OUR ALLIES
While in Turkey I only saw Italian prisoners once. They were locked into
railway wagons, and when they tried to peer out through the barred
windows a German N.C.O. brutally thrust at their faces with his stick.
They were stated to have elected to come to Turkey rather than to remain
in Austria, where food was short. They were on their way to work in a
mine in the vilayet of Aidin.
At one time there were a good many Serbs in Afion, but we saw very
little of them. Those I saw were apparently dying of starvation but they
seemed to be cheerful folk.
There were nine French officers at Afion, and, except for one who spent
a long time in a Constantinople hospital, they were with us the whole
time. They and the English were on the best of terms throughout, and
they were a very nice lot of fellows indeed. They were most studious
people and only one of them wrote a book. One of them, however, read
through Gibbon's "Decline and Fall" three times, besides devouring every
other history he could obtain, and we had many books. We had a large
library of general fiction, recruited from parcels, and we had a fairly
large reference library of solid works, partly from parcels and partly
from the Education Department at home. And, between them, the French
must have read nearly all of those hundreds of books, ranging from "The
Way of an Eagle" to Mahan's "Sea Power."
The French were extraordinarily generous, too, in giving up their time
to teach their language to Englishmen. Very few, if any, of them had not
several English pupils, and one ran a large class. With only one
exception they could all speak English fluently long before most of us
learned much French.
Our pronunciation was, of course, a mystery to them, nor was it to be
wondered at. Their house was too large for them alone, and Britishers
who wished to study French joined their mess. They had at one time
Australians, a Canadian, a Lancashire man, and a Scot, and each of them
spoke English in a different way. No wonder the French found it
difficult.
For a whole year once the French were not allowed out farther than that
strip of street, sunless and frozen in the winter, dusty in the summer,
and crowded all the year round. The pretext was a reprisal for some
imagined wrong done to Turkish prisoners in France. We suffered from a
continual threat of reprisals like this. Six Englishmen were once
imprisoned for months in a loathsome hole in Constantinople for some
crime of our Government, probably invented, and one of the six died as a
result. And there were other minor cases of the same kind. It is useless
for a civilized people to swap reprisals with savages: the savages will
win every time.
The French temperament was totally different from the English. They used
to get extraordinarily elated at times, and at other times they became
desperately depressed. We did both of these things too, but our pendulum
was longer and did not swing so suddenly. In the great German offensive
of the spring of 1918 we refused to be downhearted. "They will take
Paris!" the French would cry. "Very likely," we would reply; "perhaps we
are leading them on." There was unpleasantness over this kind of
divergence, and they would say despairingly, "Oh! you bloody English!
You do not understand." But no real quarrel ever resulted. The most
frequent offender was an Irish major, who assiduously studied French.
His joy was to lead his tutor to the verge of hysterics by calculated
callousness regarding German victories. The poor tutor would scream at
him, but they were really the best of friends. "Unless I rouse him," the
major would say, "he won't speak fast enough to give me the practice in
conversation that I require."
I shall never forget a scene in the church, where, by the way, the
French beat us at all points in quiet endurance of a detestable
experience. A certain French officer resented having his belongings
searched, and certain articles of Turkish clothing "stolen" from him. In
revenge he shaved off his moustache, fitted a large newspaper cocked hat
upon his head, and strutted fiercely up and down the central aisle,
looking the very personification of _revanche_. He was a tiny man, very
clever, and a great mathematician. Why he did it the Lord alone knows,
but he did; and he felt as one embarking upon a forlorn hope. There was
not a smile in the affair--on his side--from beginning to end.
The French senior officer was a very fine man, one of the best-read and
all-round best-informed men I have ever met, and he ran his rather
difficult mixed French and British house tactfully and well.
Utterly different were the Russians. To begin with, a great many of them
were not prisoners of war at all, but the officers and engineers of
Black Sea trading vessels. These unfortunates had not been allowed to
leave Constantinople when they wished to, about a week before war was
declared, and they were older prisoners than any of us. "Comme vous etes
jeune!" said one to me when I told him I had just completed my third
year. He had done nearly four. Then they belonged to many nationalities,
some of them peoples one had hardly heard of before the war: Ukrainians,
Lithuanians, Poles, Polish Jews, Cossacks, Georgians, Russian Armenians,
Russian Greeks, Russian Italians, Great Russians and Little Russians,
and others I forget.
Their senior officer was a Commander in the Black Sea fleet, a very
nice, quiet, friendly man of about fifty. He had lost every single thing
in the world except the few articles of clothing remaining to him in
Turkey, and he knew not where to turn after the war. All his money had
gone: he received no pay from his Government, for there was no
Government. He had had no news of his relations since the revolution
swallowed them up, and he said he knew no way of earning his living
except on a ship of war; yet he was cheerful in a rather plaintive way.
Poor Commander Burikoff! I hope he has found some haven of refuge.
On the whole, the Russians, as I must continue to call them, kept very
much to themselves, though there were exceptions to this general rule.
They spoke many tongues, but few of them knew any English, and not very
many of them French. Uncle Vodka used to talk to us in pigeon-Turkish,
and a few of the British knew a little Russian, notably two young
Australians. Australians beat all varieties of British in their search
for knowledge. The Russians were bitterly poor. They had no Embassy
money, for they had no protecting Embassy. How they managed to live at
all was very wonderful. The sailors had started with full kits, unlike
prisoners of war, who were taken in what they have on; but they had
gradually sold their clothes for food until they had not much left. The
Turks did not actually let them starve, but they went very near it, and
in the winter they nearly froze. We helped them sometimes, but they were
too proud to be helped much, and we had not much to give, there were so
many of them. In the summer of 1918 they used to go in gangs to the
river, armed with every conceivable kind of drag-net, and sweep that
river clean. Fish they caught in large quantities and ate them; it was
about the only meat they got: and they caught crayfish, which they sold
to the British. They did not emulate some of the British, who caught
frogs and ate them, so far as I know. Perhaps there was no sustenance in
frogs. I ate one one day, but he must have been the wrong kind. It was
said that they ate cats and I'm sure I hope they did. The French used to
eat the tortoises that scour the plains of Anatolia.
My best friend among the Russians was a colonel, a Georgian prince. He
got me to teach him English, and he would write down the equivalent of a
word in Russian, French, German, Polish, or Georgian quite
indiscriminately. He was a fine, brave little fellow; dark, muscular,
and astonishingly fiery. I expect he is with Denikin's army now,
fighting Bolsheviki. "Ces sales types," as he used to call them. Years
ago, during some minor outbreak in Russia, his squadron had arrested
Lenin and brought him in, and the colonel spent vain hours in wishing he
had slain him then and there. Europe would probably echo his lament.
If Maslum escapes the gallows, woe betide him if ever he meets the
Russian colonel. He will be killed inevitably. After the frightful
punishment of Constantine B. the colonel protested vigorously, and got
the poor fellow put into hospital. Not very long afterwards, a sort of
commission of Turkish officials, accompanied, I believe, by a member of
the Spanish Embassy, visited Afion to look into the question of the
Russian prisoners' treatment. Maslum Bey did not wish his conduct to be
exposed, so he visited the colonel and had the effrontery to offer him a
bribe of an oke (21/4 lb.) of sugar to say nothing about it. The little
man was furious, and swore that if ever he met that man with arms in his
hand he would kill him on sight. I sincerely trust he will be robbed by
the British of any such opportunity. When the commission came he spoke
up at once, but nothing came of it except that the colonel was locked up
for about a week. He had a little house to himself up a side street, and
I often used to visit him there and devise ways of persuading him to
accept little presents of tea or other things from parcels; for he never
got parcels, and was miserably poor. It was really quite a dangerous
thing to do, and I had never to let anyone else see. He was about as
safe to handle as a live bomb with the pin out. The head of the
commission referred to above accused him of secretly handing a document
to the Spaniard. The Colonel had not done so, and he said so, expecting
his word to be accepted. But the fool of a Turk, who had probably never
met an honest man in his life, expressed himself still unsatisfied. Up
flared the colonel. "Search the man!" he said. "If you find it on him I
will commit suicide. If not, you shall." The Turk apologized.
There was a Russo-Armenian, a sneak-thief, and he robbed an Indian
officer of some tobacco. The Indian suspected him and laid a trap into
which he fell. I saw the Russian colonel tell him off in the street,
while the man trembled and went pale green, and afterwards the Colonel
told me what he said.
"Have you a revolver?" he asked. "No, sir."
"Have you a good razor?" "No, sir."
"Then borrow a rope and hang yourself. You have brought shame on the
Russian officers. If you are alive at the end of the war, I shall send
you a pistol. Use it. If you fail, I shall send a man to kill you, for
you are too base for me to fight."
He was a dangerous little man, but he had many friends among the
English, and his ambition was to ride in the Grand National. May he win
through!
He had been in the Imperial Guard, and knew all the Petrograd Court
gossip. One day, during the English lesson, he saw the announcement of
the death of a certain Grand Duke in the paper, and told me a tale
about him. The Grand Duke was a parallel, in position only, to the Duke
of Connaught, for he was an uncle of the Tsar, and he was Governor of
Turkestan. At the Tsar's coronation, it was his privilege to hold the
crown during part of the ceremony, and, while doing so, he became
enamoured of a vast ruby which it contained--call it the Kohinur to
complete the parallel. The stone glistened, and he desired it very
greatly, so he bit it from its setting and hid it in his cheek. But he
was observed, and brought to book. He was required to take up his
residence in Siberia; and here the story ought to end, "and he lived
happily for long afterwards." Perhaps he did, for the colonel told me
that, being already married, in Siberia he committed bigamy, to annoy
his nephew.
Russians are very direct people. When they desire a thing they
straightway pursue it. There was a very large Russian officer in Afion
who went by the name of Uncle Vodka. He was an old man, a dug-out, and
he fought at the siege of Plevna in 1877-79. He was about 6 ft. 5 in.
high, and very huge. He had a long, broad beard, and looked like a
picture of the Tsar's coachman. He was a direct person. He conceived the
ambition of colouring his body, as a man might colour a meerschaum pipe,
and he chose the hill-side to do it on. There he would lie in the sun
without a single stitch of clothing on his great body, which must have
been nearly a rood in area, and he would turn himself round and round so
as to make the colour even all over. We used to climb the hill on
purpose to see him, and he was always pleased to meet us. He was a
venerable figure. You might have taken him for an archdeacon.
Among all these Russians, differing as they did in caste and kind, there
was one thing they held in common. Despite the mother revolution and all
its children, they still held their belief in Russia, great and united.
Technically speaking, many of them were the subjects of countries now at
war with each other and with us. But, although the conditions they lived
in were far worse than ours in the matter of overcrowding, they clove
together as Russians. I studied this question, and used to get one to
interpret for others, so that my survey might be based broadly; and in
that one respect I found them all the same. There are no boundaries,
they would say, between Russia and Ukrainia, or between Russia and the
Cossacks. Poland they excepted, and, to some extent, Georgia; but they
denied that the new divisions of the rest of Russia could endure. There
was neither racial, physical, nor lingual frontier they maintained. And
when I asked whether they did not find it difficult to avoid thorny
subjects, now that their country was giving birth to republics almost
daily, and was torn in pieces by internal war, they said No; they had
all been taken prisoner as allies of each other and of us, and allies
they still were. The only exceptions, among the officers, were a hybrid
anarchist who joined the Turks, and the Russo-Armenian sneak-thief.
Russians all call each other by their Christian names. I once asked a
Russian midshipman what he called the captain of his ship. "George," he
replied. "And what on the quarter-deck?" I asked. "George, son of
Dmitri," he said. I should like to be present to hear Admiral Beatty
called David by a midshipman on the quarter-deck of the "Queen
Elizabeth."