The Turkish officers at Port Sulieman were very courteous, especially
Nouri Pasha, who is a brother of Enver Pasha, but palpably perturbed
at the prospect of caring for us. They were short of food themselves
apparently, and that region, like all the rest of Eastern Tripolitana,
is an almost absolute desert. Since their German masters had decreed
the thing, however, there was nothing more to be said, and so, in the
true Oriental fashion of following the line of least resistance, they
passed us on to the Senussi. Since the Senussi had no one else to pass
us along to, they had to shoulder the burden themselves and trudge on
with it as best they might.
The ship's cook, who had died from his wounds in one of the boats, we
buried soon after landing, breaking an oar to form a rude cross above
his grave. That night, still in our wet garments, we spent huddled
together upon some rocks by the shore. The next morning we were given a
small quantity of rice, which we had to cook as best we could in some
beef tins and eat with our fingers. There was less than a handful of
the tasteless, unsalted mixture to each man. We were terribly cold,
hungry, and thirsty; indeed, for the next four months and a half, there
was hardly an hour in which we were not suffering a good deal from
one, and usually all three, of these causes.
After a couple of days we were moved back from the coast to a primitive
village where the people and animals alike lived in dug-outs in the
rocks. A "stable" which had been occupied by goats, donkeys, and pigs
was cleared for us, and there, living in indescribable filth, we were
kept for four days. We had been forced to carry with us on a stretcher,
a quartermaster of the _Tara_ who had sustained a double fracture
of one of his legs. At this juncture, between filth and vermin,
infection set in, and the only chance of saving his life appeared to be
amputation. This--I will spare you the harrowing details--was finally
accomplished with no other instruments than a pair of old scissors and
a drop of whisky--our last--to steady the poor fellow's nerves. Of
course, he died.
The Arabs now told us that they were going to take us to a beautiful
oasis, where there were water and dates in plenty, and flocks of
sheep and goats, and warm houses to shelter us in. Why they told us
this I have never been able to make out. Possibly to make us forget
our ever-empty stomachs; more likely because Arabs are incapable of
telling the truth even when they want to. At any rate, we never reached
the paradise that our captors persistently dangled before us like the
carrot on a donkey's nose.
But march we did, marched endlessly, and most of the time on less than
a pint of vile water and a dozen ounces of cooked rice a day. The
country was one endless stretch of small round pebbles that ground the
soles from our boots and the skin from our feet. We were always hungry,
always thirsty, always footsore. The sun at noonday scorched us, the
cold of the night chilled us. One day, to make matters worse, a man who
was off his head from suffering ran away and evaded capture. Following
the Oriental practice, our guards must needs punish the birds in the
hand for the sins of the one in the bush. For two days we were marched
without a drop of water or a morsel of food. The second day they goaded
us forward from daybreak to sunset. It seemed as though we must have
gone a hundred miles, and I learned later that it was actually twenty.
Even that was an awful distance for starving men, who hadn't the
strength to walk in a straight line, to be driven.
For three long weeks they herded us on. At the end of that time we
arrived at what appeared to be our destination, some half-ruined Roman
wells called Bir-Hakkim, the "Red Doctor" and the "White Doctor." It
was not an oasis in the true sense, but only three or four caved-in
cisterns, partially filled with reeking rain-water, which served
as a caravan halt. There were no houses, no palms, no cultivation;
only rocks and the crumbling copings of the ancient wells broke the
awful monotony of the desert. Most of us arrived barefooted, all of
us half-naked; but it is due to our guards to say that they were in
scarcely better plight themselves, and that as opportunity offered to
get old boots and rags from passing caravans they gave them to us.
One day I found a bit of broken glass, and with this managed to scrape
down some slivers of camel's bone to the form of clumsy needles. Yarn
we made by rolling tufts of camels' hair, picked up along the way,
between our palms. The resulting strand was seldom less than an eighth
of an inch in diameter, and always lumpy and prone to pull apart at
the joints; yet, by dint of patience and care, we were able to stitch
fragments of rags together to form hats and long Arab shirts. Those of
us who still had any parts of our socks and trousers left, patched and
darned them as best we could with our bunchy yarn.
Our daily ration, diminutive from the first, became smaller and smaller
as the days went by, and finally, to stave off actual starvation, we
began eating snails and the roots of a small plant, with spreading
leaves like the arms of an octopus, which grew here and there among the
rocks. The roots had a pleasant, nutty flavour--I could eat these few I
have kept with the greatest zest at this moment--but snails, roasted in
their shells on a camel-dung fire and eaten without salt, were, to say
the least, hardly up to that delicacy as served at the Maison Riche.
Most of us had a hard time in bringing ourselves to eat them at all,
and a few ever came really to like them. One chap, however, a Welsh
quartermaster, developed an almost uncanny taste for the things, eating
several hundred every day, and actually waxing fat on them. Ever since
we have called him the "Snail King."
A few days after our arrival at Bir-Hakkim an Arab woman came to our
camp with some goats and sheep to sell, but our guards either could not
or would not buy them for us. That night, however, a wolf killed one
of the sheep, and some of the men, out foraging for snails, found and
brought in the half-eaten carcass. Neither the wolf himself, nor the
waiting vultures, could have tackled that flesh more voraciously than
those half-famished sailors did.