OF THE COMRADES WE HAD LEFT BEHIND AND HOW POSH
CASTLE PLAYED THE RAVEN
Our new prison was one of the best built houses in Yozgad, empty of all
furniture, it is true (except the chair and table we had each brought
with us), but large, airy, and comparatively clean. From the front
windows we had a view of the Commandant’s office and the main street.
From the side we looked into “Posh Castle,” where now lived our friends
Doc., Price and Matthews; and at the back there was a tiny cobbled yard,
with high walls round it, and a large stone horse-trough, which we
promptly converted into that real luxury—a full-length bath. To the
south-east we had a wide view of the distant pine-woods, and nearer at
hand a certain grey rock projected through the snow on the slope of
South hill. Under its shadow lay the first clue to the treasure.
Indoors, if we wished it, we could each have a bedroom, a dining-room
and a study, and still leave a spare suite for the chance guest.
Furniture? Simple enough! Move your chair and table to wherever you want
to sit, and there you are! When we arrived some of our friends were
waiting to see the last of us. Our escort hustled them out. The door
slammed, the key grated in the lock, and a sentry took up his stand
outside. Our separation from the camp was complete, and our solitary
confinement had begun.
It was natural that Hill and I should be elated at the success of our
plan. The simultaneous hoodwinking of friend and foe had for us an
amusing side. But mingled with our elation and our amusement was a
feeling which no loyalty to our friends in the camp could suppress. For
we rejoiced, above all, in our loneliness, in our freedom from
interruption, in the fact that we were quit of the others. I make the
confession knowing that any fellow-prisoner who chances on this story
will understand and sympathize. The longing for a little solitude was
shared by us all.
It must not be imagined that the prison walls of Yozgad enclosed a
company of particularly obnoxious irreconcilables, or that we were a
shiftless crew who gave in to the discomforts of their situation. Far
from it. A more companionable set of men never existed, and during our
stay in Yozgad we overcame every difficulty but one. For instance: to
begin with, there was an entire absence of furniture. Yozgad was no
Donnington Hall, and the Turks provided nothing but a roof to our heads,
and a bare floor—sometimes of stone—for us to lie on. The camp purchased
empty grocery boxes, acquired a saw, a hammer, a plane, and nails, and
some of our prisoners evolved designs in chairs and tables and beds
which would have done credit to Maple’s. Our food, both in quality and
price, was appalling; we learned to cook, and before we left Yozgad
there were Messes which could turn out on occasion a five-course dinner
that left nothing to be desired. We had no games. Busy penknives soon
remedied the deficiency; chessmen, draughts, roulette-wheels, toboggans,
looges, skis, hockey-sticks, and hockey-balls were turned out to meet
the demand. There was no end to the ingenuity of individuals in
supplying their wants or adding to their few comforts. We had cobblers
of every grade, from an artist like Colonel Maule, who made himself a
pair of rope-soled shoes, to “Tony,” whose only boots, owing to their
patches, were of different size and vastly different design—indeed, it
required a stretch of the imagination to realize they had once been a
pair. We had knitters who could unravel a superfluous “woolly” and
convert it into excellent socks, heels and all. We had tailors whose
efforts (being circumscribed by the paucity of cloth) would have brought
tears of delight to the eyes of Joseph. In every house there was an
embryo Harrod who kept a “store” containing everything, “from a needle
to an anchor,” that the Turks would allow him to buy, and an accountant
who evolved a system of book-keeping and book-transfer of debts which
enabled those under a temporary financial cloud (a thing to which we
were all subject, thanks to the irregularity of the Ottoman post) to
continue making necessary purchases until the next cheque arrived.
[Illustration: “THE SNOW ON THE SLOPE OF SOUTH HILL”—THE SITE OF THE
FIRST CLUE TO THE TREASURE]
These were all material difficulties, and easily adjusted. Our chief
problem was how to pass the time. It was tackled in a similar spirit and
with nearly equal success. We had four-a-side hockey tournaments[20] and
(when the Turks allowed) walks, picnics, tobogganing, and ski-ing. There
was one glorious point-to-point ski race over the snow-clad hills, with
flag-wagging signallers along the course, bookmakers and a selling
sweep, and to cap it all a magnificent close finish. That was a
red-letter day. Later on there was to be a Hunt Club, with long dogs and
foxes and hares complete.
For indoor amusement we wrote dramas, gay and serious, melodramas,
farces and pantomimes. We had scene-painters whose art took us back to
England (we could sit all day looking at the “village-green” scene). We
had an orchestra of prison-made instruments, a prison-trained male-voice
choir and musicians to write the music for them. Artists, song-writers,
lecturers, poets, historians, novelists, actors, dramatists, musicians
and critics—especially critics—all these we evolved in the effort to
keep our minds from rusting. Indeed, we went beyond mere amusement in
the effort: we went to school again! When at last books began to arrive
from England a library was formed, and classes were held in Mathematics,
Physics, Political Economy, French, German, Spanish, Hindustani,
Electricity, Engineering, Machine Drawing, Agriculture and Sketching. We
became a minor University, with Professors who made up in enthusiasm
what they lacked in experience. Memories of their own youth made some of
them set “home work,” and it was no uncommon thing to run across a
doughty warrior, most unacademically dressed in ragged khaki, seeking in
vain for some quiet corner of the garden where he might wrestle
uninterrupted with the latest vagaries of _x_, or convert into graceful
Urdu a sonorous passage from the _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_.
Nor did we await the tardy arrival of books to commence our education.
Barely had we settled down in Yozgad when some genius realised that the
hundred officers and men whom the Turk had collected haphazard within
our prison walls possessed amongst them a rich and varied experience.
Our genius had a persuasive tongue. He organized lectures. Once a week,
after dinner, we of the Upper House gathered in the only place that
would hold us all together—the landing. It was unfurnished, dark, and
draughty. Each man brought his own chair, each room provided a candle or
a home-made lamp. Wrapped in blankets, rugs, bedquilts, sheepskins,
anything we possessed to keep out the cold, and packed together like
sardines, we settled down to what in those days was the one entrancing
hour in the dull week. And what lectures those were! With men who had
done or helped to do these things we entered the Forbidden City and
shared in the taking of Pekin, combated sleeping-sickness in Central
Africa, tea-planted in Ceylon, cow-punched in America, chased criminals
in Burma, joined in the Jameson Raid, fruit-farmed in Kent, organized an
army for an Indian Princeling, defended a great Channel Port, fought in
a Frontier War, went geologizing in the Sudan, and trained the Rangoon
river. We controlled in turn a Royal Mint, a great jute mill, a battery
of Field Artillery, a colour-photography studio, a submarine, a
police-court in England, a wireless telegraphy station, a pork factory,
a torpedo-boat, and a bee-farm.
[Illustration: “WE HAD FOUR-A-SIDE HOCKEY TOURNAMENTS”]
The list is not exhaustive, but it may serve its turn. Such were the men
with whom we had spent nearly two years of our lives. In a month of
marching you could not fall in with company more varied, more
interesting, or more charming. Yet, because amongst the many
difficulties that had been overcome one remained unsolved, Hill and I
were glad to get away. Nothing in captivity is so distressing, so
discomforting, so impossible to allay as overcrowding, and the unhappy
consequences it brings in its train. It is a cancer that eats into the
heart of every unnatural form of society. Time is its ally, and slowly
but surely it wears down all opposition. In Yozgad we did not quarrel—we
got along without that—and we tried not to complain. But every now and
then a man would seek relief. As unostentatiously as might be he would
change his mess, and though nothing was said, we all knew why. He knew,
and we knew, that he was not getting rid of the bonds that were so
irksome. He was merely seeking to exchange the old for the new pattern
of handcuff, in the hope that it would not gall him in the same raw
spot, and we could sympathize with him. Your neighbour may be the most
excellent of good fellows, but if he is jogging your elbow for every
hour of the twenty-four you will begin to look askance at him. Little
idiosyncracies that would pass unmarked in ordinary life assume the
magnitude of positive faults. Faults grow into unendurable sins. The
fine qualities of the man—his endurance, his courage, his cheerfulness,
his generosity—are lost to sight under the cloud of minor peculiarities
that close acquaintance brings into view. Indeed, in time, his very
virtues may be counted unto him as vices. His stoicism becomes a “pose,”
his cheerfulness is “tomfoolery,” his generosity “softness,” his courage
“rashness“! We _knew_ the worth of the men beside us, but we were being
forced to examine them under the microscope. So we were in constant
danger of taking the part for the whole, and of losing all sense of
proportion. Z was a glorious leader of men: we forgot it—because he
snored in his sleep! Distance lends enchantment, because it puts things
into their true proportions. To realize the grandeur of a mountain the
climber must stand back from it, at least once in a while. And so it is
with character.
I do not know if others—leaders of Arctic Expeditions, for instance—are
wont to succeed much better than we did in solving the problems of
maintaining feelings of mutual respect amongst their company. Certain it
is they have a great advantage over us, because, for them, the close
companionship is voluntary and (what is more important) necessary to the
attainment of a common object. For us, it was compulsory, and the common
object that palliates it was entirely wanting. But we did our best.
Outwardly we succeeded; there was no public break in the harmony of our
camp. Yet in our hearts every one of us knew that he had failed, and
that our only achievement had been to fail in a very gentlemanly way.
Our new-found solitude came to Hill and myself in a good hour, while the
friendships we had formed in the camp were green and the canker-worm of
super-intimacy still in its infancy. For we had left behind many friends
and, as far as we knew, no enemies. In front of us stretched a prospect
of an indefinite period of unrelieved companionship with one another.
What dangers to our mutual friendship this involved we knew too well.
But we had that on our side which would have relieved the camp of its
most serious trouble—a common aim. We no longer merely existed. We were
partners in a great enterprise. There was something definite for which
to work, something which would compensate us for every hardship—our hope
of freedom.
Absurd as it may seem, Hill and I felt not only happier, but actually
freer in our new prison than we had done in the camp. On the face of
things there was no excuse for this feeling, for outwardly we were more
closely confined than ever. In order to give a fitting air of
verisimilitude to his proceedings, Kiazim Bey had issued the strictest
orders to our sentries. Indeed, he went rather out of his way to
describe us as a pair of desperate characters, and so upset the nerves
of our old “gamekeepers” that for the first few days of our confinement
they marched up and down outside our house, instead of snoozing in their
sentry-boxes as they had been accustomed to do. The genial, wizened
little Corporal, Ahmed Onbashi, whose duty it was to verify the presence
of all prisoners night and morning, lost all the _bonhomie_ which had
made him a favourite, and for at least a week we saw no more of him than
a wrinkled nose and a single anxious eye peering at us round the gently
opened door of our room. But as the days passed by and we showed no
signs of hostility, he gradually regained his old confidence. His escort
dropped from two veterans with rifles at the “ready” to the accustomed
one with no rifle at all. At last he came one night boldly into the
room, and catching sight of our spook-board propped against the wall, he
pointed a grimy finger at it, shook his head at us, and uttered one of
the very few Turkish phrases that was understood of all the
camp—_“Yessack! Chôk fena!”_ (Forbidden! Very bad!) From which we
learned that the cause of our downfall was known to our humble
custodian.
The stricter surveillance did not in the least affect our happiness for
it had been suggested by the Spook, and our present circumstances were
of our own choosing. We knew that, within certain limits, we could
lighten or tighten our bonds as we pleased, for we had gained some
control over the forces that controlled us. We were no longer utterly
and entirely under the orders of the un-get-at-able Turk. We had the
Spook as an ally, and the Spook could make the Commandant sit up.
There was another reason, deeper and more permanent, for this curious,
instinctive sense of increased liberty which came to us, and expressed
itself in the enthusiastic enjoyment with which we submitted to a more
stringent form of imprisonment. At the time we could not have put the
reason into words, but it was there all the same, and it was this: so
far as we ourselves were concerned, we were well on the way to correct
the one serious mistake which the camp as a whole had committed. It was
the mistake that lies at the core of all tragedies. We in Yozgad had put
the lesser before the greater good, our duty to ourselves, as prisoners,
before our duty to ourselves, as men, and to our country. For reasons
that have been stated it was considered wrong to attempt to escape. The
general feeling was that there was no choice but to wait for peace with
such patience as we could muster. We all knew the value of what we had
lost when we surrendered to the Turk. But not one of us realized clearly
that since our capture we had surrendered something infinitely more
precious than physical freedom. It was not the supremacy of the Turk but
our own recognition of it and our resignation to captivity that made us
moral as well as physical prisoners. We did not see that in giving up
_trying_ to free ourselves we were giving up our one hope of happiness
until peace came. So that in spite of the outward cheerfulness, the
brave attempts at industry, and the gallant struggle against the
deterioration that a prison environment brings, an atmosphere of
hopelessness pervaded the whole camp. At heart, we were all unhappy, for
we had created for ourselves an “Inevitable.” The camp had built a
prison within a prison, and he who wished to run had to defeat the
vigilance of his own comrades before he could tackle the Turk. It is
perhaps too much to say that it is a man’s duty to escape, but certainly
it is _not_ his duty to bar the way to escape either for himself or for
anyone else. Had every prisoner in Yozgad bent his energies to achieve
freedom not only for himself but for his fellows, things would have been
very different in the camp. Strafed the camp might have been, but it
would have been in its duty, happy in discomfort instead of miserable in
comparative ease, and welded into unity by a common aim. Prisoners most
of us would have remained, but not beaten captives; the victims of
misfortune, but not its slaves.
In getting away from the camp Hill and I had gained a new and more
cheerful outlook. But we did not realize that we had already broken down
the walls of our moral prison. There was no time to analyse the causes
of our happiness. We were obsessed with the immediate situation, and
especially with the necessity of getting the proof of Kiazim Bey’s
complicity which would make the camp safe. Kiazim was not an easy man to
trap: up to date there was nothing he could not explain by a theory of
collusion between his subordinates and ourselves. He was perfectly
capable of sacrificing the Pimple in order to save his own skin. He
could range himself alongside Gilchrist and the other witnesses, and
pose as the victim of a plot in which he had had no share. When alone
with us he was as frank and open as a man could be. But we had no proof
of his share in the plot. With typical Oriental cunning he kept himself
well in the background. There was no hope of getting him to commit
himself in the presence of others; yet, by hook or by crook, we must
produce independent evidence that he was implicated in the
treasure-hunt.
Weeks ago we had conceived the idea of snapshotting Kiazim Bey, his
satellites and ourselves, digging for the hidden gold. Cameras are a
luxury forbidden to prisoners of war, but Hill had made one out of a
chocolate box and half a lens, to fit films which a fellow-prisoner
possessed.[21] The drawback to the camera was its bulk—it measured about
twelve inches each way—which rendered concealment difficult. He had had
serious thoughts of making the attempt with this as a last resort, but
found a better way. On our first night in the Colonel’s House Hill put
into my hands a Vest-Pocket Kodak, belonging to Wright, which somehow or
another had escaped notice at the time of the latter’s capture. Films to
fit it had arrived in a parcel, and Hill had palmed them under the nose
of the Turkish censor while “helping” him to unpack. He explained to me
that as the films were his own, and the camera without films was only a
danger to Wright, he had “borrowed” it for our purposes without asking
permission. It contained three films still unexposed—which would prove
three ropes for the neck of Kiazim Bey, or for that of the photographer,
according as the Goddess of Fortune smiled on Britisher or Turk.
It is not easy to take a group photograph at seven paces (the limit, we
reckoned, for recognition of the figures) without somebody noticing what
is being done. Discovery would be dangerous, for we were now very much
in the Commandant’s power. It was no new idea to the Turkish mind, as we
knew from the Pimple, to get rid of a man by shooting him on the plea
that he was attempting escape; and in our case the camp was more than
likely to believe the excuse. Besides, there are many other Oriental
ways of doing away with undesirables, and if Kiazim Bey caught us trying
to trap him he would regard us as _extremely_ undesirable. Now that we
were actually up against the situation it looked much less amusing than
it had done from the security of the camp.
“It’s neck or nothing,” I grumbled. “If we’re spotted everything goes
smash, and we’ll probably be in for it. I’m hanged if those fellows in
the camp who cussed us for nuisances are worth the risk.”
We were still pondering gloomy possibilities when heavy footsteps
sounded on our stairs, and paused on the landing outside.
_“Htebsi-gituriorum-effendiler-htebsi-i-i.”_
Hill and I looked at each other. The noise was like nothing on earth.
_“Htebsi-gituriorum-htebsi-i-i-i,”_ again.
“Somebody sneezing, I think,” said Hill, and opened the door.
It was the Commandant’s second orderly. We never knew his name, so
because he was in rags, and looked starved, and had the biggest feet in
Asia, we called him “Cinderella” for short.
In his hands was an enormous blue tray, piled with enamel dishes, from
which came a most appetising odour of baked meats. Cinderella advanced
cautiously into the room. He was obviously afraid of us two criminals,
but he was much more nervous about the tray. He wore the look I have
seen on the face of a bachelor holding a baby, and seemed to expect
everything to come to pieces in his great hands. Very gingerly he sidled
round the table, keeping it between him and ourselves, and placed the
tray upon it.
_“Htebsi!”_ he said again with a sigh of relief, and pointing to the
tray he left us.
“He was not sneezing after all, Bones. _‘Htebsi’_ must mean grub or
something. Let’s see.” Hill began to uncover the dishes, I helping him.
“Soup!” said he.
“Meat—roast mutton!” said I, lifting a second cover.
“Potatoes—by Jove!”
“Nettle-top spinach!!”
“Chocolate pudding!!!” Hill cried.
I peered into the only remaining dish—a small jug.
“Coffee!” I gasped, and collapsed into a chair. Compared with our
customary dinner it was a feast for the gods. It came, as we knew, from
“Posh Castle,” for under the Spook’s instructions the Commandant had
requested that mess to send us food. It was the nearest prisoners’ house
and therefore, we thought, it was the natural thing for the Commandant
to do. Of course, we had no manner of claim on “Posh Castle,” but as we
were putting ourselves to a certain amount of trouble for the sake of
the camp, we had considered it right and proper they should do our
cooking for us for a day or two. But we had not reckoned on their
killing the fatted calf in this way, and our consciences pricked us.
“This,” said Hill in a very contrite voice, “this is the work of old
Price——”
“Who believes in the Spook,” I groaned. “I’ve been stuffing him with
lies for a year.”
“Oh, what a pair of swine we are,” we said together.
I took the camera from under the mattress where I had hidden it when
Cinderella appeared, and gave it back to Hill.
“I think, Hill, that risk or no risk——”
“Of _course_!” he snapped at me. “It’s _got_ to be done now! And if it
comes off, Posh Castle gets the photos. Have some soup?”
It was a merry dinner, and the coffee at the end was nectar.
“Now,” said Hill, by way of grace after meat, “let us begin to minimize
that risk. Watch me!”
[Illustration: THE “POSH CASTLE MESS” WHO FED US IN OUR IMPRISONMENT]
For fifteen minutes I stood over him, my eyes on his clever hands,
watching for a glimpse of the camera as over and over again he took it
out, opened it, sighted it, closed it, and returned it to his pocket. I
rarely saw it until it was ready in position, and then only the lens
peeped through his fingers, but when I did I told him. It was the first
of a series of daily practices.
“Once I know the feel of it I’ll do better,” he said at the end; “I
should be pretty good in about three weeks.”
“You’re pretty good now, but where does my part come in?”
“You’ll have to talk like a blooming machine-gun, to drown the click of
the shutter, and——” Hill grinned and paused.
“Yes?”
“Well, if it is a dull day, it will be a time exposure, and you’ll have
to _pose_ the blighters, of course.”
I retired to my corner to think it out.