THE LONG DESCENT OF WASTED DAYS
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 cost a 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 moral effect 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 new _pekmes_.[2] Read _Hilal_.[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. _Hilal_ did 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. _Sakuska_ party
at sevenish with ---- and ---- in my room. Polly was seen out walking
with a _posta_.[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 from _le tremplin de la vie_ is 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 sow
And 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 role 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 more
puzzling. 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 and scorpions 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 began
In 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 runs forward,
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, a friendship 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
if opportunity 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 discoursed on 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 sip hot 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 _'araq_ so 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 be fit 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 the worst 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 the pitiful 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.
[Footnote 1: Afion = opium.]
[Footnote 2: _Pekmes_: a substitute for jam and sugar, made from
raisins.]
[Footnote 3: The _Hilal_: a Moslem morning paper, published in French.]
[Footnote 4: _Sakuska_: Russian for hors d'oeuvres--such as sardines,
frogs' legs, onions, bits of cheese, or indeed anything edible.]
[Footnote 5: _Posta_: a Turkish sentry.]