CHAPTER V

"Wewon'tbe bothered aboutWherever we go, we always shoutWe won't be bothered about. . . .We're bothered if we'll be bothered about!"

greatly to the astonishment of the townsfolk, who connected the Armenian church with massacres rather than melody. The leader of our band was a wounded officer, in pyjamas and a bowler hat (this being the sum of his possessions) who waved his crutch as a conductor's baton. (Alas! his cheery voice is stilled, for he died in hospital a year later. R.I.P.) I can still see him hobbling along—a tall figure in pink pyjamas, with one leg swinging (bandaged to the size of a bolster) and his hat askew, and his long chin stuck out defiantly—hymn-writer and heromanqué—fit leader of lost causes and of our fantastic pageant to that church.

It was a gay and motley crew of prisoners of all nationalities and conditions of life who entered its solemn and rather stuffy precincts. We were all delighted to be "strāfed" in a worthy cause. Three good men had escaped, and more might follow later.

To anyone in decent health the month we spent in the Armenian church must have been an interesting experience. Even to me, it was not without amusement. Imagine a plain, rather gloomy, church, built of oak and sandstone, with a marble chancel in the east. Two rooms opened out on either side of the altar, and there was a high gallery in the west. In the bodyof the building the English camped. One of the small rooms was taken by the French, the other we reserved for a chapel. The Russians chiefly inhabited the space between the chancel and the altar, but the overflow of nationalities mingled. Our soldier servants were put in the gallery. When everyone was fitted in, there was no space to move, except in the centre aisle. There was no place for exercise nor any arrangements for washing or cooking. During our stay in the church two men died of typhus, and it is extraordinary that the infection did not spread, considering the lack of sanitation. During the first night of the strafe, the Russians, accustomed to pogroms in their own country, thought there was a likelihood of being massacred, and kept watch through the small hours of the morning by clumping up and down the aisle in their heavy boots. All night long—for I was sleepless too—I watched these grave, bearded pessimists waiting for a death which did not come, while the French and English slept the sleep of optimists. At last dawn arrived, and lit the windows over the altar, and a few moments later the sunlight crept into the northern transept. Then the Russians gave up their vigil, dropped in their tracks, and at once began snoring in the aisle, like great watch-dogs.

The noise the two hundred of us made in sleeping was remarkable. Probably our nerves were rather queer. The church was never silent through the night.Some cried out continually in their slumbers, others went through a pantomime of eating. Some moaned, others chuckled. One sleeper gave a hideous laugh at intervals. One could hear it deep down in his throat, and mark it gradually bubbling to his lips until he grew vocal like some horrible hyena. But it is small wonder that the prisoners in the church were restless. The marvel is that they slept at all. Nearly all of us had lived through trying moments, and had felt the hand of Providence, whose power makes one tremble. We knew the shivers of retrospection. One officer, for instance, wounded in an attack on Gallipoli, had been dragged as a supposed corpse to the Turkish trenches and there built into the parapet. But he was none the worse now for his amazing experiences, except that he suffered slightly from deafness, as his neck had formed the base of a loophole. Then there was a man, left as dead after an attack, who recovered consciousness but not the use of his limbs, and lay helpless in the path of the Turkish retreat. For an hour the passers-by prodded him with bayonets, so that he now has twenty-seven wounds and a large gap in his body where there should be solid flesh. From the very brink of the valley of the shadow this boy of nineteen had returned to life. Again, there was a young Frenchman, who lay four days and nights between the lines, dying of the twin tortures of thirst and a stomach wound; but by a miracle he survived, and now at night, sometimes, when will lost its gripon consciousness, he would live those ninety-six hours again. Then there were the submarine crews, out of the jaws of the worst death conceivable. One crew had lived for a whole day struggling in a net at the bottom of the Dardanelles while the air became foul and hope waned, and the submarine "sweated," and depth charges exploded so close to them that on one occasion the shock knocked a teapot off a table! Hemmed in and helpless, the clammy agony of that suspense might well haunt their sleeping hours.

But on the whole our psychology was normal. Only, at nights, if one lay awake, did one realise the stress and stark horror through which the sleepers had lived. Out of four hundred officers "missing" at the Dardanelles, only some forty were surviving at Afion-kara-hissar. This fact speaks for itself.

By day we wandered about, so far as the congestion permitted, making friends and exchanging experiences. To us, lately from Mesopotamia, the then unknown story of Gallipoli stirred our blood as it will stir the blood of later men.

I ate and drank the anecdotes of Gallipoli as they were told me. I loved the hearing of them, in the various dialects of the protagonists, from a lordly lisp to a backwood burr. The brogue, the northern drawl, the London twang, the elided g's or the uncertain h's, had each their several and distinct fascination. There is joy in hearing one's own tongue again after a time of strange speech and foreign faces.

"Beyond our reason's sway,Clay of the pit whence we were wroughtYearns to its fellow-clay."

The many voices of the many British were better than sweet music.

But we had plenty of sweet music as well. The sailors amongst us were the cheeriest crew imaginable.

A résumé of our life at that time would be that we sang often about nothing in particular, swore continually at life in general, smoked heavily, gambled mildly, and drank'araqwhen we could get it, and tea when we couldn't. Not everyone, I hasten to add, did all these things. As in everyday life, there were some who said that the constant cigarette was evil, and that cards were a curse, and drink the devil. But, again, as in everyday life, their example had no effect on cheerful sinners.

"Here's to the bold and gallant threeWho broke their bonds and sought the sea"

sang one of the poets of our captivity, and all of us French, Russians, and English, took up the chorus with a roar. The Turkish sentries protested vainly, and some, ostentatiously loading their rifles, went up to the Western gallery which overlooked the body of the church. As we were being treated like Armenians, they could not understand why we did not behave like Armenians and herd silently together, as sheep before a storm. Instead, two hundred lusty voicesproclaimed to anyone who cared to listen that we were not downhearted.

See us then at midnight, seated at a table under the high altar. About fifty of us are celebrating somebody's birthday, and a demi-john of'araqgraces the festive board. We have sung every song we know, and many we don't.

"Jolly good song and jolly well sung,Jolly good fellows every one. . . .Wow! Wow!"

The chorus dies down, and the Master of the Ceremonies, still in pyjamas and bowler hat, rises on his sound leg and standing (swaying slightly) at the head of the table, raps on it with his crutch for silence.

One officer wears a soup-bowl for a Hun helmet. Others are dressed as parodies of Turks, and have been acting in a farce entitled "The Escape." Two Irish friends of mine are singing "The Wearing of the Green," while others are patriotically drowning their voices. A submarine skipper, with a mane of yellow hair over his face, like a lion in a picture-book, watches a diplomat dancing a horn-pipe. A little bald flying man of gigantic strength and brain, is wrestling with a bearded Hercules. Some sailors are singing an old sea-chanty.

The rough deal table, littered with pipes and glasses, the tallow-dips lighting the vaulted gloom, the bearded roysterers singing songs older than Elizabeth's time, the simple fare of bread and meat, the simpler jokesand horseplay, took one back through centuries to other men who made the best of war. In Falstaff's time such scenes as these must have passed in the taverns of Merrie England. Only here, there were no wenches to serve us with sack. We had to mix our own'araq.

"Silence, if you please," says he of the long jowl, using his crutch as a chairman's hammer. "Silence for the prisoners' band."

The band begins. It consists of penny whistles, banjos, castanets, soup-bowls, knives and forks, and anything else within reach. Themotifof the piece is our release.Andante con coraggiowe pass the weary months ahead. Then the dawn of our liberation breaks. We smash everything we possess, while the train to take us away steams into the station.

Sh! Shh! Shhh! Chk! Chk! Chk! Bang! Swish!! We take our seats amid a perfect pandemonium. Then the train whistles—louder and louder—and we move off—faster and faster and faster andfaster, until no one can make any more noise, and the dust of our stamping has risen like incense to the roof, in a grand finale of freedom.

Strange doings in a church, you say? But what would you? We had nowhere else to go. There is a time for everything after all, and it is a poor heart that never rejoices. I feel sure Solomon himself would have sung with us, and proved most excellent company.

On Sunday mornings Divine Service was always wellattended. Perhaps by contrast with my usual methods of passing the time, those Sabbath hours are set as so many jewels in the tarnished shield of idleness. The fadeless beauty of our Common Prayer brought hope and consolation to all of us who were gathered together. We repeated the grand old words; we sang "Fight the Good Fight" and "Onward, Christian Soldiers." We shared then, however humbly, in the tears and triumph of our cause. We were not of that white company that was to die for England, but we could share the sorrow of the women who mourned, and of the old who stood so sadly outside the fray.

And as through a magic door, I passed from that barren room to a country church where the litany for all prisoners and captives went up to Heaven, mingled with the fragrance of English roses.

Afion-kara-hissar means "Black Opium Rock" in Turkish, but it is not as interesting a place as it sounds. The only romantic visitors are the storks, who use it as an aerodrome on their bi-annual migrations. They blacken the sky when they come, in flights a thousand strong, swooping and circling over the plain and alighting finally near the black rocks that give the town its name. With one leg tucked up, and pensive beak back-turned, they form arresting silhouettes against the sunset. And curiously enough, the Turkish children know that they bring babies to the home.

We lived in four cottages, connected by a common garden. They were quite new—so new that they had no windows or conveniences. We fitted frames and panes, we erected bathrooms, installed kitchen ranges, made beds out of planks and string, and tables out of packing-cases. We made everything, in fact, except the actual houses.

I daresay that at this time we were better treated than the officer prisoners in Germany. Not so the men. We officers had plenty to eat, though it costa great deal, but the men were always half starved when for any reason they could not supplement their ration from Ambassador's money, or private remittances from home. Every month the American (and later the Dutch) Embassy used to send a sum of money to our prisoners to help them buy something more nourishing than the black bread and soup provided by the Turks. When this relief did not arrive in time, or the Turks delayed in distributing it, our men suffered the greatest hardship. Treatment in Turkey was all a question of money. The officers could, and did, cash cheques while in captivity, and were able to pay for the necessities (and sometimes also the minor luxuries) of existence, but the men were entirely dependent on what was given them. Although some had bank balances, no one except an officer was allowed to write a cheque.

Here it is fitting to say a word in praise of those organisations who sent out parcels to our prisoners. No words can express our gratitude to them. To us officers, parcels were sometimes in the nature of a luxury, though none the less welcome. But to the men, who starved in dungeons of the interior, they came as a very present help in time of need. The prisoners' parcels saved many lives, and I hope the kind people who worked so hard at home against all sorts of difficulties and disappointments realise how grateful we are, and what a great work they did. Besides the material relief of provisions, the moraleffect of a parcel from home on the mind of a sick prisoner cannot be over estimated. To open something packed by English hands was like a breath of home to him.

We were allowed no communication with the men, so it was very difficult to help them. Whether the worst done to our prisoners in Germany equals the worst in Turkey I do not know. To compare two horrors is profitless. But I do know something of the sufferings of our men, and when I write of my own petty amusements and comedies of captivity I do not for a moment forget the tragedy of their lives.

Light and shade, however, there must be in every picture, else it is not a picture at all. And there must be colour in the canvas, however grim the subject.

The poppy fields, which give the town the first part of its name,[1]lay right underneath our windows, across the station road. In June, when they were white with blossom, and the farmers' wives came out to drain the precious fluid from the buds, I used to gaze and gaze at the beauty of the world, and long for freedom. To be cooped up in a little room when the world was green and white, and the sky a flawless blue, and summer rode across the open lands, was miserable. It was unbearable to be growing old and immobile, like the hills on the horizon, when one might be out among the poppy blossoms. Of what use to be alive, if one did not share in the youth of the world?

But we were closely guarded in our cottages and rarely allowed out, except into the back garden—a bare space some hundred yards by thirty, which was the scene of most of our small activities, from early morning skipping to the mid-day display of our washing, and from the occasional amateur theatricals of an evening to the rare but tense moments of an attempted escape.

A diary of my days might run as follows:

Monday.Up at 6 a.m. Skipped 200 times. Two eggs for breakfast, tried my newpekmes.[2]ReadHilal.[3]Looked out places on my hidden map. Long argument about the use of cavalry in modern war. Walk in garden. Mutton cutlets for lunch. Completed my new hammock. Argued about Free Trade. Played badminton in garden. Read philosophy with —— and ——.Sakuska[4]party with —— and —— at 7.30. Watched Polly picking opium. Dinner at 8. Soup, eggs, suet; very satisfactory. Bridge and bed.

Tuesday.Up at 6.15. Skipped 250 times, and had a boxing lesson. Painful. Two eggs for breakfast, but one bad.Hilaldid not arrive. Argued about yesterday's cavalry news. Walk in garden. No meat for lunch. Bitten by mosquitoes in my hammock. Argued about Protection. Ran round the garden ten times. My wind is getting worse.Sakuskaparty at sevenish with —— and —— in my room. Polly was seen out walking with aposta.[5]Dinner at 8. Mutton cutlets. Chess and bed.

And so on,ad infinitum.

I had at that time come to the conclusion that I could not reach the coast from Afion-kara-hissar, so for some time I sought a mental rather than a physical escape from my surroundings. Philosophy seemed an ideal subject under the circumstances, and in the company of two friends of like mind, I made some study of "Creative Evolution." Every afternoon we used to forgather for tea, in a little room I had built, where our joint contributions provided a well-selected pabulum of cakes and jam and Bergson, so that the inner and the outer man were Platonically at one. But to plunge fromle tremplin de la vieis not easy in captivity. Lack of employment cripples imagination. The average mind works best when it has practical things to do, and mine, such as it is, boggles at abstractions more quickly than it tires of talk.

When this occurred the best thing to do was to laugh. A friend and I used to laugh for hours sometimes over weak and washy stories that would hardly pass muster, even in the small hours of the morning. But they did us good. Generally, however, the time between tea and dinner was spent in learned and weighty discussions on appearance, reality, and the problems of Being and Not-being.

With my two friends

". . . the seed of Wisdom did I sowAnd with my own Hand arboured it to grow,But this was all the Harvest that I reaped—I came like Water and like Wind I go."

Only unfortunately I did not go. I remained firmly at Afion-kara-hissar. When philosophy failed me, the hours spent in planning escapes and concocting cyphers were those which passed most easily. But the craft of cyphers, interesting though it be, cannot be discussed in print. Like the preparation of poisons, it must remain part of the unpublished knowledge of the world, until the millennium. As regards escapes, some of us thought a great deal, and did very little. There were, however, some ingenious attempts made to get to Constantinople. One officer conceived the idea of going there to be treated for hydrophobia, and, after inflicting suitable wounds in the calf of his leg with a pair of nail scissors, he asserted that a certain dog, well known in the camp, had exhibited strange symptoms of insanity, amongst others, that of suddenly biting him in the leg. This ruse would have succeeded but for the fact that the Turks did not treat hydrophobia with any seriousness. Kismet takes no account of the Pasteur system. Short of actually snapping at someone, the officer could not have established a belief in his infection. He found it simpler to feign another ailment. Two other officers, however, of a still more picturesque turn of mind,declared that they themselves were mad, and actually hung themselves as a proof of insanity. They were found one morning by their astonished sentries suspended from a rafter, and apparently in the last stages of strangulation. Convinced that they were "afflicted of God," the Turks sent them to hospital, and carefully watched for any symptoms of suicidal mania. After various astonishing experiences, in their rôle of madmen, amongst real madmen in a Turkish lunatic ward, they were eventually exchanged.

In sheer manual dexterity, our prisoners also showed great resource. The soldiers who were employed on making a tunnel through the Taurus, to take one example, succeeded in purloining various odds and ends from the workshops where they laboured under German supervision, until they eventually were able to build for themselves a complete collapsible boat. This boat they actually tested at dead of night on a river near their camp, before setting out to reach the coast. That success did not crown their efforts was sheer bad luck. Luck, also, was against most of the forty officers who concerted a simultaneous escape from Yuzgad, and prepared for it in absolute secrecy, down to the smallest detail, for months beforehand. Some of them even made their own boots. Only eight out of the original party actually got out of the country, however. Their story, surely one of the most remarkable ever written, has recently been published.

The two great difficulties in any attempt to escape were: firstly, that the Turks, by spies or otherwise, studied the psychology of every individual prisoner, setting special guards on the more enterprising among them, and, secondly, that the distance of the camp from the coast, and the number of brigands infesting every mile of that distance, was such that it was extremely difficult to gain the sea, let alone embark upon it.

The spies made some very bad guesses about the intentions of the prisoners. One harmless and elderly officer was seen greasing a pair of marching boots, and this gave rise to the most sinister suspicions. Where could the officer want to march to, except the coast? He was immediately asked for his parole, and gave it.

Exercise in any form was a sign of incipient madness in the eyes of the Turks. Why, they argued, should anyone in his right mind skip five hundred times, and then splash himself with ice-cold water? If he did such things, he ought certainly to be placed under restraint. Boxing, again, was a suspect symptom. A man who bled at the nose for pleasure might commit any enormity. In order to circumvent suspicion it was necessary to adopt the utmost caution. The method I myself employed is described in a later chapter. One friend of mine, while training for a trip to Blighty, habitually carried heavy lead plates hung round his waist, to accustom himself to the weight of his pack. Such were the internal difficulties. But outside the camp the problems were even morepuzzling. How to avoid the brigands—how to carry food enough for the journey—how to elude our guards and get a few hours' start—what clothes to wear and what pack to carry—how to find one's way—how to get a boat once the coast was reached—here were well-nigh insoluble questions, which provided, however, excellent topics for talk.

I talked about these things for eighteen months. But I will ask the reader to skip that dismal procession of moons, and come directly to the day when I was asked by the Commandant to sign a paper stating that I would not attempt to escape. I naturally refused, as also did another officer to whom the same request was made.

Our negotiations in this matter, while interesting to us at the time, and involving the composition of several noble documents in French, led to the sad result that we were both transferred, at an hour's notice, to a little box of a house in the Armenian quarter. Once inside the house, with the various belongings we had collected during a twelve-month of captivity in Afion-kara-hissar, we two completely filled the only habitable room. And although habitable in a sense, this room was already occupied by undesirable tenants.

I must here, rather diffidently, introduce the subject of vermin. But, saving the public's presence, bugs are the very devil. Other insects are nothing to them. Lice the gallant reader may have met at the front. Fleas are a common experience. Centipedes andscorpions are well known in India. But bugs are Beelzebub's especial pets, and Beelzebub is a ruler in Turkey. It is quite impossible to write of my captivity there without mentioning these small, flat creatures who live in beds. I cannot disregard them: they have bitten into my very being.

Imagine lying down, after a sordid day of dust and disagreeableness. One thinks of home, or the sea. One tries to slide out to the gulfs of sleep, where healing is. But rest does not come: there is a sense of malaise. One's skin feels irritable and unclean. Presently there is an itching at one's wrists, and at the back of one's neck. One squashes something, and there is a smear of blood (one's own good blood) and one realises that one's skin (one's own good skin) is being punctured by these evil beasts. Almost instantly one squashes another. A horrible odour arises. One lights the candle, and there, scuttling under the pillow, are five or six more of these loathsome vermin. They not only suck one's blood. They sap one's faith in life.

"If one could dream that such a world beganIn some slow devil's heart that hated man,"

indeed one would not be mistaken. In them the powers of Satan seem incarnate.

Having killed every bug in sight, one lies back and gasps. And then, out of the corner of one's eye, creeping up the pillow, and hugely magnified by proximity, another monstrous brute appears. It runsforward, horribly avid, and eager, and brisk. All the cruelty of nature is in its hideous head, all the activity of evil in its darting body. Presently another and another appear. There is no end to them. You kill them on the bed, and they appear on the walls. You search out and slaughter every form of life within reach, but the bugs still drop on you from the ceiling. No killing can assuage their appetite for a healthy body. Reckless of danger, they batten on the young. Regardless of death, they swarm to silky skin. Of two victims, they will always choose the one in best condition.

After being eaten by bugs for some time, one feels infected with their contamination. It is almost impossible to rise superior to them. In one night a man can live through the miseries of Job.

It may be imagined therefore that our confinement in that little house was not amusing. My companion in misfortune and myself lived in that box for a week with the bugs, without once going out of the door. Now, to stay in a room for a week may not seem a very trying punishment (I was later to spend a month in solitary confinement); but when the punishment is wholly undeserved, and when, moreover, one is wrongly suspected of something one would like to do but has not done, and when one is bitten all night, and when from confinement one sees other officers walking about in comparative freedom, one naturally begins to fret.

There were compensations, however. Firstly, afriendship grew between my companion and myself which I hope will endure through life. Secondly, as a prisoner, any sort of change is welcome. And, thirdly, we felt we were doing something useful. The Commandant did not dare to force us to sign parole. Neither could he keep us permanently in special restraint. It is rarely that one gets the chance, as a prisoner, of putting the enemy on the horns of such a dilemma.

This Commandant, an ugly, drunken beast, who is now, I hope, expiating the innumerable crimes he committed against our men, caused a search to be made one day amongst the effects of all the prisoners at Afion-kara-hissar. One of the most interesting things he found was a diary kept by a senior British officer, with the following entry:

"New Commandant arrived. His face looks as if it was meant to strike matches on."

No better description could possibly have been written. He was a vain man, and it must have cut him to the quick to see himself as others saw him.

After a month of "special treatment" the Commandant learnt that Turkish Army Headquarters, fearing reprisals, no doubt, would not support his bluff in punishing us if we did not give parole. He had to climb down completely.

We were transferred to another house, in the Armenian quarter, already occupied by some R.N.A.S. officers, who were all determined to escape ifopportunity arose. A very cheery house-party we made.

The time was now the year of grace 1917, and our life was organised to some extent. Once or twice a week we were allowed to play football, or go for a walk. On Thursdays we used to troop down in a body to visit the officers in the other houses, and on Monday mornings we were sometimes able, with special permission, to attend the weekly fair of coke and firewood held in the market-place. All this gave an interest to our lives, and money, so long as one was prepared to write cheques, was not a source of difficulty. The Turks, in fact, encouraged us to write cheques, exchanging them for Turkish notes at nearly double their face value (190 piastres for a pound was the best I myself received), because they rightly thought that our signature was worth more than the guarantees of the Turkish Government. I heard afterwards that our cheques had a brisk circulation on the Constantinople Bourse. But one was loth to write many. Five pounds is five pounds—and in Turkey it represented only a packet of tea or a kilogram of sugar. . . . I saved as much as I could for bribes when escaping.

A microscopic, but not unamusing, social life was in full swing. There were parties and politics, clubs and cliques. Each prisoner, according to his temperament, took his choice between grave pursuits and gay.

There were lecturers (really good ones) who discoursedon a wide range of topics, from Mendelism to Mesopotamia. There were professors of French, Italian, Greek, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Hindustani, and I daresay all the languages of Babel, ready to teach in return for reciprocal instruction in English. Our library contained many luminous volumes, kindly sent out by the Board of Trade. Law and Seamanship, Semaphoring and Theology, Carpentry and the Integral Calculus, Gardening and Genetics—such is a random selection of the subjects on which there were experts available and eager to impart information.

But, personally, my mind resisted the seductions of learning. I learned only how to waste time. And sometimes, perhaps, I touched the hem of Philosophy's garment, and stammered a few words to her. Otherwise I did nothing except try to forget things . . . things seen.

Yet one enjoyed oneself, occasionally. The football was great fun. So also were some of the lighter sides of our indoor life. Poker used to pass the time. So also, though more rarely, did reading. The plays which a dramatist—soon to be eminent, I expect—presented to enthusiastic audiences are delightful memories. His revues and topical verses were worthy of a wider audience, and I am sure his work—unlike the most of our labours—will not be wasted.

But best of all, I think, was to sit in a circle on the floor round a brazier on a winter's evening, and siphot lemon'araq, and listen to songs and stories. It was a relief to laugh, and forget the fate of those we could not help.

"Sweet life, if love were stronger,Earth clear of years that wrong her . . ."

sang a soft Irish voice, whose melody seemed to melt into the cold of one's captivity. . . . Then there were the fancy dress balls held on New Year's Eve in 1917 and 1918. So good were they that for the night one completely forgot one's surroundings. A very attractive barmaid dispensed refreshments behind a table. There were several debutantes, and at least one chaperone. Pierrot was there, and Pierrette, and Mephistopheles, and Bacchus, and a very realistic Pirate. If some reveller in London had looked in on us at midnight he might easily have fancied himself at an Albert Hall dance. He would certainly not have guessed that all the clothes and furniture and food were home-made, and that everyone in the room was a British officer. The self-confident flapper, for instance, who could only have given him "the next missing three" was a Major in the Flying Corps. And the girl at the bar, with big brown eyes, who would have offered him'araqso charmingly was really a submarine officer of the Navy, and a well-known figure at "The Goat."

After functions such as these, the morning after the night before found me wondering where it would all end. If the war lasted another ten years, would I ever befit to take a place in normal life? How long could I keep sane in this topsy-turvy world? . . .

The weather in the winter of 1918 was absolutely arctic. For a month there was a very hard frost, and during all this time, had it not been for festivities such as the foregoing I should have stayed stupidly in bed and hibernated until the spring. Intenser cold I have never felt. In the room in which we dined the water froze in our glasses on several occasions while we were eating our evening meal. Icy winds howled through the house, and the paper windows we had improvised (to replace unobtainable glass) had burst, through weight of snow. Also, the plaster of the outer walls of our mansion had peeled off, so that cold blasts penetrated through the walls. With few clothes and only one pair of leaky boots it was impossible to keep warm and dry-shod. Fuel, of course, was very scarce. In my bedroom some precious quarts of beer, which I was preserving for Christmas, froze and cracked their bottles. I invited a party to taste my blocks of amber ice, but they were better to look at than to swallow.

Under these climatic conditions washing was a labour that took one the best part of the morning, and until I caught a chill I used to economize time and fuel by rolling in the snow on the flat roof of my house. This amused me, and surprised the neighbourhood, but it was a poor substitute for a bath. That winter was a black, bleak time.

During the hard frost it was impossible to escape, but we used occasionally to reconnoitre the sentries outside our house after lock-up. I have spent some amusing moments in this way, especially in watching one sentry (generally on duty at midnight) who used to warm himself by playing with a cat. With pussy on one arm and his rifle on the other, he formed a delightfully casual figure. It would have been quite easy to pass him, but the difficulties lay beyond. . . .

I then thought, wrongly I dare say, that the only reasonable hope of success lay in starting from Constantinople, and it was to this end that my real schemes were shaping. But I thought it well to have two strings to my bow, and besides, I considered no day well spent which did not include some practical effort towards escape.

A complex of causes contributed to this idea, which became almost an obsession. First, I dare say, was boredom. Second, the feeling that one was not earning one's pay or doing one's duty by remaining idly a prisoner. And thirdly—or was it firstly?—the condition under which our men were living and the crimes which had been committed against them made it imperative that someone should get to England with our news. It was high time, and past high time, that the civilised world should know how our prisoners fared.

I have already written the savage story of our life at Mosul, where the men died from calculated cruelty.The history of the Kut prisoners is even worse, for the crime was on a greater scale.

That garrison, debilitated from the long siege and the climatic conditions of Mesopotamia, were marched right across Asia Minor with hardly any clothes, no money, and insufficient food. Their nameless sufferings will never be known in full, for many died in the desert, clubbed to death by their guards, stripped naked, and left by the roadside. Others were abandoned in Arab villages, when in the last stages of fever or dysentery. Others, more fortunate, were found dead by their companions after the night's halt, when the huddled sleepers turned out to face another day of misery. Hopeless indeed the outlook must have seemed to some lad fresh from the fields of home. The brutal sentries, the arid desert, the daily deaths, the daily quarrels, the bitterness of the future, as bleak as the acres of sand that stretched to their unknown destination, the dwindling company of friends, the grip of thirst, the pangs of hunger, and the pains of death—such was the outlook for many a lad who died between Baghdad and Aleppo. Ghosts of such memories must not be lightly evoked amongst those alive to-day, friends of the fallen, but always they will haunt the trails of the northern Arabian desert.

Through it all our men were heroes. To the last they showed their captors of what stuff the Anglo-Saxon is made. The cowardly Kurds, who were theworst of the various escorts provided between Baghdad and Aleppo, never dared to insult our men unless they outnumbered them four to one. Even then they generally waited until some sick man fell down from exhaustion before clubbing him to death with their rifle-butts.

In the middle of the desert, between Mosul and Aleppo, a friend of mine found six half-demented British soldiers who had been propped up against the wall of a mud hut and left there to die. There was no transport, no medicines. Nothing could be done for them. They died long before the relief parties organised at Aleppo could come to their rescue.

At Aleppo the hospital treatment was extremely bad.

All men who were fit to move (and many who were not) were sent on in cattle trucks to various camps in the centre of Anatolia, and when at length they reached these camps after vicissitudes which were only a dreary repetition of earlier experiences, they came upon the plague of typhus at its height, and naturally, in this weakened state, succumbed by scores and hundreds.

To see a body of our soldiers arriving at Afion-kara-hissar, pushed and kicked and beaten by their escort, was terrible.

Our men were literally skeletons alive, skeletons with skin stretched across their bones, and a few rags on their backs. This is an exact statement of things seen. They struggled up the road, hardly able to carry thepitiful little bundles containing scraps of bread, a bit of soap, a mug, all, in short, that they had been able to save from systematic looting on the way.

In silence, and unswerving, they passed up that road to the hospital, and all who saw those companies of Englishmen so grim and gallant in adversity must have felt proud their veins carried the same blood.

Once in hospital our prisoners fared no better. There were no beds for them, and hardly any blankets or medicines. They died in groups, lying outside the hospital.

It was a common sight to see sad parties of our men passing down this same road, away from the hospital this time, and towards the cemetery. Those weary processions, consisting of four or five emaciated men, with a stretcher and a couple of shovels, used to pass underneath our windows going to bury their comrade. They were a party of skeletons alive, carrying a skeleton dead.

[1]Afion = opium.

[2]Pekmes: a substitute for jam and sugar, made from raisins.

[3]TheHilal: a Moslem morning paper, published in French.

[4]Sakuska: Russian for hors d'oeuvres—such as sardines, frogs' legs, onions, bits of cheese, or indeed anything edible.

[5]Posta: a Turkish sentry.

The contrast of tragedy and farce and the incidents, and the lack of incident, which I have attempted to sketch in the foregoing chapter, had a marked mental effect on all of us. But each felt the effects of confinement differently. With me, I came to look on my life in Turkey as something outside the actuality of existence. I did not feel "myself" at all. I was disembodied, left with no link with the outer world, except memory and anticipation. I was in a dark forest far from all avenues of activity such as the sanity of society and the companionship of women. My world seemed make-believe, and my interests counterfeit.

I worked at a novel with a friend of mine, and for a time that seemed something practical to do. But there was always the fear that it would be taken from us by the Turks, and the possibility that we would never publish it.

Doubt and indecision lay heavy on me. I did not know how long captivity would last. A criminal's sentence is fixed: not so a prisoner of war's. He is dependent on matters beyond his control, and a will beyond his narrow ambit. To reach that outsidewill, and to form a part of it again, was my dominating wish. Through the glasses of captivity the world was colourless and distorted. Only freedom could make me see it again aright. And when freedom seemed remote, the world was very colourless.

The novel amused me by snatches. Learning languages amused me at times. But these things were really the diversions of a child, who dreams through all its lesson-time of another and a fairer world.

But, unlike a child, I became absorbed in self. I analysed my moods, and thought gloomily about my health. I mourned my youth, as my hair turned grey. The sorrows of the spinster were mine and the griefs of the middle-aged. The value of material things was magnified. The pleasures of the palate, I confess, assumed an exaggerated importance. I found a new joy in food, and sometimes I dreamed that I was eating. Also I contracted the habit of smoking cigarettes in the middle of the night. And I learnt that the effect of alcohol, when one is very depressed, is like putting in the top clutch of the car of consciousness, so that one runs forward smoothly on the road of life. In short, I enjoyed eating and drinking and smoking in a way that I had never done before, and never will again, I hope. But I know now why public-houses flourish. After my own experience of deathly dullness, I heartily sympathise with those who seek relief in alcohol and nicotine. Theymay be poison, but in this imperfect world the deadliest poison of all is boredom. Prohibition, as I saw it in Turkey, when tobacco was short, or food was scarce, or alcohol was forbidden, did not impress me as being beneficial. The fact is, we all need stimulant of one sort or another. Normally our work, our home, or our hopes supply this need. Almost everyone in the world is struggling (however carefully they may disguise the fact) to be other than they are, and better (or worse) than they are. We strive after superlatives and are rarely satisfied by them. But in captivity, as in other circumstances of distress, this stay in life, this hope of something different and wish for somethingmore, is suddenly removed. We are left withoutstimuli. Nothing seems to matter. One's mental and material habits inevitably relax. A muddy idea seems as good as a clear one—a sloppy suit of clothes serves as well as a tidy one. Energy wanes.

But why? The reason is that the average mind cannot live on abstractions. It must grapple with something practical. One must sharpen one's wits on the world, and it is just this that as a prisoner one cannot do. One cannot "lay hold on life," because there is no life to lay hold of, except an unnatural and artificial existence, where the sympathy of women and the dignity of work are absent. That was the crux of the matter. Sympathy and dignity were lacking in our life. We heard of advances and retreats as from another sphere. We read of great heroisms andgreat sorrows without being close to them. We had no part in the quarrel. We were in a squalid by-way, living out a mean tragedy, while the fate of all we loved was in the balance. Never again would we go fighting.

From the moment of our capture we had passed into a strange narrow life, where the spirit of man, while retaining all its old memories and hopes, could not express them in action.

Captivity is a minor form of death, and I was dead, to all intents and purposes.

Often, lying a-bed in the early morning, I used to feel that my body was completely gone, and that only a fanciful and feverish intelligence remained. I remember especially one dawn in the spring of 1917, when I watched two figures passing down the station road. Slouching towards the station, and all unconscious of the beauty of the waking world, came a soldier with his pack and rifle. He wore the grey Turkish uniform, his beard was grey, his cheeks were also grey and sunken. Slowly, slowly he dragged his heavy feet towards the train that would take him away to the war. The train had been already signalled, I knew (for I kept notes of the traffic in those days), and I found myself hoping anxiously that he would not be late. The sooner he was killed the better. He was old and ugly and ill. If only such as he could perish. . . . Then my thought took wings of the morning. From the soldier, plodding onwards devotedly, as so manymen have gone to their deaths, my eye ranged across the plains, lying dim and dark to eastward, to the horizon mountains of the Suleiman Dagh, whose snow had already seen the messengers of morning hasting from the lands below our world. And man seemed mean and minute in the purposes of Nature. So ugly was he, such a blot on the landscape with his trains and soldiers, that I wondered he continued to exist. There was a life above our life in the dawn. The powers of the world knew nothing of this soldier's hopes and fears. To them his endeavours were a comedy. A huge mountain-back, with the gesture of some giant in the playtime of long ago, seemed shrugging its shoulders at this ridiculous straying atom of a moment's space. The train came in, and I saw its smoke above the tree-tops of the station. It whistled shrilly, and the soldier quickened his pace. No doubt he was late. Perhaps he still survives, and is toiling even now towards some trench. Anyway he passed from my ken, but I still stood at the window, looking towards the mountains and the sky.

Then there passed an archaic ox-cart, creaking down the road slowly, as it has creaked down the ages, from the night of Time. It was drawn by a white heifer, whose shoulders strained against the yoke, for it was a heavy cart. But she went forward willingly, resignedly. Work was her portion. She would live and die under the yoke. She licked her cool muzzle,dusted flies with her neat tail, and looked forward with wistful eyes that seemed to see beyond her working world, to some ultimate haven for the quiet workers. Somewhere she would find rest at last. To my feverish imagination that white heifer symbolised the pathos of all the driven souls who go forward unquestioning to destiny.

And the soldier with his pack was a type also of voiceless millions who carry the burden of our civilisation.

We stagger on, under the bludgeonings of chance, and but rarely lift our eyes to the dawn, although a daily miracle is there. Someone conducts the orient-rite, regardless of the lives of men, which come sweeping on, on the tide of war, to end in foam and froth. Yet from this stir of hate and heroism some purpose must surely rise. From the travail of the trenches some meaning will be born.

I saw things thus, through images and symbols. Across the vast inanity of that waiting time, streaks of vision used to flash, like distant summer lightning. Impermanent, but beautiful to me, they lit a fair horizon. Else, all was dark.

To call this time a death in life seems an overstatement, but if my experiences in Turkey had any mental value at all, it was just this: to teach me how to die. A curtain had come down on consciousness when I was captured. Since then I only lived in the Before and After of captivity. My old self wasfinished. I saw it in clear but disjunct pictures of recollection: pig-sticking, sailing, dining, dancing, or on the road to Messines one hard November night when feet froze in stirrups and horses slipped and struck blue lights from the cobbles. And my new self awaited the moment of freedom. It still stirred in the womb of war.

Even so, in my belief, do the souls of our comrades lost consider their lives on earth and look back on their time of trial with interest and regret. Discarnate, they cannot achieve their desires, yet they long to manifest again in the world of men. With level and unclouded eyes they consider the incidents of mortality, and find in them a Purpose to continue. There is work for them in the world through many lives, and love, which will meet and re-meet its love. And so at last, drawn by duty and affection, those who have woven their lives in the tapestry of our time will one day take up the threads again.

Back to Index Next