WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
A Prisoner in Turkey cover

A Prisoner in Turkey

Chapter 43: A KUT PRISONER
Open in WeRead

About This Book

The author recounts his experience as a British prisoner in Turkey during the Great War, combining personal narrative with extracts from an official report to document conditions and mortality. He describes stark contrasts of treatment—occasional courtesy, widespread neglect, and episodes of deliberate brutality—detailing squalid hospitals, inadequate medical care, prisons used as clearing‑houses, and brutal punishments including routine flogging at certain camps such as Afion and Angora. Official figures are quoted to show thousands captured and a heavy death toll. The account also refers briefly to the contemporaneous state‑sanctioned massacres of Armenians and directs readers to official documentation for details.

THE SILENCE OF
COLONEL BRAMBLE

By ANDRÉ MAUROIS

Second Edition. 5s. net.

Westminster Gazette.—“‘The Silence of Colonel Bramble’ is the best composite character sketch I have seen to show France what the English gentleman at war is like ... much delightful humour.... It is full of good stories.... The translator appears to have done his work wonderfully well.”

Daily Telegraph.—“This book has enjoyed a great success in France, and it will be an extraordinary thing if it is not equally successful here.... Those who do not already know the book in French will lose nothing of its charm in English form. The humours of the mess-room are inimitable.... The whole thing is real, alive, sympathetic; there is not a false touch in all its delicate, glancing wit.... One need not be a Frenchman to appreciate its wisdom and its penetrating truth.”

Star.—“An excellent translation ... a gay and daring translation ... I laughed over its audacious humour.”

Times.—“This admirable French picture of English officers.”

Daily Graphic.—“A triumph of sympathetic observation ... delightful book ... many moving passages.”

Daily Mail.—“So good as to be no less amusing than the original.... This is one of the finest feats of modern translation that I know. The book gives one a better idea of the war than any other book I can recall.... Among many comical disputes the funniest is that about superstitions. That really is, in mess language, ‘A scream.’”

New Statesman.—“The whole is of a piece charmingly harmonious in tone and closely woven together.... The book has a perfect ending.... Few living writers achieve so great a range of sentiment, with so uniformly light and unassuming a manner.”

Observer.—“The flavour of M. Maurois’ humour loses little in this translation.... The admirable verisimilitude of the dialogue.... M. Maurois’ humorous gift is unusually varied.... He tells a good story with great vivacity.”

Holbrook Jackson in the National News.—“The Colonel is an eternal delight.... I put the volume under my arm, started reading it on the way home, and continued reading until I had finished the same evening.... That ought to be sufficient recommendation for any book....”

Times Lit. Supplement.—(Review of French Edition.)—“M. Maurois ... is indeed so good an artist and so excellent an observer that we would not for worlds spoil his hand, or do more than merely introduce to English readers by far the most interesting and amusing group of British officers that we have met in books since the war began.”

Gentlewoman.—“The translation of this book is so splendidly done that it seems impossible that it can be a translation.... One of the very few war books which survive Peace.... This is one of the few war books that will not collect dust on the bookshelf.”

James Milne in the Graphic.—“It is all very wise and very charming.”

Morning Post.—“This gently-humorous little book.... Half-an-hour with Colonel Bramble and his entertaining friends will stop you worrying for a whole day.”

Saturday Review.—“The wittiest book of comment on warfare and our national prejudices that we have yet seen.”


JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD, VIGO ST., W. 1

 

A KUT PRISONER

By Lieut. H. C. W. BISHOP. Illustrated. 6s. 6d. net.

This book is the remarkable story of the first three British officers to escape from a Turkish prison camp. It contains a description of the siege and the march of 1,700 miles to Kastamuni; of their capture, escape, and dramatic rescue, and finally the voyage in an open boat to Alupka, in the Crimea.


SONNETS FROM A PRISON
CAMP

By ARCHIBALD ALLAN BOWMAN

Crown 8vo. 5s. net.

This book falls naturally in two parts; the first is a sonnet sequence describing the author’s capture with his battalion in the great March Offensive, his weary tramp as a prisoner, and internment in a German camp; the second consists of a series of meditative sonnets on theses inevitably suggested by close confinement. The poems show great promise, their intense sincerity being foremost among their merits.

Morning Post.—“Mr. Bowman’s rich and dignified sonnets.”

Scotsman.—“There is only one possible verdict on this volume—well done.”


SAPPER
DOROTHY LAWRENCE

The Only English Woman Soldier

Late Royal Engineers, 51st Division, 179th Tunnelling Coy., B.E.F.

With Portraits. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.

Daily Mail.—“Her very astonishing tale ... an extraordinary performance.”

Daily Chronicle.—“Miss Lawrence’s book is interesting and well done.”

Scotsman.—“Her exploit supplies the materials for a fine tale of adventure, and she tells her story uncommonly well.”


JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD, VIGO ST., W. 1