THE SECOND YEAR
To a large extent, the events chronicled in the last chapter overlap
into the second year. Some have been recorded as the natural sequels to
others, and some generalisations cover the whole of captivity. But,
broadly speaking, I am trying to make the record as continuous as
possible, and to preserve chronological order.
We had been in Turkey for less than a year when we first established
code correspondence with England. All our letters were censored in
Vienna as well as in Constantinople, and perhaps locally; but, so far as
we know, our code was never discovered. It was suspected, at least, some
means of communication was suspected, because the Turkish Government was
requested, through the Dutch Embassy, to set right certain urgent
wrongs, and they knew that some one of us must have reported those
wrongs. Letters frequently used to arrive with the marks of a hot iron
on them, showing that they had been tested for at least one form of
invisible writing. There are many forms of invisible writing, but we did
not use them. We used a plain, straightforward code, and our letters
might have been read by anyone on earth. It was curious that none of us
should have arranged a code before leaving home, but no one had, and I
never yet met a prisoner who had even contemplated the idea of being
captured.
Since our correspondence, after passing through several hands and
various different addresses in England, eventually reached the War
Office, it is obviously impossible for me to describe it. But I should
like, however anonymously, to pay a tribute to the clever person who
received the first code letter, realized that it was code, discovered
the key to it, knew what to do with it, and acted as our central post
office for the two and a-half years. He (she) had no idea that a code
message was coming, and had no clue beyond what his (her) brain
afforded.
It is a pleasure, too, to be able to claim that, though immobilized, we
were not altogether useless.
What exactly they would have done with us if they had brought home to us
a charge of conveying information of military value, I do not know. The
most probable fate would have been a dungeon until the end of the war,
or for as long as one could stand it. But, though I am unable to make
further reference to the system we actually used, it may not be
completely without interest to give an example of what can be done in
the simplest possible way. For instance, a prisoner writes the following
letter:--
DEAR ELIJAH
It is four months now since you wrote to me about the
proposed division of Dad's property, and I have not had a
single line since. If I am passed over because I am away
it will be very hard, through no fault of my own. I don't
think that Gwendoline will be greedy enough to treat me
as you say. And anyhow I rely upon you to do your best to
bag the old hall clock for me. Dear old Dad always meant
it for me, and it seems only yesterday that he promised
me it, &c. &c.
That is simple enough. It would pass any censor. But it contains
military information. It is not the code we used, but it was, as a
matter of fact, one which was held in reserve as a possibly useful one.
It was never communicated home.
Read it again in the light of the key, which is the Greek letter [pi].
Every schoolboy knows [pi]. It is something or other to do with the
relation of a circle's circumference to its diameter. I am no
mathematician, but I know that [pi] means 3.14159. Take the third word
of the first line, the first of the second line, the fourth of the third
line, and so on right through the letter following [pi]. It will then
read: "Four division passed through to Bag Dad yesterday."
In addition to writing codes, I took to studying cypher, and of all the
nine or ten varieties of cypher given me by various prisoners never
found one for which a method of solution could not be worked out. An
average piece of Playfair took me about three and a-half hours: probably
an expert would do it in half that time. This is not written as an
advertisement for the study of cypher, but to show the straits to which
a prisoner may be driven for want of occupation. Few occupations are
more detestable than poring over cypher, but total inaction is worse. It
is an occupation for a slave, and now I am no longer a slave I hope
never to do it again.
Enough has been said of prisoners' occupations now for the rest to be
left to imagination. Here endeth the Arts and Crafts section.
Towards the end of the summer of 1916 some of the generals taken in Kut
passed through Afion. None of them made more than one night's stop
there. But after them there came some officers who did stop; and from
them we heard how the men had suffered on their deadly trek over the
desert. The road from Bagdad to Aleppo is strewn with the bones of the
British and Indian soldiers of Kut. We used to see gangs of men arrive
and walk up from the station to the town, almost too weak to look up at
our windows as they passed. And hundreds, thousands, have died or been
killed on the way, long before they reached Afion. At Afion itself they
were not badly treated then, but they reached that comparative refuge so
weak and worn out that very many of them died there. We used to see
their bodies by twos and threes and half-dozens being carried to the
Armenian cemetery where they were buried. We were not allowed to go to
their funerals, but later, when we had a padre, he was allowed to read
the burial service over the Christians.
The senior British officer was allowed a little, a very little,
communication with the men. The other officers were allowed none at all.
But through our shopping orderlies we kept in touch with them. Those
shopping orderlies became masters of intrigue. I am sure that each
successive senior officer did every single thing that he could for the
men. It was uphill work the whole way through. The unfortunate officer
who had to deal direct with the Turkish officials found himself baffled
at every point by lies, and lies, and lies; by cheating and by
bare-faced robbery. Whatever he could do he did do, but it was
absolutely heart-breaking. Thank goodness, I was a very junior officer,
and one who trembled in the presence of more than three stars.
I have been to that cemetery, not so very bad a place as cemeteries go.
There is a stone wall round it, and in it are a number of Armenian
tombstones of white marble. Many of them have carved upon them little
pictures of the implements proper to the deceased's trade: scissors for
a tailor, a hammer and a chisel for a stonemason, and so forth. A very
large number bear the image of a small basin with a very fat caterpillar
in it. I thought it was the worm which dieth not, but others have held
it to be a chalice containing the spirit of the departed rising in
vapour.
It was a sad place, and many good fellows lie there, both officers and
men, who need not have died.
Afion was looked upon by the Turks as a rest camp. The church and the
Medrisseh were used as barracks for the sick and for worn-out prisoners.
But when the men gained strength again they were sent out in working
parties: some to cut timber in the forests near the Black Sea, some to
work on the railway then being built through the Taurus mountains, and
some even beyond the Taurus. There were good places and there were bad;
and in the worst of them life was Hell, and death came swiftly.
The only prisoner we ever had who had been a prisoner in Germany too
during this war--he had escaped from there and been recaptured--said
that the difference in treatment between the worst places in Germany and
Turkey was this: in Germany the men were ill-treated until they became
ill, and were then put into hospital; in Turkey they were ill-treated
until they became ill, and were then ill-treated more until they died.
Before the end we used to reckon, so far as we could get smuggled
figures, that seventy-five per cent. of all men who had been taken
prisoners two years or more earlier were dead. Three out of every four.
It was not only the Kut prisoners who had gone on short rations before
they were captured. It was all the prisoners, all those who were not
officers. For the Turks thought that if they sent back to England most
of the officers, no inquiry would be made about the men by the British
nation, any more than, in the opposite case, the Sublime Porte would
have seriously objected. I have met people who thought it was only the
Kut prisoners who were ill-treated, but, once that tragic march across
the desert was over, the prisoners from Kut, officers and men alike,
mixed with the other prisoners from all the other fronts and were in no
way distinguished from them, either by the Turks or by themselves.
There were places where working parties were treated well. We heard the
most extraordinary tales of places where British N.C.O.'s were running
the whole show themselves, running the prisoners and running the Turks
too: men who had come to the top by sheer force of character. It is very
greatly to be hoped that some account of this will see daylight. I wish
the details were in my hands. But these places were rare. There were
other hells upon earth where the men were beaten and starved, robbed of
the money sent them from home, robbed of their parcels, frozen in the
winter and overdriven in the summer until they died, either from sheer
collapse or from one of the many diseases that a dirty country breeds.
People who have no special knowledge of Turkey-in-Asia hardly realize
what the winter is like there. The last winter we were in Afion snow
fell at the end of November and did not melt until the middle of March.
The temperature ranged round about zero for a good many weeks. What this
meant to the men in some of the bad places can easily be imagined.
Clothes were provided for them by our Government, acting through the
Protecting Embassy; but, except where British officers were stationed
and were permitted to issue them, these clothes were nearly always
stolen. So were their boots. One of the orderlies in the house I was in
latterly had twice been to hospital--before he became an orderly--and
each time he had been looted of every stitch he possessed and of his
boots. Both times he had to start again in Turkish rags.
It is not my aim to complain about the lot of the officers. We were
lucky to be alive, and we did not really have a very bad time. But most
of the men were so unlucky that they are now dead, and while they lived
they suffered all manner of ill.
This book would indeed be incomplete were I to fail to tell of the
plight of the men.
I expect they are forgetting it. People do forget things.
But I must go back to our own history, the history of the Lower Camp in
1916-17.
That winter was a mild one. We played football about two or three times
a week on a small ground about half a mile from the camp. Association
was the rule that year, but the following winter we played Rugby. The
football ground was a long, rather narrow strip between two ploughed
fields, and the reasons it was not ploughed up were two. It sloped
toward the road, and all the lower portion was used as a threshing
floor at harvest time. The Turkish method of threshing is a very
remarkable one, very early, I imagine. When the straw stacks have
ripened sufficiently they are broken up, and large circular mats of
straw with the grain in it are arranged upon the ground. On these mats
sleds made of three planks, and, drawn by horses, are driven round and
round, as though in a circus. Under the sleds are grooves containing
rows of sharp flints which cut all the straw up into chaff and separate
the grain from the husk. Then the whole mass is winnowed in the wind,
and divided into two heaps, one of food for man and the other of food
for beasts. Which of the two our bread was made of I forget.
This threshing naturally requires a good deal of space, and it protected
the lower part of our football field. The upper half was conserved in
quite a different way, for it was a Hebrew cemetery.
There was a large slab or soft rock in it, roughly squared and
conveniently situated for those who wished to watch the game.
Three of us were sitting on this one day when a Turk, driving a cart
along the road, turned his horse and drove up to this stone. He asked us
to move to one side, and then gravely led the horse three times round
the stone, after which he dug out a piece of earth from under the stone
and gave it to the horse to eat. The only thing we could get out of him
was that the horse was ill and that it would now get well. To prove his
point he beat it all the way back to the road and made it canter. There
was only one thing remarkable about the stone, and that was that it was
pierced all over by nails hammered in, nails of all shapes and sizes,
and some of them entirely rusted away, leaving only a stained hole. But
just think of the plight of that poor horse! Officially speaking, it was
now well, registered as A1. Any further weariness would be put down to
malingering, and treated accordingly.
In the spring of 1917 we began to get a little more liberty. For some
time the Commandant answered all applications to be allowed to go out
for walks by saying that the weather was not yet fine enough, a
subterfuge so transparent that I suspect he was laughing at us. His
sense of humour was a very grim one. He appeared one morning and told
the senior officer that three British soldiers were to be hanged that
day. Of course there was a vigorous protest made; but, after a while,
the Commandant smiled and went away. He then visited the senior French
officer and told him that three Frenchmen were to be hanged. After he
had enjoyed his joke sufficiently, it came out that three Turks actually
were hanged on that day. There was nobody to protest for them, poor
devils! The Turkish method of hanging is to erect a tripod, rather like
a strong, high camera-stand. The victim stands below the centre of this,
a noose is passed round his neck, and the legs of the tripod are pushed
closer and closer in until the man is lifted from the ground and
strangled. The men at the Medrisseh often saw public execution take
place, I believe.
But when spring grew fine enough we actually did go for several long
walks, and saw the little yellow crocuses thrusting their heads up on
the hill-sides. It was good to see flowers grow again. The wild flowers
were wonderful round Afion. But that spring we saw little of them. The
policy was changed again, and instead of being allowed out for walks in
the country, we were allotted a little corner of one of the hills
overlooking the town. Here we used to march, twice a week, and sit for
an hour or two on the grass. It was steep and rocky, and there was
nothing else to be done there. People used to take books out there, or
pencils and paper and try to draw the one view. Then we would walk back
to tea, through the slums of Afion, down narrow roads, past huts and
graveyards, past kitchen middens where dead cats' and horses' skulls
lay, and where children played: sturdy, grimy little urchins who used to
abuse us, and make their favourite cutthroat sign, drawing their baby
hands across their necks.
I forget when the policy was changed again. It was always being changed.
Capricious and wavering as thistledown. But in the summer we had quite a
lot of liberty. We used to gather huge armfuls of purple larkspur, pink
orchis, and yellow dog-roses. It was a good time for most of us, but
early in the summer five officers were suddenly taken from their friends
and shut up in a separate house in the Armenian quarter. They were
allowed a short time twice daily for exercise in about 50 yards of the
street, but for the rest were no better off than if they were in gaol.
They were not released until about Christmas time. All this was because
the Commandant suspected them of planning to escape.
The Upper Camp grew a great deal larger that year. All the Russians came
back again, and with them a great many more Russian officers who had
been interned at Sivas for several years previously. From Yozgat, too, a
large number of British officers came, among whom were two of the three
who had escaped in March, 1916. From being a camp of one British house
and one French, the Upper Camp now spread the whole length of one
street, and into two neighbouring by-streets. The whole community of
prisoners in that camp lived in Armenian houses.
My personal opinion is that the camps as a whole lost interest a great
deal after this. They certainly became more respectable, but the
character of the place altered. It improved on the whole, but it was
duller. In the old days we had at least this in common, that we were all
different; we had all come into Turkey in different ways and at
different times. Now that queer distinction disappeared, for most of the
new-comers were from Kut, the senior officers in nearly all of the
houses were from Kut, and Kut rather dominated the conversation. We
old-timers were a little sick of Kut. They were mostly old regular
soldiers, and senior to the rest of us. Let me hasten to say that I have
never met a nicer lot of men. That was part of the difficulty. They were
nicer than we were. But they had all led the same sort of lives before
the war, and during the war. They had all fought in the same battles,
and been in the same siege. They had all the same adventure to tell. I
have great friends among them, and I hope they will smile if ever they
read this. But the old-timers will smile, too, and recognize the truth
that is in me.
One result of this influx was that we all became very unsettled. The
fact was that we had stagnated too long, and were growing very queer. We
were used to new prisoners dropping in one or two at a time, and trying
to teach us how to be prisoners. We knew how to be prisoners; we had
learned it in a bitter school; so we smiled at these new babes in the
wood, let them kick against the pricks a little, and took them to our
bosoms. They made no difference. But you can't take old regular
lieutenant-colonels to your bosom, you have to wait until they take you
to theirs. They do in time, at least these did. But they unsettled the
whole place, and it was probably very good for us.
The result was a break up of many happy homes, a great deal of
arrangement and rearrangement of houses, and when we settled down
again it was like a new Parliament with a different cleavage of parties,
and a strange Government.
At the end of all this I found myself in the Upper Camp, in a house of
twelve almost equally divided between Kut and non-Kut. It was a very
happy house. I don't think anyone in it really hated any of the others;
and, in prison, that means that you like each other very much, and will
always be glad to meet each other again for the rest of your lives.
It was a very respectable house. Much too respectable to be popular.
Indeed it was a byword for respectability, until Good Friday, 1918;
but that is anticipating.
We thought, a lot of us, that the war was going to end that year, so who
can say that we were downhearted?