ANGORA
The town of Angora is built round a hill. Originally there was a large
castle on the top of the hill, with walls conforming to the rocky nature
of the site, and outside the castle a walled town. The walls still
remain, but the town has burst its bonds and overflowed down the slopes
and out on to the plain below. At many points among the rocks, at all
levels, springs gush out, and this water is very clear and good, a thing
that Orientals attach great value to. The walls themselves are full of
interest. When they were built, and whether by Byzantine Greeks or by
the Turks themselves, I do not know. But they contain innumerable
fragments of an earlier civilization. There are sculptured figures which
once ornamented Roman altars, the capitals of Greek pillars, very many
inscriptions in Greek and Latin, and a number of carved stones stolen
from the fine marble temple of Augustus which still rears high walls
near the bottom of the town. So beautifully was this temple built that
it still defies the efforts of those who would destroy it in order to
mend their houses with its marble blocks. A mosque is built against its
wall, and the cornice is built on by the storks, but the temple still
preserves much of beauty. Higher up in the town, one of the Turkish
mosques carries its roof on Roman pillars; and wherever you go in the
town there are traces of olden days.
On three sides the town flows down into the valleys round it, but the
fourth side is one wall of an almost precipitous gorge, where a stream
has cut through the range, and separated off this hill for men to build
on. The place has the usual legend of a secret passage connecting the
castle with the neighbouring hill. Afion-Kara-Hissar, too, has the same
legend; and I have found it generically wherever rocks have been crowned
with castles, in many lands. At the bottom of the gorge is the
evil-smelling quarter of the skinners and tanners, men who proved their
value when it was resolved to slay the Armenians.
From very early times, indeed, Angora must have been occupied. It is
well supplied with water, very defensible, and situated at the junction
of great caravan routes which penetrate northwards to the Black Sea and
eastwards, through Sivas, to the Caucasus. In the plain to the
north-west of the town there are barrows much like those on Salisbury
Plain.
Many battles have been fought in the plain before Angora, and the city
has often been sacked and burnt.
No place I have ever known has such an atmosphere of evil history
looming in its streets. Should some prophet (or is it profit?) of
psychometry venture to sleep there, she would probably die in horrible
agony.
Even to the present day Angora is a great rendezvous of caravans. When
we were there it was still the terminus of the railway stretching out
toward central Asia, and we used to see long strings of laden camels
approaching the town from far away. They pass with silent step along
their wide, worn routes, tied in strings of four or five, each one's
nose to the saddle of the one ahead, and with a donkey to lead the
procession. They looked as if they had walked straight out of the Old
Testament, and many of the men with them looked much more like what the
Patriarchs must have been than the benevolent old gentlemen in stained
glass windows can do.
Kurds we used to see, and Turks, and men of tribes we could not place.
Generally they wore huge astrakhan hats of black, curly lamb's wool,
and as a rule their broad belts were stiff with daggers and pistols,
with generally a rifle slung across their shoulders as well. I often
used to think what a wonderful experience it was for our untravelled men
to see these strange people from the back of beyond. Strings of camels
used to penetrate the dim, winding lanes of the city, and nasty,
snarling, tusky creatures they were to dodge about among. But the real
gathering place of the caravans was a trampled space of many acres which
lay out beyond the railway station. A Golgotha it was, a place of
skeletons and skulls. For centuries, for millenniums, perhaps, it had
been the place where men and camels met and exchanged the news of Asia,
mostly of wars and rumours of wars, of invasions, murders, massacres,
the sack of cities, and tales of brigands in the hills. For all these
mountain roads are infested by armed bands, even to the present day.
In the town itself there are two or three fairly good streets, paved
with cobble-stones, and flanked by small boutiques, but most of the
streets are narrow gullies; steep, winding, and dim. The houses have
usually stables on the ground floor, while the stories above project and
shut out the light; so much so that it is quite a feature of these
thread-like lanes to find each house built with one shoulder thrust
out, facing half-right one side of the street, half-left the other, and
enabling the windows to collect some of the light which falls along the
lane.
I think, between us, we explored the whole town. Under Chukri Bey's
benevolent _regime_ we had almost complete liberty, very much more than
a prisoner could expect. Save that we had to be accompanied by guards,
we were free to wander where we would, in the town and out of the town.
We used to go shopping in the covered bazaar, where whole streets were
shut up, their owners murdered. We used to explore the castle, and climb
its crags. We used to take walks down the valley among the irrigated
vegetable gardens. We used to walk among the hills. And through those
hills some of us intended one day to walk to the sea. Not now, but in
the spring.
The people were not at all hostile to us. I think they rather liked us.
We used to shop a great deal. Our power to buy was limited only by our
purse. But we used to shop for hours, like a pack of women in
Kensington, all shopping no buying. For we had practically no money, and
we had not only to buy blankets and clothes for the winter, but also to
set up house, buy crockery, cutlery, cooking pots. Four bob a day, even
when it still is four bob, is not much to set up house on. So we shopped
much but bought little. There was a large store in the main street, run
by Spanish Jews, and we used to swarm in there in a gang. A very funny
sight we must have been, dressed all sorts of ways, some of us with
shorts on, one young Australian, I remember, wore long pink drawers
under and below his shorts and a fur cap on his head. For we wore the
headgear of the country. We were advised to, to avoid exciting too much
attention; and some of us wanted to acquire a set of disguise.
Personally I had no other headgear of any kind, except a sort of
Glengarry made of pieces of puttee stitched together. My helmet had been
lost soon after I was captured. But the towns-folk did not seem to
think us strange. They were remarkably polite. Several officers out for
a walk one day met a man with a shot-gun, and asked to be allowed a
shot. He handed over the gun; they tossed for the shot; a naval officer
won, put up a woodcock and killed it.
Who, then, it may be asked, were the murderers, the people who killed
about a million Armenians and quite a lot of Greeks? Well, just anybody
and everybody. A Turkish peasant with a plough in his hand is a
generous, open-hearted, simple fellow. A Turkish peasant with a gun in
his hand is a brigand. The lower orders of the town are straightforward,
simple people, but come a massacre, and they take their part. Probably
things in France were not a bad parallel at the great St. Bartholomew's
Eve. And it must always be remembered that the great drive of the
Armenians was a Government affair, a national policy. Turks cannot stand
having power. A private soldier who becomes an N.C.O. becomes, nine
times out of ten, a black-guard. An ordinary citizen who becomes an
official becomes, ten times out of ten, a thief. A common man who is
invited to kill his Christian neighbour, free of all danger of
punishment, does so. Throughout captivity the guards were faithful
mirrors of the powers above. In the time of Chukri Bey they were kind,
faithful dragomen who did their best to save us from being swindled in
the bazaars. In the days of his successor, their vocabulary was limited
to "Yok" and "Yassak"--"no" and "forbidden."
Beneath the surface of life in Turkey there was always a grim
undercurrent of cruelty. And in that land there is more unnecessary
human suffering than in any land of the world. There were dens in the
town of Angora where Christian deserters--Conchies, perhaps--were kept,
sometimes in chains. We used to see them marching out between their
guards to work on the railway. Thin, grey, starved creatures, dying on
their feet. Later on our men suffered in exactly the same way and about
four-fifths of them died.
When the men went to Changri we kept our orderlies, and throughout
captivity our orderlies were safe. But the rest of the men worked on the
roads and railways all over Turkey, hundreds of miles from their
officers, and the greater part of them died.
For the first two or three weeks of this season of exploration we lived
in a Greek hotel at the bottom of the town. As hotels go in that part of
the world, it was a good one. Downstairs there was the public
eating-room on one side of the entrance and the coffee-room on the
other; and upstairs there was a landing with a settee and a few chairs,
and nine bedrooms. The beds were quite comfortable, but were infested
with vermin, and the smell from the drain was perfectly awful. This was
not the whole of the premises, for it formed one side only of a hollow
square. The other three sides were occupied by Turkish soldiers, and the
hollow square was really a caravanserai. Those rooms which faced the
rear, into the hollow square, were the most infested, but the smell was
the same everywhere. There was no garden, but a narrow space, cut off
from the road by palings, was planted with half a dozen small trees, and
used as an outdoor cafe.
The whole fifteen of us, from the Wank and from the Agricultural
College, were established here. A certain number of sentries were at our
disposal for explorations, shopping, etc., but we were not allowed to go
out alone except within the palings, and there was a guard on the gate.
We took our meals in the public room downstairs, together with the
general public who patronized the hotel, Turkish officers for the most
part. There were plenty of things to eat, not bad either when once one
had got used to their greasy way of cooking, and they were cheap. But
even so they were for the most part beyond our slender means, and it
became quite a work of art to select so wisely as to fill one's stomach
without emptying one's purse. All we had was paid for in cash at the
time, and there were so many clamant uses for cash. Clothes, for
example. An Armenian tailor came and measured us for suits, and used to
come and try them on. He was a Roman Catholic and it was from him that
we first learned that the Roman Catholic Armenians had been spared. He
spoke a little French, and while trying on our clothes he used to
whisper tales of the horrors of the preceding months. All the town was
whispering them, all, that is to say, who were not Turkish. And they
whispered in the greatest fear and trembling. Even Turks sometimes
referred to the murders, and even they were impressed by slaughter upon
so grand a scale; for it was the murder of a nation. It was as though
England had tried to destroy the whole of the Welsh race, and was still
whispering about the deed. I remember one day we visited what had been
the headquarters of the merchants of tiftik, the hair of the Angora
goat. It was battered about and locked up, for with the death of the
Armenian traders the tiftik trade had died. The Turkish guard who
accompanied us grinned and drew his hand across his throat. Armenian
refugees from Constantinople were interned in Angora. For the most part
they were professional men, and they were all Russian subjects. They
appeared to have no occupation, except to play backgammon all day long
in a cafe they frequented. Most of them spoke French and a few English,
and they, too, whispered sometimes as we sat near and sipped our coffee.
Greeks whispered of the massacres, they did not know if their turn would
come next. I remember a laborious conversation two of us held with a
Greek boy, by the aid of a Turkish vocabulary. He had seen much that
took place in Angora.
It seems, in writing this account, as though the greater part of our
time was spent out of doors; but this was not really the case. For a few
hours a day we got out, and we made the most of it, but for very many
weary hours a day we were shut in. We had no books except a few French
plays lent to us by a Turkish officer; one was "La Foi," by Brieux, and
I occupied myself by translating it into English. We had chess, and that
was all. When it was warm enough we used to sit in the chairs outside
and watch the passers-by, and in the evenings we sat in the common room
upstairs and talked. On the whole, we got on pretty well together,
though things got very strained one evening when we had a
thought-reading _seance_. It really must have been exceedingly annoying
for the true believers to find that the whole affair was faked. I know I
got behind a naval man in a corner and laughed until I nearly burst, but
dared not let my face be seen. Things were so electric just then that a
laugh might have brought about a thunderstorm. Especially when one of
the most ardent spirits made the rest of us a perfectly solemn and
heartfelt speech, beginning with "Gentlemen" and ending with a hope that
our hearts were sufficiently pure to let in the light that would be
vouchsafed us. Our hearts were not pure at all, but our merriment was.
We got a manifestation of sorts, well thought out beforehand. But there
was a lot of heartburning about ill-timed levity.
There was a certain amount of illness among us, from time to time. The
officer with the pink drawers was really quite bad for a long time, and
the remaining French officer nearly died, killed by kindness. That is
before we had discovered that it was fatal to call in a Turkish doctor.
As a rule, a Turkish doctor's one anxiety is to get you off to hospital
where he may make money on your keep, and steal your boots. And from a
Turkish hospital all escape is miraculous, all recovery is marvellous.
If you were to go into a Turkish hospital with a broken leg the odds are
that you would die of typhus. But we did not know that then. Our French
friend was ill, so we sent for a doctor. Three came, at intervals during
the day. The first was a captain, and he gave the patient a purgative of
the right size for captains to give. The second was a major, and, as was
only fit, he gave a much larger purgative, of the size that majors give.
The third was a colonel, and whether his mission was to finish the job
his subordinates had begun I do not know, but he strove manfully, and
gave a similar dose of the size proper to colonels. That evening the
Frenchman collapsed. He fainted and was carried off to bed by our
stalwart Bill, the medical student of the party, a splendid person who
was better than all the Turkish doctors in the world rolled in one. Much
do we all owe to Bill, and none more than I do, for he nursed me through
several bad illnesses; although, as he frankly stated on one occasion
when I had paratyphoid, he hadn't "done fevers." A real wonder was our
Bill, and I hope he will read this some day. From about that time until
about a year later, when the doctors from Kut-el-Amara joined up with us
at Afion, Bill was the camp physician-in-chief, and were I ill now I
would as soon go to Bill as to anyone. He was a born healer. French was
not his forte, but in the chemists' shops he always got what he wanted:
went on until he did, or turned out on the counter the whole of the
proprietor's stock. "Avez-vous ammoniated tincture of quinine?" he would
ask. And if the man said "No," then Bill would counter with, "Avez-vous
aucun else that will do similaire?" And in the end he would get it. As a
linguist he had a natural perception of which words could be left out,
or put in in English, without destroying the sense.
Two events happened to me about this time which were landmarks in that
desert of dullness. It was in the Greek hotel that I received my first
letter from home. A very great day indeed. And it was soon afterwards,
in late November, that I spoke for the first time in Asia Minor to a
woman. She was an old Roumanian in a cake-shop, and to her I said, "Bu
kach para," being Turkish, my Turkish at least, for "What is the price
of this?" I commend this sentence to the notice of those about to visit
Turkey. It is one of the few worth knowing. It may seem strange that
this should be noted as a landmark, but as a matter of fact I only spoke
seven words to women between the 9th of August, 1915, and the 10th of
September, 1918, and these were three of the seven. It is no small part
of the multitude of causes that make prisoners queer, this deprivation
of women's society. Men sink back into barbarism very rapidly when
unbuoyed by the influence of women. They do not want the feminist, the
creature doomed to the sterile affection of a little lamp-post-loving
dog dragging at a lead. But they want to be helped by talking to
mothers, lest they forget that motherhood is by far and away the
greatest thing on earth.
At the beginning of November we moved into our house, up in the town,
against the city wall. But a few days before that happened three more
officers arrived from Constantinople. They were not newly captured. One
had been taken on the same day as Bill, at Suvla Bay, and the other two
were the oldest British prisoners of war in Turkey. I specify British,
because we learned later on that there were Russian naval officers taken
before war was officially declared, and prisoners of war because there
were civil prisoners of earlier date. These two were members of the
Egyptian police who had been given commissions in the army and sent out
to test the disposition of the Arabs in that territory shown upon Old
Testament maps as inhabited by the Philistines. The Arabs had turned
upon them and handed them over to the Turks, and the ten or eleven
months which elapsed before they joined us had been most eventful. I
will not anticipate their story, for I do not know whether they will
ever write it, further than to say that whereas we had seen the Armenian
women and children setting forth on their fatal pilgrimage, these had
seen it near its end. Their tale was truly ghastly. But there is one
thing about one of them that I must write. He was an Egyptian, and by
upbringing a Mohammedan, his name was Selim Zaki Kenawi (he will forgive
me if it is spelt wrongly). From the very start the Turks had tried
their utmost to seduce him from his loyalty, and from the first to the
last he had openly defied them. He was the most ardently loyal British
person I have ever known. His plan was simply for Great Britain to own
the whole earth and run it justly. I forget how many times he had been
court-martialled on the charge of being a rebel, but it was several.
They had tried the religious business too, and a venerable personage
whom Zaki irreverently termed "a holy bloody religious man" had taken
off his turban and solemnly asked, "Will you fight against this, Zaki
Effendi?" But Zaki stood fast, and became more British than ever. It
took some doing in his position, but he had the guts of a man. After he
had been a couple of months with us he was sent for to Constantinople
and again tested, both by intimidation and bribery. Enver Pasha, the
Commander-in-Chief of the Turkish Army, the adventurer, the murderer,
both privately and wholesale, the biggest scoundrel unhanged--I regret
he is still unhanged--even himself sent for Zaki and offered him a
choice between death and a commission in the Turkish Army. But Zaki
never even thought which to choose. He chose death. But he did not die,
although they sent him in the winter on the awful march to Sivas in its
frozen mountains to be imprisoned among the Russians. There was typhus
raging there, and there was more than a chance that his throat would be
cut by the way. But he came safely through, and eventually rejoined us
at Afion. An Egyptian tested as was Zaki should have a fine future in
his own land.
The third new arrival, he from Suvla Bay, had suffered a curious
adventure. In an attack he had been shot, and when he came to it was to
find himself built into a temporary rampart of corpses. He was one of
the corpses, and a Turk, with his rifle resting across his head, was
firing away at our trench. He flapped about a bit, and was so fortunate
as to become one of the seventeen officers who were kept as samples on
Gallipoli.
I do not propose to give many personal histories, but without a few it
would not be easy to convey to others what a strange selection from
fate's claws we earlier pre-Kut prisoners were. Until Kut brought up our
numbers to a large figure, every one of us, officer or man, was the
survivor, perhaps the sole survivor, of some great adventure. Such as
one I will refer to as the Squire: the day he was captured at Suvla Bay
one hundred and two officers were "missing" on Gallipoli, and he alone
came through. Such as Chok, our gigantic Yorkshireman, who, after
braining a Turk with an axe, being blown up by a shell, and seeing his
regiment almost wiped out, came through alone to us suffering from what
is now known as shell-shock. Such as Dinkie, disabled by a bullet
through the foot, who had to sham death while bayoneted ever so many
times, and who had fortitude enough to sham it long enough. Such as
Bill, who was shot through the neck; and who, long before he was well,
was cast with other sick and wounded into a den in Constantinople, where
he spent whole days wrestling single-handed with wounds and disease.
This was the place where Enver visited the prisoners, and smiled and
said it was good enough for the British. Very many died. Very many were
saved by Bill.