IN THE SHADOW OF THE BLACK ROCK
Moored under a willow tree, we were clearing what was left of the cold
chicken and salad from the middle of a punt. I filled the Chambertin
bottle with water and dropped it overboard. It plashed and sank
noiselessly to the bottom of the Thames. From the far side of our
island came the metallic strains of a gramophone, made less blatant by
the soft atmosphere of the river. A passing punt-pole clacked, rose
from the surface, stabbed the water and clacked again. Flies danced
from the hot sunlight into the shade of the willow, and hovered over
the remains of our lunch. I composed the cushions and lay down,
opposite Phyllis.
But the cushions became harder and harder, and the breeze merged
gradually into a stuffy, dark oppressiveness. I opened my eyes, and sat
up. The head cushion, it appeared, was a sackful of kit, my white
flannels were a uniform in creased and dirtied khaki, Phyllis was
Alfonso the Turkish guard, and the Thames the military baths at
Afion-kara-Hissar, in the centre of Anatolia.
Some ragged Turks arrived through the stone passage that led to the hot
room, and began undressing. Cuthbert was talking to the bath attendant,
while Alfonso lay opposite me and snored. H. and W. also snored in
dissonant notes. R. was sorting out his kit. The rest of the party
still slumbered silently, stretched out in twisted attitudes on the
stone floor.
Then I remembered how we were dragged from the train in the early
hours of the morning, and had wandered through the streets of
Afion-kara-Hissar, looking for the prison camp. Finding it closed to
night arrivals, Cuthbert and Alfonso led us to the Madrissah _hammam_,
in the courtyard of a mosque. Weary with want of sleep and the
hardships of a long journey, we had slept for several hours on the
floor of the outer bath-room.
Only R. had risked taking off his boots; and these had evidently
disappeared, for as he searched his loud curses echoed from the domed
roof. As was to be expected, all the Turks in the room disclaimed
volubly any knowledge of the missing boots, so that when we moved to
the prisoners' camp R. clattered along the streets in a pair of wooden
sandals borrowed from the bath attendant.
A Turkish officer met us at the barrier which divided the street of
prison-houses from the rest of the town, and sent us to meet the
British adjutant of the camp. Cuthbert and Alfonso waved a
good-humoured farewell and disappeared. With them they took our cooking
pots--although we did not discover this fact until later in the day. By
that time they had left Afion-kara-Hissar. We swore long and loud at
the memory of the two guards, for in those days any sort of a cooking
utensil was in Turkey worth at least two pounds.
Passing up the narrow street we were greeted by groups of weirdly
clothed Britishers. Some wore torn and creased uniforms and a civilian
cap or a much-dented billycock; some a military hat and ill-fitting
suits of shoddy mufti; some were in khaki shorts surmounted by shirts
of violent colours open at the neck; some wore heavy boots, some wore
bedroom slippers, some wore sandals.
Many of them were survivors of the Kut-el-Amara garrison and had been
prisoners in Turkey for two and a half years. Their uniforms had long
since become scarecrow relics of better days, since when they had
depended for clothing on the supplies forwarded by the Dutch Legation
at Constantinople. The productions of the Turkish tailors and
shirt-makers, as issued to the prisoners at Afion, were entertaining
but rather anarchic.
Afion-kara-Hissar contained the largest prison-camp in Turkey, although
there were others at Yozgad, Broussa and Geddós--the last-named being
for the fifty or sixty of his Majesty's officers who had been persuaded
to give parole not to attempt an escape. When the first batch of
British officers arrived at Afion the Turks turned some Armenian
families out of their homes, confiscated the furniture, and told the
captives from the Dardanelles and Mesopotamia that they were to live in
the empty houses.
"Beds? Furniture?" said the commandant. "We have none, and it is
impossible to supply any."
"Food?" he said in reply to another demand. "It is well known that all
British officers are rich. You have money enough to buy food for
yourselves."
And so it had to be. At first the British officers lived on their pay
as captives; which, according to rank, was at the rate of seven to ten
Turkish pounds a month. But food prices soon expanded to extraordinary
proportions, while the exchange value of the Turkish pound continued to
decrease. By the beginning of 1918 it was worth less than two and a
half dollars; while sugar, for example, was four dollars a pound. Tea
was fifty dollars a pound, and real coffee was unobtainable. Under
these conditions, it became almost impossible to obtain even a bare
subsistence on seven Turkish pounds a month without outside help. The
Dutch Legation, therefore, supplemented each captive officer's pay to
the extent of five, then fifteen, Turkish pounds a month, taken from
the Red Cross funds at their disposal.
Even thus the food difficulties could not have been solved without the
help of parcels from home. These arrived either seven or eight months
after they left England, or never. Many were delivered only after the
Turks had looted from them such articles as were scarce, including
boots, clothes, and good tobacco. Letters from England needed from two
to five months for transit.
The lack of furniture was overcome by amateur carpentry. With string,
nails, and planks of wood each newly arrived prisoner constructed a
bed, a table, and a chair. Profiteers in the bazaar naturally took
advantage of the demand for wood, and, by the time of which I write,
the price of it had soared to two Turkish pounds a plank.
Besides the officers there were at Afion about two hundred Tommies shut
up in a Greek church. Their daily rations from the Turks were one small
loaf of bad bread and one basin of thin soup. For the rest, they
existed on the tinned food which they received from time to time in
parcels.
As for the Russian soldiers, who were herded into the Madrissah
buildings, they were literally starving, and most of them had sold part
of their clothing to buy extra food. Weak and ragged, they passed the
time in walking round and round the courtyard. During the bitter months
of winter scores of them died from hunger and cold.
Conditions in the prison camp varied according to the character of
whoever happened to be the Turkish commandant. For a time the officer
in charge was one Muslum Bey, who was reported to have committed
several executions for Enver Pasha during the turbulent days of the
Young Turk _coup d'état_ in 1908. He was a brute, a swindler, and a
degenerate, and during his reign unspeakable outrages were committed.
He himself gave a Russian officer who had committed some minor offence
more than a hundred strokes of the bastinado. When his arm was tired he
made his sergeant-major continue the flogging until the Russian
fainted. The unconscious body of the victim was then thrown into a
cellar, where a part of his face was burned by contact with quick-lime.
Muslum Bey not only stole food parcels from England but made a practice
of deducting part of the monthly pay which helped to procure for the
British Tommies a bare existence. In addition, he made an arrangement
with bazaar traders whereby a monopoly in certain articles of food came
into being, so that the prisoners had to pay incredible prices, or go
hungry.
It was not until the visit of a Swiss Commission that was investigating
the prison-camps of Turkey that the British officers at
Afion-kara-Hissar heard of Muslum Bey's worst outrage. The brutal
commandant had taken great care that there should be no communication
between the captive officers and the captive men, and severe punishment
was inflicted if a Tommy tried to speak with a British officer whom he
chanced to pass in the street. Scenting that something was wrong the
officers induced members of the Swiss Commission to take with them the
senior British doctor when they visited the Tommies in the Greek
Church. Almost the first words that Colonel B., the doctor in question,
heard on entering the building were the equivalent of "I've been
outraged, sir." He then learned the story of how two British soldiers,
thrown into jail for some trivial offence, had been forcibly outraged,
first by the commandant and then by his sergeant-major.
The Swiss Commission itself was not immune from Muslum Bey's
criminality. An Australian officer took a member of it aside, and told
him the full story of the awful death-march from Kut-el-Amara, on which
the captured garrison, already reduced by hunger, were forced to trek
over 800 miles of desert and mountain, being left to die in the
scorching sun if they fell out owing to weakness--a death-march which
is responsible for the fact that less than 25 per cent. of the men
captured at Kut-el-Amara are alive to-day.
"Yes, we know all about it," said the Swiss, "and we had it in our
notes. But most of our papers were stolen the other day."
When I reached Afion, in May, 1918, the conditions had improved. As a
result of a secret report by the senior British officer, smuggled to
the headquarters at Constantinople of the Ottoman Red Crescent, Muslum
Bey had been removed from his position and imprisoned. He was put on
trial for his many crimes; but owing to _baksheesh_ and to political
protection the sentence was but a few months' imprisonment. He had
already served this period while awaiting trial, and was therefore
released immediately after sentence. He went into business as a
shopkeeper, and sold among other things tinned food bearing British
labels--tinned food of the kind that anxious people in England and
India lovingly bought and lovingly packed for their husbands, sons, and
relatives who were prisoners of war.
Meanwhile, although Muslum Bey had been given only the travesty of a
punishment by the Turkish judges, instructions were sent from the
Turkish War Office that life at the prison-camps of Afion-kara-Hissar
was to be made more pleasant. We were, for example, allowed the run of
a portion of the hillside. In cold print such a concession seems
unimportant enough, but to men who had become staled and unspeakably
bored by months of captivity during which their only exercise was to
walk up and down a narrow street, it was a godsend. Cricket and
football matches were also allowed, and two or three times a week long
walks were arranged.
Members of these walking parties would study the flat plain that
surrounded Afion-kara-Hissar and the succession of hill-ranges beyond
it, and would dream of an escape to some point on the coast.
From this town in the centre of Anatolia, however, escape seemed an
impossibility, for the nearest point of the coast was 150 miles
distant, and the intervening country, wild and almost trackless, was
full of brigands and starving outlaws of every description, who would
cheerfully kill a chance traveller for a pair of boots, a loaf of
bread, or merely for practice. In any case, a tramp to the coast must
extend over at least five weeks, and it was difficult to see how food
for this long period could be carried.
Several officers were carrying on a secret correspondence with friends
in England by means of code, and were trying to prepare wild schemes
whereby a boat was to be waiting for them at some specified part of the
coastline between specified dates, or whereby an aeroplane was to pick
them up during the night. Most of us gave up the idea of making a dash
for freedom from Afion, and schemed to be sent to Constantinople, where
the chances of success would be greater.
When a recently captured prisoner first accepted the fact that escape
from Afion-kara-Hissar was impossible, and when the monotony of
captivity had permeated him, he would as a rule pass through a period
of melancholia and the deepest depression. A black rock--huge, gaunt,
and forbidding--overshadowed the little town from its height of 2,000
feet of almost sheer precipice. For hours at a time one would stare at
its bare blackness, and at the crumbling ruins of the fortress, built
by the Seljak Turks, which topped the rock; and the blackness and
bareness would enter into one's soul and plunge one into a swirling
vortex of morbid thoughts. For me the rock was a symbol of
captivity--bleak, inexorable, and unrelenting.
Yet, as a rule, the period of melancholia soon passed, and gave place
to resigned acceptance of the trivial and monotonous daily round of
prison life. This more or less sane view of things was only made
possible by improvised distractions, by reading, and by the discussion
of the thousand-and-one rumours that spread from the bazaars. Time and
again it would be whispered by some Greek trader that Talaat Pasha was
negotiating a separate peace and had agreed to open the Dardanelles, or
that war was about to be declared between Turkey and Bulgaria as a
result of the Dobrudja dispute, or that Enver Pasha had been
assassinated, or that the Sultan was determined to rid himself of the
Young Turk government. We knew well that these reports were untrue and
scarce worth even the attention of bitter laughter; but since we wanted
them to be true they would be discussed with gravity over the
mess-tables until the next batch of newspapers proved their falsity.
The most useful means to forgetfulness was the camp library. Many
hundreds of books were sent to the prison-camps of Turkey by various
societies and individual sympathizers in England. It was at
Afion-kara-Hissar that I first found the courage and concentration
necessary to read through each and every consecutive volume of Gibbon.
"The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," by the way, was probably
more in demand than anything else in the library; for the state of mind
induced by captivity needed something more solid and satisfying than
the best yeller-seller. Great favourites, too, were books of Eastern
travel and adventure--in particular the works of Burton and Lamartine,
the "Travels of Marco Polo the Venetian," and Morier's "Hajji Baba." A
copy of Plutarch's "Lives" also received the attention of much wear and
tear. For the rest, many a time have I thanked the gods for Kipling;
but never more heartily than when lying on the hillside at Afion and
forgetting the Black Rock and all that it stood for in the company of
Kim the lovable, Lalun the lovely, and The Man Who Would Be King.
Away from the ragtime blare and rush of modern life this isolation in a
small town of a semi-civilized province gave the prisoners time and
opportunity to "find" themselves, so that for the first time in their
lives many began to think individually, instead of accepting
conventional opinions at second hand. At least one book of promise was
written at Afion-kara-Hissar, and four others have found publication.
Several excellent poems were born there amid a welter of verse that was
deathless because lifeless. Plays, paintings, and songs were produced
in profusion. One man, an Australian, made a very thorough study of the
ancient civilizations of the Middle East, and could supply accurate
information, without reference to a book, about every phase of the rise
and fall of Babylon and Nineveh, of the Medes and Persians, of the
Chaldeans and Assyrians, with the extent and location and customs of
the various empires. Yet he confessed that three years earlier, at a
time when he was flying in Mesopotamia, he had no more interest in
Babylon than in Nashville, Tennessee.
Apart, however, from the quality of this work _pour passer le temps_,
the very fact that so many should adventure into the unknown country of
creative effort proved that, when away from the preoccupations of an
artificial social system, even the average Englishman turned
instinctively to learning and the arts.
Meanwhile, many a lively performance was given in the garden which
served as open-air theatre, with plays written and songs composed by
people who, before being subjected to the isolation of captivity, had
occupied themselves solely with soldiering or business. Comic relief
also was provided by two youthful subalterns who set up shop as
earnest-minded philosophers, and on a foundation of Nietzsche, Wilde,
and Shaw built a gargoyled edifice that was perverted and extravagantly
young, but withal vastly entertaining.
The social life of the camp was complex. Despite the absence of the
female of the species, it resembled in many ways that of a suburb in
some wealthy city of the Midlands. As was to be expected among a
hundred people confined in two small streets, innumerable cliques were
formed, from each of which ripples of gossip spread outward until they
merged into and were overwhelmed by another eddy of gossip. Starting in
the morning from a small room in a wooden house an item of scandal
would, by the evening, have reached every room of thirty other
houses--how X. had received a pair of pyjamas for nothing from the Red
Cross supply and sold them for three liras; how Y. had climbed over
several roofs at night-time and, in the shadow of a chimney, met that
Armenian girl with the large eyes; how Z. had begun to smoke opium.
Opium, by the way, could be had in plenty. The production of it was the
chief industry of Afion-kara-Hissar ("_afion_" is Turkish for "poppy,"
"_kara hissar_" being "black rock"). Enormous poppy-fields spread all
round the town in vivid splashes of red and white.
Yet with all the trivial gossip and light scandal there was a very real
sense of comradeship. If any man were sick the remainder would fall
over each other in their desire to be of help. If any house were short
of wood during the bitter months of winter its inmates could always
borrow from such as had enough and to spare. A new prisoner, possessing
no money and a minimum of clothes--as was the case with most of
us--would find himself overwhelmed by loans and gifts.
When I was at Afion the camp was very much preoccupied with rumours of
a forthcoming exchange of sick prisoners between Great Britain and
Turkey. Scores of intrigues centred round the room of Major H., then
senior medical officer among the British; for it would be his task to
examine the "_unfit_" before deciding which were to be sent for further
and final examinations by Turkish medical boards. Scarcely a man failed
to produce an ailment. Wounds that had healed years before were
bandaged and treated with unnecessary care. Limps of every description
were to be seen in the street. Some claimed to be deaf. Others allowed
their gray hairs to grow long, and continued to express an opinion that
the old and feeble should be sent home first. Such as could produce
neither old age nor some physical ailment discussed loss of memory and
mental trouble.
All day long Major H. examined the claimants, smiled to himself, and
compiled lists. These, I imagine, must have been subdivided something
like this--(a) those who suffered from real injuries or illnesses; (b)
those who were middle-aged, and had minor ailments; (c) those who were
young, and had minor ailments; (d) those who might conceivably have
minor ailments but could supply no visible symptoms; (e) those who had
nothing the matter with them, but were good liars, and as such might
convince the Turks; (f) those who were not only healthy, but bad liars.
Besides the British there were at Afion about a hundred Russian
officers; for although the peace of Brest-Litovsk had been signed and
Russia was at peace with Germany, the Russian was the traditional enemy
of the Turk, and none knew when war might break out between Turkey and
the small states which had sprung up in the Caucasus. With no money, no
Red Cross supplies, no means of communicating with their relatives, and
no knowledge of whether these relatives had survived the Bolshevist
terror, the Russian officers among us lived miserably, and were largely
dependent upon the charity of British fellow-captives. In return they
taught some of us a smattering of Russian, and helped to pass the time
with their interminable but entertaining talk. They also provided a
really fine choir, with Captain Korniloff, a cousin of the famous
general, as one of its leading members. Besides ourselves, its
audience, when the choir sang on the hillside, never failed to include
the dark-haired Armenian girls--the only Armenians left in the
town--who had been saved from the exodus and massacres of 1915-16 that
they might serve the pleasures of Turkish officers and officials. They
listened from a distance, and looked their sympathy, as we looked ours.
At the beginning of each month, when the funds arrived from
Constantinople, there would be a succession of birthday parties. On
these occasions the rule was relaxed whereby each prisoner must remain
in his own house after seven o'clock. The Turks reverence birthdays,
and by playing upon this fact permission would be obtained to celebrate
in a friend's room. It was necessary to claim birthdays in rotation,
for even the Turks might have disbelieved if the same prisoner had
three of them in three successive months.
I shall always remember a party given on the evening of my arrival by
White, an Australian aviator captured in the early days of the
Mesopotamian campaign. It was my first introduction to _árak_, a kind
of a tenth-rate absinthe, which, excepting some incredibly bad brandy,
was then the only alcoholic stimulant to be bought in Anatolia. Finding
it far stronger than it seemed, I had almost forgotten captivity and
its miseries in an unreal enjoyment of the songs, the stories, and the
general hilarity--hilarity which was merely a cloak for forgetfulness.
And then, amid the fumes and the shouting, there recurred insistently
the thought of escape. I spoke of it to the man nearest me, a short
figure in a faded military overcoat, Turkish slippers, and an eyeglass.
"Not so loud," he warned. "You can't trust half these Russians. Come
over into the corner."
Yeats-Brown, the speaker, began to suggest advice about how best to
escape. One's only chance, he declared, was to get to Constantinople.
He himself claimed nose trouble, and having cultivated the friendship
of the local Turkish doctor, he was to be sent for treatment to a
hospital in the capital. If I could invent some plausible ailment he
would persuade the Turkish doctor to use his influence on my behalf.
Meanwhile, we would have further talks and discuss plans. The great
thing was to get to Constantinople.
Although I did not know it at the time there were in that bare room
several men with whom, in a few weeks' time, I was to be involved in a
succession of extraordinary intrigues and adventures, when we should
have met again in Constantinople. There was the host himself--Captain
White--who later on joined me in a thousand-mile journey, through
Russia and Bulgaria, to freedom; there was Captain Yeats-Brown, who for
weeks went about an enemy capital disguised as a girl; there was Paul,
who was to escape three times, be recaptured twice, and finally to
marry the English lady who helped him; there was Prince Constantine
Avaloff, a Russian colonel, who was to help us all by acting as
go-between; there was Lieutenant Vladimir Wilkowsky, a Polish aviator,
whom I was to see again on the other side of the Black Sea, in
German-occupied Odessa. Meanwhile, the _árak_ bottle passed round, and
the songs grew louder and wilder, until daylight broke up the party and
we returned to our rough, hand-made beds.
It now became my aim in life to reach Constantinople. My injuries had
healed, and at a moment's notice I could produce no convincing illness.
I decided, therefore, on some form of mental trouble. Yeats-Brown had
already mentioned me to his friend the Turkish doctor; and I was to
have been examined, when yet again the unexpected happened. It was
ordered by the Ministry of War that the seven of us who left Damascus
together were to be forwarded to Constantinople, presumably for
interrogation.
I took with me high hopes and the addresses of various civilians in the
capital who might be of help. As we entrained, and moved westward
through the poppy-fields, the Black Rock--which more than ever seemed a
symbol of the blackness and menace which overshadowed prisoners in this
half-barbaric country--loomed gigantic and forbidding, so that we were
thankful when the railway wound round a hill and shut it from sight. I
vowed to myself that never again would I return to the monotonous
death-in-life of the prison camp at its foot, on the fringe of the
squalid town of Afion-kara-Hissar.