A PRISONER IN TURKEY

A PRISONER IN TURKEY

By JOHN STILL

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY R. CLAY AND SONS, LTD.,
BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E. 1, AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

FOREWORD

This book, like most books, consists both of facts and opinions. In order to fortify the facts, and so that it may be clearly seen that the opinions are justified, a number of extracts from the “Report on the Treatment of British Prisoners of War in Turkey,” which was presented to Parliament in November, 1918, are included here by the special permission of the Controller of His Majesty’s Stationery Office. So few people read Government publications that this course seems necessary.

In this official report it is stated that out of 16,583 British and Indian prisoners “Believed Captured,” 3,290 are dead, and 2,222 untraced and almost certainly dead. But this report was compiled before the end of the war and is admittedly incomplete. I do not know the actual statistics, which must by now be available, nor do I know where to obtain them. But, as stated in the book, we in Turkey believed that about 75 per cent. of the British rank and file perished within two years of being captured. It may be that we were unduly pessimistic; it is very sincerely to be hoped that we were, and on the whole it seems probable. But I leave the figure unaltered in the text, for it was our sincere belief after very difficult and laborious enquiries made secretly. In the official report the figures show that of a total of 4,932 British believed captured, no less than 2,289 are either dead or untraced. This amounts to 46 per cent. It would be interesting to know the final figures.

The extracts taken from the report have been selected because they are either general in character or have special reference to Angora or Afion Kara Hissar, the two camps I knew personally.

I am indebted to three fellow-prisoners for the photograph reproduced as a frontispiece to this book, for the piece of music, for reading the MS., and for reading the proofs.

Extracts from a Report on the Treatment of British Prisoners of War in Turkey.

The history of the British prisoners of war in Turkey has faithfully reflected the peculiarities of the Turkish character. Some of these, at any rate to the distant spectator, are sufficiently picturesque; others are due to the mere dead-weight of Asiatic indifference and inertia; others again are actively and resolutely barbarous. It has thus happened that at the same moment there have been prisoners treated with almost theatrical politeness and consideration, prisoners left to starve and die through simple neglect and incompetence, and prisoners driven and tormented like beasts. These violent inconsistencies make it very difficult to give a coherent and general account of the experience of our men. Almost any unqualified statement can be contradicted again and again by undoubted facts; and the whole subject seems often to be ruled by nothing but pure chance.

Yet on the whole there are two principles which may be detected as influencing the behaviour of the Turk in this matter, first and last, one being an affair of deliberate policy, the other instinctive and customary. Mixed in with a good deal of easy-going kindness, there is always to be found the conviction that it can matter little what becomes of the ordinary mass, so long as compliments are paid to the great. It has doubtless been a real surprise to the Turkish mind, even in high places, to learn that the rights of the common soldier are seriously regarded by western opinion—the rights, moreover, of a few thousand disarmed men who could be no longer used in battle. This principle has not always been effective, it must be added, in its application to prisoners of higher rank, as some of the following pages will abundantly show; but it has seldom failed in the treatment of the rank and file. These have had small reason in their helplessness to regard the Turk as that chivalrous and honourable foe of whom we have sometimes heard.

It need scarcely be said that the level of surgical and medical skill is low in Turkey. There are good doctors, but not many of them, and it is only in Constantinople that they are to be found. In the provincial towns the hospitals are nearly always places of neglect and squalor, where a sick man is simply left to take his chance of recovery, a chance greatly compromised by Turkey’s total indifference to the first rudiments of sanitation. Such hospitals are naturally the last to be provided with adequate stock or equipment of any kind; and even if some modern appliance is by fortune forthcoming, it will probably be beyond the local talent to make use of it. In a very horrible Red Crescent hospital at Angora, for example, there was at one time seen an excellent German disinfecting apparatus standing idle amidst the filth, because no one could tell how it was worked. It is fair to say that in such places there is no distinction between the treatment of prisoners and that of Turkish sick or wounded; all suffer alike by reason of a state of civilisation centuries out of date.

It was characteristic, too, that until the end of 1916, or even later, the only clearing-station that existed in the city, where the men discharged from hospital were collected until they could be sent into the interior, was apparently the common civil prison, a most vile and filthy place, in which many of our men lay for weeks until the convenient moment happened to come for removing them. At first they were lodged there in ordinary cells; later they would occupy the gallery of a large hall, where their tedium was relieved by witnessing the vociferous floggings of the criminals on the floor below. This would seem to be the same prison as that in which certain British naval officers have at different times undergone most barbarous punishment (in the name of “reprisals”), by being confined for many weeks underground, without sight of day, in solitude and severe privation. As a collecting place for prisoners from hospital it was superseded in 1917 by a camp at Psamatia, a suburb of the city, installed in a disused Armenian school and church. This was at first a dirty and disagreeable place; though supposed to be in some measure for convalescents, it was always a struggle to get so much as a wash there; but under a better commandant it was improved later on.

But before going further we may give what is in effect the substance of our whole report—the epitome, in unmistakable terms, of the story of the prisoners’ treatment. The officially announced figures of the mortality among them, so far as are known up to the present date, give the exact measure of the meaning of captivity in Turkey. The total number of officers and men believed to have been taken prisoners by the Turks from the beginning of the war is 16,583. Of these 3,290 have been reported dead, while 2,222 remain untraced, and we must believe that they, too, have almost all perished unnamed, how or where we cannot tell in any single case. They all belonged to the force which surrendered at Kut, and it is therefore certain that they passed living into Turkish hands, but not one word was ever afterwards heard of any of them. The story we shall now tell is the only light that can now be thrown upon their fate.[1]

Afion, indeed, has a hideous record for the flogging of prisoners—punishment which was habitual there, for the most trifling offences, while the place was under the control of a certain Turkish naval officer. This man ruled with a cow-hide whip, from which the offender received a given number of lashes on his bare back. Many specific instances are known and noted. Fortunately the man’s behaviour became notorious, and the Turkish Government, under pressure, removed him early in 1917. He had had time, however, to add to the burden of the unhappy men from Kut, whose appearance when they reached Afion is vividly remembered by the prisoners who were already there. Some of them naked, many half out of their minds with exhaustion, most of them rotten with dysentery, this band of survivors was received with deep sympathy by the rest, who did all they might to restore them, small as their own resources were. In very many cases it was too late. The sick men were placed in the camp hospital; but this was a hospital in not much more than the name, for though there was a Turkish doctor in attendance, with some rough Turkish orderlies, medicines were non-existent, and a man too ill to look after himself had a very poor chance. Deaths were frequent; the dead were buried by their comrades in the Christian cemetery of the town. All this time, close at hand, there was a party of British officers imprisoned at Afion, two of whom were officers of the medical service. Yet all communication between officers and men was flatly forbidden, under heavy penalty, throughout the bad time of 1916 and even later. English doctors had thus to wait inactive, knowing that the men were dying almost daily, a few yards off, for mere want of proper care.

Angora is another camp which began very badly. In the spring of 1917 (it had already been in use for a year and a half) there were seventy-five prisoners lodged here in two rooms of a very insanitary house, which caused outbreaks of typhus. There was a brutal sergeant-major in charge and a free use of the whip. Conditions have improved as Angora has become the centre of the working groups engaged in laying the narrow-gauge line towards Yozgad. By May, 1917, the chief settlement was under canvas, in a healthy position about twenty miles from the town, moving forward as the work progressed. A little later we hear of kind treatment on the part of the Turkish officers. By the end of the year there was rather a large concentration of British prisoners in this district; and although they were short of clothing and suffered much from the winter cold—snow was thick in December—the general treatment was considerate. The men appear to have considerably impressed the Turks by their power of bearing up and adapting themselves to hard circumstances.

The Turkish Government has announced that in its zeal for the comfort of the British officers in its hands, the finest situations in Asia Minor have been chosen for their internment; and if a prisoner of war were in the position of a summer tourist in peace-time this consideration would be admirable. Yozgad, Kastamuni, Afion-Kara-Hissar, Gedis, are places of interest and beauty; the mountain scenery of Central Anatolia is very striking, the summer climate excellent. Unfortunately this attractive landscape is buried deep in snow throughout the winter; the cold is intense, the places named being from three to four thousand feet above sea-level; communication with the outer world (Afion alone is on the railway) becomes difficult or almost impossible; and the picturesque towns, with their streams and valleys and mediæval citadels, have none but the most primitive provision against the rigour of the season. This would be so even in the time of peace. The difficulties of life under such conditions in war-time can hardly be imagined—difficulties partly due to the general scarcity of necessities, but also much aggravated by Turkish incompetence and disorganisation. With each winter the officers have had to face the prospect of something like famine and destitution, well knowing that they must rely on their own hampered efforts, if they were to get through.

In writing of them one must, in fact, put aside all idea that the care of prisoners is the business of their captors. In Turkey it has amounted to this—that British officers have been sent to live in places where at least it is very hard to keep body and soul together—have there been put under various restrictions and disadvantages—and have then been left to support themselves as best they might. They have had to pay for practically everything they needed beyond bare housing, and sometimes even for this.

After Broussa the most conveniently placed camp, so far as officers are concerned, is Afion-Kara-Hissar, though its direct communication with the capital by railway did not save the prisoners from severe privation in the winter of 1917-18. The few things there were to buy were then at prohibitive cost; and the general state of affairs may be judged by the fact that on Christmas Day, there being no firewood and twenty degrees of frost, the officers took their dinner in bed, as the only place where they could keep a little warm. Afion was one of the earliest formed prison camps in Turkey. In the spring of 1918 there were 100 British officers here, and 120 Russians. This is too large a number for the accommodation, and still more for the resources of the town.

They are lodged in a number of empty houses between the town and the station, which is about two miles away. These houses are in two groups, forming the so-called upper and lower camps, though they are not camps in the sense of being enclosed in any sort of compound. They seem to be fairly satisfactory in good weather, but they are very primitive. In the buildings, more or less unfinished, of the lower camp there was at first no provision for heating and no glass in the windows. By the early part of 1917 the officers had arranged a routine for themselves which the vexatious, sometimes maddening, inefficiency and caprice of the Turk did not seriously interfere with. They had books and games indoors, fixed hours of study, and a flourishing run of amateur theatricals. Out of doors they were cramped, but there were some limited chances of cricket. Once a week the two camps could visit each other, under escort, and there was another weekly outing when they could go for country walks.

The constant trial was not bad treatment, but the stupid and irritating notions of the commandant and his subordinates on the score of discipline. The natural indolence, the want of organisation, the dirty habits and customs of the Turks, their inveterate and irrational lying, all meant a wearisome wastage of time and temper. The commandant had the mark of the typically incompetent manager—a fondness for imposing sudden and teasing regulations, without the will to enforce them consistently. Thus at one time it was decreed that everyone must be fully dressed for the 8 a.m. roll-call, at another that all lights must be out by 9.30 in the evening, at another that no officer should rest on his bed during the day; such rules would be rigidly insisted upon for a few days, till the novelty wore off, and then helplessly abandoned. It is recorded, indeed, that soon after the “lights out” rule was started, the commandant himself dropped in at 11 p.m. one night to visit the officers of the lower camp; he found them all up, stayed for a talk and a glass of Greek brandy, and made no further allusion to the matter. This is the amiable side of the Turkish misrule. It is the other that has since become prominent at Afion, till the place compared badly with other camps for the stupid tyranny of its control. It is not surprising if the officers have felt themselves back in an ill-managed nursery, with its rotation of indulgence and random severity.

Here for the present ceases our information with regard to the officers’ camps in Asia Minor. There are others—Eskichehir and Konia—which are reserved for Indian officers only; but of these little is known beyond the fact that the prisoners enjoy complete local freedom. Eskichehir was supposed to be the “depôt modèle” of the empire, and the late Sultan even ordained that the officers there might keep their swords. But so far as the British officers are concerned, our sketch will have indicated the main lines of their daily routine, its security on the whole from the worst forms of coercion, and on the other hand its exposure to grave risk and hardship. Fully to understand what their existence is like, one must of course amplify the picture in many ways, the chief of which is perhaps the deadly monotony of its isolation. All communication with the world outside is endlessly uncertain and broken. Between these prisoners and their friends at home, who only ask to be allowed to send them the help they need, there lies a mass of corrupt and torpid inefficiency, a barrier almost impossible to overcome because incalculable and irrational. The due and punctual censoring of the prisoners’ mails, for example, has apparently been beyond the resources of the Turkish Empire. The authorities have never been able to establish any system by which parcels, letters and books, might be regularly scrutinised at the various camps. These are all dealt with at Constantinople, with long and exasperating delays. A novel for an hour’s reading, say, is delivered to an officer in Asia Minor; it will instantly be taken from him, returned to the Capital, and there lost to sight for months before it is discovered to be inoffensive and allowed to proceed. For a long while the prisoners’ letters were cut down to the barest minimum both in number and length, because the censor at headquarters could not deal with more. It appears that it has not been possible to carry out this work in the camps for the highly Turkish reason that the various authorities concerned mistrusted each other too deeply.

The housing, feeding, and medical care of the prisoners, the delivery of their parcels and correspondence, their pay, the exchange of invalids and others, the inspection of internment camps, and the thousand and one details of the treatment of prisoners, have been the subject of constant attention and voluminous correspondence, hampered not only by the callous obstinacy of the Turkish Government, but by the failure of Turkish officials even to read the communications addressed to them.

CONTENTS

A PRISONER IN TURKEY

CHAPTER I

THE DARDANELLES

At dawn on the 9th of August, 1915, the 6th Battalion of the East Yorkshire Regiment received an order to attack the great hill that towers above Anafarta. The order was late, hours too late, for the messenger had lost his way; so, although we did not know it at the time, we had already forfeited our chance, and were launched upon a forlorn endeavour.

The rampart of hills to the east of us was black against the chill, pale sky as we moved out across the grey flats that led up to the foot of Teke Tepe, towering up to nearly 1,000 feet ahead of us. And we came under fire from our right flank almost from the very start.

The foot-hills of the range were rough with boulders, and deep cut by rocky ravines. As we moved on and on, up and up, men got lost in the prickly scrub oak, holly they called it, and it became increasingly difficult to maintain any sort of formation. But the enemy’s fire grew in volume as we mounted, poured into us at ever decreasing range from the right and from the front.

In that hour my admiration for the splendid courage of the men rose to a pitch of exaltation. They were Yorkshire miners for the most part, dogged, hard men of the sturdiest breed on earth. Those who were hit stayed where they fell, and those who were whole climbed on. The only complaint heard upon that hill-side was that no enemy could be seen to fire upon. So there was but little reply from our rifles as we went on up.

About thirty of us reached the top of the hill, perhaps a few more. And when there were about twenty left we turned and went down again. We had reached the highest point and the furthest point that British forces from Suvla Bay were destined to reach. But we naturally knew nothing of that. All that we knew was that the winding ravine down which we retreated alternately exposed us to rifle fire from the enemy above and protected us. Hid us and revealed us. A sapper major who walked with me, after a long silence said, “Are you married?” “Yes,” I replied. “It it were not for that this would be good fun,” said the major. So we agreed that if one of us got out he should go and see the other’s wife. And it fell to me to do it; for he was shot through the ankle soon after that, and an hour later was bayoneted in cold blood by a Turk.

We hoped that the foot of the ravine would bring us out among our own supports at the bottom of the hill. But the enemy held it.

Five out of all those who had gone up got down again alive.

We reached the point where the ravine ended, and in the scrub ahead of us we saw a number of men who fired upon us. For a moment we thought they were our own, firing in ignorance. Then we saw that they were Turks. We had run into the back of an enemy battalion which held the lower slopes against our supports. They had crossed the range at a point lower than that we had attacked, and had cut in behind our climbing force. We could do nothing but surrender.

When we held up our hands some dozen or more of the enemy charged towards us with fixed bayonets. And we began to experience that strange mixture of nature, so characteristic of the Turks, from which we and our fellows were to suffer much in the years to come.

The man who took possession of me searched my pockets and annexed everything of military use except my revolver, which had fallen out of my hand a minute before, when I had been knocked down by a bullet that glanced off a rock on to my leg. He took out my purse and saw that it contained five sovereigns in gold (more than I have ever seen since) and a good deal in silver. Then he gave it back to me, and apparently told me to keep it. The pay of a Turkish private is, or was, ten piastres a month, nominally about one shilling and eightpence. My captor was a good Turk. Later on, when I came to know how rare good Turks were, I was filled with marvel.

Of those taken with me, one was not molested; one was fired at from five yards’ distance, missed, and quietly captured; one was beaten and fired at. Thank God the man who fired at him hit the man who was beating him and broke his wrist. The fourth, my Colonel, was bayoneted. Then, for the moment their fury ceased. I was permitted to tend the Colonel. He did not seem to suffer pain at all, only to be intensely thirsty. He drank the whole of the contents of my water-bottle as well as his own. They even allowed me to carry him on my back; and on my back the Colonel died. May he rest in peace! He was a brave man, and a good friend to me.

Brief though my personal experience of battle was, it has left two lasting convictions. One that wounds from which men die are rarely painful, at any rate for a considerable time after they have been inflicted. And another that men actually in action neither fear nor even expect death. As we climbed up that hill on August the 9th; as we dwindled down to fifty, to thirty, to twenty; as we retreated down that winding, trench-like ravine, and dwindled to five, I was not blind. I was not even fighting, but only being fought. There was but little chance to fire back, and only once did I get a bead on an enemy target. There was nothing extraordinarily exciting about it. Mostly it was hard work, rough and prickly, and I was tired. My brain was quite clear. I saw and realized the odds. But I never expected to be killed, though I knew for certain that nearly everyone else would be. It was not courage, for I have trembled with fear on other occasions. It is my fixed belief that this is the ordinary and instinctive attitude of the normal mind. And it is very comforting.

For a time that ranks in my memory longer than some years, and which may have endured for an hour, we were held prisoners just behind the Turkish fighting line. We had been joined by one other captured private and were again five. It was not a pleasant time. Several times we were apparently condemned to death. Once an officer took out his pistol to shoot us and was prevented by a priest, an Imâm with a turban on, who wrestled with him and took his pistol away. Once Derrick and I, the two officers, were put up against a bank to be bayoneted: an unpleasant, ticklish sensation as the steel swings back. But somehow or other it did not come off. When the Turks pushed we were fairly safe; and when our friends pushed the guards threatened to kill us. Personally, I confess to very torn emotions regarding that small section of that particular battle, though it may seem cowardly to do so. I did not honestly hope the Turks would be pushed back just then.

My slight wound was tied up, and we received at last an order to move to the rear. An order from an Asiatic when you have lived for eighteen years in Asia is a strange experience. I disliked it.

Two guards with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets took us back over the hill once more. We wound wearily and painfully up a ravine more or less parallel to the one we had come down. All the way we were meeting enemy reinforcements hurrying to the fighting-line, most of them carrying cardboard boxes of cartridges. Rough, brigand-like fellows they seemed, but very fine infantry. They were the pick of the Ottoman army. Twice our guards had to stand before us and beat off would-be assassins with the butts of their rifles, and once I was struck heavily across the head by a sword-bayonet, but saved by my topee. The whole thing seemed then and still seems rather like a dream, and we walked as men detached from our surroundings.

Near the top of the hill the ravine grew steeper, and at last ended. An aeroplane, one of our own, was circling round the summit of Teke Tepe, spotting for the naval guns; and we all lay low while British shells burst on the rocks about us. The only Turks they seemed likely to harm were our guards. For, far below we could see that a battle was in progress. We could see the white crusted salt on the lake, and the pinkish-brown of Lala Baba hill, from which I had watched, three days before, the storming of Chocolate Hill, like a scene in a theatre. There were British transports in the bay, and outside were British warships cruising slowly while puffs of smoke broke from their sides. These were the last British ships we were to see for more than three years.

We had to run over the crest of the hill, and down a little way into safety on the other side, safety from our own guns. And for the first time I think we felt the pang of lost children. Out of sight of our ships seemed somehow much further than did the other side of the hill from all touch with England.

We halted in safety and sat down, out of breath, while our guards fraternized with a small party of Turkish soldiers and smoked cigarettes. Then we moved on again, and passed away into Turkey.

Worn and very, very thirsty, we were taken that afternoon to the headquarters of General Liman von Sanders, Commander-in-Chief of the enemy forces on Gallipoli; and there we found some more of our men with one more officer. Von Sanders was looking at the samples he had drawn. He has been accused of many things since then, for all I know quite justly; but to us he was not unkind. His staff gave us a meal in their quarters, and he gave two Turkish pounds to our men. But the kindness to the men did not extend far beyond his sight. When next we saw them, some ten days later, they described how their Turkish guards had robbed them of their boots and made them run for several miles barefoot over rough ground. Still, to us the General was civil, though he did say that International Law no longer existed. One of his staff, a German naval officer, told us that they found it almost impossible to get the Turks to take prisoners, or, having taken them, to keep them alive. We, too, had observed this reluctance.

From Liman von Sanders’s headquarters to the Turkish general headquarters was about three miles by the way we went, and we arrived there after dark. We were four officers now, all of the 11th Division, and we did not see our men again until much later, in Constantinople.

We were kept in a tent for three days at the Turkish G.H.Q., and were not troubled with many questions. Our interrogation came later. Various officers came to see us. To look at us, I think. For we were samples, and on their valuation of us would depend their reports on Kitchener’s Army. The four of us aggregated about twenty-four feet four inches in length, and about fifty-three stone in weight, but I do not suppose they went much on that. General von Sanders had said to our youngest, “Eton? and Oxford?” and seemed pleased to find that his conjecture was right. He knew England well, and said that he had been in Ireland not long before the war. But the Turks were different. They looked at us a good deal, but ventured no overt guesses as to our antecedents. One Turkish officer, an Arab rather, and a descendant of the Prophet, as he told us, had lived in London, and spoke English perfectly. Indeed, he boasted that in his veins there ran some drops of English blood, and told me the well-known family that had lent it. Being ignorant of the law of libel, I will not mention it here. He was a curious being. A violent Moslem, but not unfriendly to us personally. Indeed, he did me a real good turn, for he somehow or other sent a telegram for me to my wife and saved her from that awful anxiety that so many women have had to bear after receiving notice that their menkind were “missing.”

I liked to listen to this friendly enemy’s conversation. He had an idea that we had two submarines in the Sea of Marmora based upon the islands and supplied by the Greeks there.

It was impossible, he said, that our submarines should pass up and down the straits through all their nets and mines. But was it? Ask the E 7 or the E 11. Another favourite topic was the recuperative power of Islam. After this war, the Arab maintained, Turkey would recover much more quickly than the Western nations. “For,” said he, “we are polygamous. We use the whole breeding power of our race, which resides in the women. Women are not being killed. They will all find husbands and bear children. We shall build up again our full power while you are still suffering from the deaths of your young men.” There may be much truth in this. I think that all the enemy staff were very anxious at that time. They thought the Greeks had come in without declaring war, and one of my signallers, a short, dark man, a glass-blower from Yorkshire, had some difficulty in proving to the Turks that he was not a Greek. “Yok! Yok!” said the Turkish officer, “yok” being the Turkish for “no”; but he accepted the evidence of a pocketful of letters with English post-marks, and it probably saved the man’s life—for the time—for he died of hard treatment two years later. I remember that this man said to me, “They say ‘Yok, yok,’ sir; they know they have got the East Yorks!” “Yok” was at that time the only Turkish word I knew, and that and “Yassak,” meaning “forbidden,” were the words I heard most often in Turkey.

The Turkish staff officers, even as the Germans, told us how hard they found it to get their allies to take prisoners. The fact was that they only went in for taking prisoners when they wanted to study our newly-landed forces. At all other times they murdered them. It is easy to demonstrate, as I think the following facts will show. On Gallipoli, I believe something like 700 officers and 11,000 men were posted as missing. Many of these were dead, of course, but certainly nothing like all. Of the 700 officers only 17 were taken prisoner, one in every forty-one; of the 11,000 men about 400 were taken prisoner, one in every twenty-seven. The details regarding the men I do not know, but the officers were taken as follows:—

That clearly shows that the prisoners were taken only to gain information as to the types of our new forces. But I have further evidence. I was one of four British officers who crossed the Sea of Marmora in a Turkish torpedo-boat, six days after we were captured. In the engineers’ quarters with us was a sick Turkish officer, a Circassian, who spoke French. Of the four British, I happened to be the only one who could converse with him. He seemed pleased to see us, told us what a good time we should have in Constantinople; society, women, fine hotels, and other joys. We were extremely surprised. Then he told us that an order had come to take some prisoners, “and we have got some.” We were again surprised, but polite, and conversation continued. Suddenly he said, “Who are you?” “British officers,” I replied. “Oh!” he said, “I thought you were invalided Germans!”

Major-General Sir Charles Townshend has stated publicly since returning to England that the Turk is a sportsman and a clean fighter. This must have been said in complete ignorance of the whole series of damning facts which are now in the hands of our Government. I have brought out one of these facts, and others will appear as the book proceeds. Major-General Townshend is to the best of my belief singular on this point among those officers, non-commissioned officers and men who were his fellow-prisoners in Turkey. The Turk is a master of the game he plays. A hospital-ship lying off the coast is secure from his artillery, because of the publicity, not because it is a hospital-ship. A wounded soldier behind a ridge, hid from the eye of the world’s Press, has about as much chance with the Turks as he would have with a pack of wolves. An article I once read in a Turkish paper published in French, an article upon the damnable wickedness of the Entente, ended in these words: “C’est nous qui sommes les ‘Gentlemen.’” They wish to play to the gallery of neutrals, and to pose as humane fighters. But they expected to win, and they thought the prisoners’ stories would have to wait until after the war. We managed to evade this last wish of theirs; but of that later. It has been pointed out that the Turks did not use gas; indeed, they laughed at our respirators. I have heard, and I believe, that the true explanation of their reluctance was that they were found too unhandy and stupid to be trusted not to gas themselves.

There were good Turks; there are good wolves, for I have known one; but their rarity was above that of rubies.

There is one other question concerning Gallipoli which may fitly come into this chapter. I do not ask the question, but one of us four was asked it by General Liman von Sanders, and we did not then, and we do not now, know the reply. Von Sanders asked, “Why did General Hamilton send a handful like yours to attack the great hill that commands all my position. Did he think that I could be so blind as not to defend it against even a much stronger force?”

On the early morning of the 16th of August we reached the Quay of Stamboul.

CHAPTER II

CONSTANTINOPLE

We were rather thankful to reach Constantinople. We crossed the Marmora by night in a rickety little torpedo-boat with something wrong with her screw, and we hoped to escape being sunk by one of our own submarines. The danger was a very real one, for it was only a few weeks after this that a Turkish transport with a number of British prisoners on board was sunk by one of our E-boats. But in that case they all escaped to barges alongside. We were sealed up like bully beef in a tin, and would have had no chance.

At the quay, our escorting officer left us. He bore the euphonious name of Fa’at Bey, but was not a bad fellow. And, unlike the majority of Turks, he had travelled and picked up a little English. Many Turkish officers speak French, and a few German; but knowledge of English is rare. What strikes one as very curious when first encountered is to find a Turk speaking English with a strong American pronunciation. The reason is that several very fine American colleges have been founded in Turkey, where first-class education is to be had cheaply. Later in our captivity we were so fortunate as to get to know the staff of one of these colleges very well, and nothing gives me greater pleasure than to pay some small tribute to their wonderful, unselfish work. But of that in another place.

From the quay we were driven in carriages through the streets of Stamboul, up the hill to the Ministry of War, and there confined in a fairly large room with blue-tiled embrasures and a very dirty floor. Heretofore we had lived in tents; we were now to begin our painful studies of Turkish domestic fauna.

Various Turkish officers came to see us; one tremendous swell, apparently made up to take a leading part in “Arms and the Man,” was very impressive. He had the most complete appearance of gilded villainy that I have ever seen. He was the first, so far as I recollect, to play the favourite Turkish confidence trick upon us. It is a simple performance, and we were simple enough to be taken in by it—once. The procedure is thus:

Scene: Dirty room. Dirty prisoners in dirty clothes. Dirty beds. Dirty walls, covered with stains where former captives have squashed bugs. (Is that a filthy thing to write? I believe it is. But this is a history, and I shall have to write worse things than that.)

Enter: Gorgeous official, Interpreter with a mean, shifty face, and other incompetent perverts who look as though they were “walking on” for five piastres a performance. Probably they actually are.

Interpreter: “His Excellency wishes me to tell you that you are not prisoners, your country and mine are at war, but we are all soldiers. You are our honoured guests; is there anything that you require? All will be given you; in a few days you shall have complete liberty.”

Senior Prisoner: “Please thank the—General, Pasha, Excellency, Bey, Effendi, or whatnot; the title does not affect the procedure—We should like to write letters, to have a bath, to have the beds disinfected, and to be able to purchase soap, tooth-brushes, underclothes, etc., etc.”

Interpreter (after collusion with the great man): “Certainly, all these things will be allowed. Is there anything more you require?”

Prisoners make various suggestions.

Interpreter: “Yes, of course. You are our honoured guests. In one hour, perhaps.”

Exeunt omnes, except prisoners.

And that is all. That is the whole trick. The keynote is the interpreter’s final word “perhaps.” Nothing whatsoever happens. The one hour spins out to many hours, to days, to months, to years. Nothing whatever comes of the interview. But in the course of time prisoners learn other means. Our “other means” in the Ministry of War was a cultivated person, the editor of a newspaper, who was serving in his country’s army as a private soldier, and who had so far escaped fighting. He was put on to do us, and he did. But he did, at any rate, see that our meals were fairly regular, and he bought us tooth-brushes and a chess-board. Judged by the new standard we were fast assuming, he was not a bad fellow. I wonder to what extent it is a good thing to alter one’s standards in that manner. Degradation of principles versus breadth of mind. It is one of the many undermining influences a prisoner has to combat if he would come back to the world a decent man.

The month was August, still warm, but with autumn and winter ahead of us. One autumn and winter, we thought. We had been captured in khaki drill, thin stuff only suited for tropical wear. So we were most agreeably surprised when our ex-editor caterer produced next day a Nubian person, a deserter of sorts from Egypt, who told us that he would procure us any clothes we required. Our total resources in actual cash were very small indeed, but the Nubian explained that our credit was enormous. Seldom have I felt such affinity to the international financiers. The lists we compiled were comprehensive and well chosen. The Nubian was as one taking an order from Rockefeller or Rothschild. The result was the usual one in Turkey. Nothing of all we had ordered ever appeared. I forget how many times this farce was repeated. If not four times it was at least as many as three. At this distance of time I will not affirm that the lists were identical each time; but at any rate the result was. So naked as we came into the world of official Stamboul, thus naked did we depart from it. And perhaps we were lucky to retain the clothes we had. Other prisoners at different times were robbed of their uniforms, more frequently of their boots, and among the men, poor fellows, many had at one time and another to sell their clothes to buy food. We did, at any rate, get out of that place with all we had brought in.

On the second day our numbers were doubled, for two officers of the Worcesters and two from the Australian Division joined us. They had been captured three days before our own misfortune, but had come the long way round from Gallipoli by road and rail. I know we looked at them as the bears in the Zoo might be expected to greet a new companion, but we soon settled down. About this time a batch of some 150 N.C.O.’s and men arrived, but we were not allowed to see them for several days. They were housed in very uncomfortable quarters below the level of the ground; bad enough, but not so bad as the awful room three naval officers occupied about a month later.

On one side of the Ministry there was a long, narrow garden, and as our room was a corner one we looked out both over the garden across the city and through the end windows. The view over the garden was magnificent. We could see a corner of the Bosphorus, and the buildings of Pera stretching away up the opposite hill-side. From the end windows there was a prospect in two stories, typical of the land of the Turk, a mixture of squalor and display. The upper storey was a very handsome grey stone mosque with four slender and very beautiful minarets, reaching up into the blue sky where birds for ever circled as emblems of the liberty we longed for. The lower storey was a paved courtyard with barred windows all along the side that faced us. From behind the bars came the voices of prisoners and the clank of chains, and through them we could see a mass of unfortunates either undergoing sentences or awaiting them; probably the latter; it is mostly waiting in Turkey. We used to see arms thrust out with small nickel coins in the hands to bribe their gaolers to fetch their owners food or cups of coffee. I remember one poor miserable wretch of an albino, with a face like a very, very thin Angora goat, who used to gibber through the bars all day long. He looked to me as though he had gone mad, and perhaps he had. Long afterwards I met a British prisoner who had been thrust in there among those ghastly creatures for a night, and from his account they were a queer lot.

In the garden there used to promenade a number of Turkish officers who apparently had nothing else to do. We thought, of course, that they were government servants passing away the time until pay-day came along once more. It was only a natural supposition; but it was completely wrong. They were, as a matter of fact, prisoners like ourselves. People who had infringed the Turkish military code, or had been convicted of swindles sufficiently considerable to entitle them to preferential treatment. In Turkey, an officer may be convicted of theft, but unless his sentence exceeds six months he suffers neither loss of his commission nor even loss of rank. And this is wise, for you could not have an army consisting of private soldiers only. Even in Russia they do not do that. So many of them were but biding the time until a benevolent system should again loose their energies to prove once more that charity begins at home. But some were of other categories. There was one who subsequently was so kind as to admit an Englishman into his confidence, and to explain how to remain an officer, with all its prestige and honour, while yet avoiding the more distressing features of war, such as wounds, danger, or even death. This officer, most meritoriously, had become a master of his country’s military laws. A thing wholly to be admired in an officer. So skilled was he, and so fertile of resource, that he knew to a nicety the value of each crime. When war broke out he promptly committed one, was accused, awaited sentence, served it, and so escaped that tedious campaign in the frozen Caucasus. On being released, he selected from his repertory another crime, and bravely committed it, this time avoiding martyrdom in the Dardanelles. Similarly, he escaped the perils of that ill-judged attack on the Suez Canal, and, for aught I know, may at the very present moment be avoiding the infamy of seeing his country’s capital city occupied by the infidel.

I did not mean to digress into Turkish law, but having done so I will go one step further in order to describe the procedure which is followed when a private soldier makes an accusation against an officer. My authority is the official interpreter who was for a time the bane of our lives at Afion-Kara-Hissar. On hearing the accusation, the senior officer determines what the sentence would be for that particular offence. Having done this justly and with an open palm, he arrests the accused and condemns him. The accused serves the sentence, whatever it may be—I believe one hundred and one years is the maximum for serious charges; and at the expiration of the penalty, the case is tried. The officer is then found either guilty or not guilty. If the former, he is politely informed that as he has already paid the price, probably in every sense of the word, he is now at liberty. The man who accused him is commended. If, on the other hand, he is found not guilty, he is reinstated in his former position, and the man who accused him wrongfully is beaten.

I cannot say whether this is a true description, but it is true that the interpreter told me this.

And, indeed, why should it not be true? Institutions as well as animals, even that greatest of animals, man, must subscribe to the natural law of the survival of the fittest. As already pointed out when describing the way in which a Turkish officer avoids loss of rank when convicted for theft, perhaps this arrangement is wise, in the circumstances; perhaps it fits those circumstances. For in the majority of cases a Turkish soldier is a more honest man than his officer, and in a high percentage of cases the accusation must be justified: in the remainder the officer is probably only paying the penalty of one of his undiscovered crimes.

What with the four new officers and the other ranks, we were by this time a considerable body, quite large enough to become the living illustrations of a national triumph. So, in due course, we were paraded in the square on the opposite side of the Ministry to our outlook, and were passed before a cinematograph. I do not remember how many times we circled round that infernal machine while the operator ground the handle, but it was a good many. By the time he had exhausted the roll of film we must have a very creditable appearance, several divisions at the very least. It was unfortunate for the Turks that they had not a captured gun to trundle round with us; but, even as it was, we have played a great part in the world.

At the end of the square, where it abutted upon the street, there was an arched gateway, something like a Roman triumphal arch, and in the room above it there resided an arch-villain. We had been in Constantinople about a week when we were commanded to his presence. He was a very great man indeed, popularly supposed to be Enver Pasha’s remover-in-chief at a time when removals of political opponents were frequent. But we did not know that then; we only knew that he was a magnificent, tawdry and detestable person. That room lives in my memory as the gold and purple room. It was hung with velvet and decked with gilt, and the man sat in it like a frog in an orchid. We were given cigarettes, and were then informed that the British Government was ill-treating its Turkish prisoners so disgracefully that reprisals would have to be started. The infamous English, we were assured, made their Turkish officer prisoners march naked through the streets as a sport for the populace. What had we to say about it? Of course we denied the possibility of such a thing being true. But he remained unconvinced, of our knowledge, if not of our good faith. The interview left a sense of possible unpleasantness looming ahead of us.

The next day we received orders to move to a new barracks over in Pera.

When first in Turkey one is inclined to look upon all moves as desirable. Monotony and stagnation grow upon a prisoner very rapidly, and the first six months are much the hardest to bear. Any move rumoured or ordered shines like a light ahead. It must be an improvement, one thinks, it will in any case be an event, something to mark the passage of time. But after a year the average prisoner hates moves. By bitter experience he knows their cost and discomfort, the loss of his small, painfully-acquired property, and the trouble of settling down again. Also he knows that, much as he may hate the place he is in, there are many places worse. Still, we were at the beginning of things then, and we rejoiced in the move. We were marched down the streets of Stamboul, with our men, across the bridge over the Golden Horn, and up the steep street that leads to the top of Pera.

We passed on the way the small French hotel where I had stayed nearly eight years before, and listened to the howling of the dogs at night. The populace stared at us, but was not hostile. If any of them had seen the film of us in our thousands they must have been bitterly disappointed; or perhaps they thought it natural there should be so few survivors.

At the very top of the hill, where it bends down again towards the Bosphorus, we were led into the Taxim barracks. The men were given several large dormitories; the officers had a small room to themselves. This did not seem very bad. It was a smaller room than before, and it had no blue tiles, but otherwise not much worse. Our disillusion came with the fall of dusk.

That night we fought a battle.

We put up a tremendous struggle against impossible odds and we did not win.

When the sun set and the light in the room turned grey, forms were seen stealing down the walls, up the walls, out of the walls, and all over the walls; but mostly down the walls. Small, brown, flat creatures, easy to kill with anything hard, even with one’s fingers. They began in tens, and ended in tens of thousands. And each one of every one of those thousands was a famished bug. Each one could wake a clean European by crawling over him, and keep him awake long after it was dead by the venom it injected into him. We were not very clean Europeans, but we were clean enough for that. We had not then acquired the stock of antibug-venene that we had in our veins later. We began by trying to slay them. We succeeded in slaying many hundreds, but their hosts were not perceptibly weakened, nor was their natural force abated. Moreover, they stank. A bug at large smells very noticeably, a bug squashed stinks. All that night we fought them unavailingly, and at dawn they drew their undiminished tribes away.

There were three nights like that, and seven of the eight of us hardly slept a wink the whole time. We slept a little by day. But had we stayed there long it would have been a hard fight for sanity. As it was, our nerves got very much on edge, and we were not the cheery companions we might have been. It may seem childish and hypersensitive to make a fuss about a few insects, but it was a very real horror; not only the actual itching, or even the odour, but there is something disgusting and degrading in being covered with beastly creatures of that sort, and I have heard pretty rough private soldiers say they felt the same when first afflicted by lice. “Private” was, I believe, originally short for “Private Gentleman,” and the old meaning is not infrequently brought home to one.

Things were rather strained altogether in Taxim barracks. The Turkish guards were apt to be brutally rough with our men, despite our vigorous complaints. One solitary Frenchman there was too, a Corsican, and I saw a Turk kicking him most brutally on the floor one morning. There was very nearly a real explosion then, but the Turk stopped in time.

It was about this time that I began to realize what a very severe trial captivity would prove. It did prove so, and in ways I had not then foreseen. But it became apparent even then that work of some sort would have to be done if normality of mind were to be conserved. By the end of the war we had blossomed forth in all sorts of directions, but we were only feeling our way then.

Without saying or meaning one word against my fellow-prisoners, or even against myself, it must be clearly understood that first and foremost among the trials of captivity comes the unavoidable close proximity of other people. It is the prisoners themselves who are each other’s principal discomforts. We were all so close to each other; so permanently in evidence to each other, and so different from one another that weariness of spirit grew to a pitch no outsider can comprehend. Bugs are bad, Turks are worse, but eternal neighbourhood is worse still. Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner; but God alone reaches that “Tout.”

About the Taxim barracks there was one good thing. There is good in everything: in a bug it is his squashableness; in a Turk it is his stupidity; in Taxim it was the orchestra next door.

At the end of the narrow ground we were allowed to tread there was a sort of public garden, and in the afternoons the band played there. Twice we were conducted by a Turkish officer, a kindly old thing, to a bench facing this place of joys, and were allowed to watch the Levantine society that gathered there. We were even allowed to hail the waiter as he passed and have coffee handed up for ourselves and our janitor. It was a good time. We could hear music; we could watch children; and we could feel very nearly free.

Except for this narrow space, the grounds of Taxim barracks, so far as I observed, were a graveyard. Tall stones with carven turbans to indicate men’s graves, flat stones for the graves of women, and gloomy cypress trees. And through the trees gleamed the Bosphorus.

CHAPTER III

THE ARMENIANS

After three days of Taxim we were told that it had been decided to send us to Angora, where we would enjoy perfect liberty. None of us had a very clear idea where Angora was, but we knew it must be a pleasant change from Taxim.

There were not many preparations to make; no packing. My own luggage consisted, I remember, of a bit of soap, a tooth-brush, and a few other odds and ends, all contained in a paper bag tied up with a bootlace: the sort of bag you buy buns in. And I was one of the richest of the prisoners. I was rich in another respect, besides this wealth of luggage, although at that time I did not know it: for my prison hobby, art, industry, or whatever it may be called, had already started. For some reason or other the spirit moved me to write verses while a captive, and the first of all, a short poem entitled “Captivity” was written before we left Constantinople. This strange, and to me quite abnormal, habit endured for the whole of my thirty-nine months as a prisoner. It is good to have a pipe and tobacco in captivity, and it is good to have blankets, but it is even better than these to have an absorbing occupation.

We left Taxim early in the morning of the 25th of August and were ferried across the Bosphorus to Haida Pasha station. Technically speaking, we stood now for the first time in Asia, though, morally speaking, where the Turk rules there is Asia. We knew that Angora was a long journey: two days they told us, and it actually took thirty-six hours. But I think the vast size of Anatolia was rather a surprise to us all. In all ordinary atlases Asia Minor is shown on such a tiny scale that its hugeness is lost to mind.

Several officers and an armed guard accompanied us in the train, but only two individuals remain in my memory. One was a thick-set, short, fierce man of early middle age. He had one eye only, and his neck was almost circled by a frightful scar as though he had been operated upon by a blunt guillotine and then healed up again like the wolf in the fairy story who becomes a prince when you cut off his head. Only he had not gained the true, handsome, debonair appear ance of a prince. He looked, and probably was, a very efficient murderer not yet on pension. His person bulged with lumps of muscle, daggers and pistols; and I am sure the interpreter meant to speak the truth when he told me that this ferocious person was one of the chiefs of the secret police. He was in charge of the party. The interpreter himself was the other member of our party who impressed me. He travelled in the same compartment with us, and talked freely the whole way. He was the “Young Turk” complete, and ardent upholder of the Union and Progress party. When war broke out between England and Turkey he was in America, and he hoped to return there after the war. But, very patriotically, he came back to serve his country. He sailed in a Dutch ship, and touched at Plymouth on the way, where, he informed me, he went ashore under the guise of a Persian. He must, I think, have represented the mental attitude of his party very fairly. He was an undoubted patriot, and Turkey for the Turks was his keenest wish: but by the Turks he meant what is really a very small minority of the Ottoman tribe, and the other subjects of the Empire only concerned him as obstacles to be removed. He was the first person from whom we learned anything of the organised massacre of the Armenians then in progress. He told me that at Van the Turks had killed all the Armenians, men, women, and children; and he would agree to no condemnation of this dreadful act. “They were bad people,” was his invariable reply. Nominally this man was a Mohammedan, whose feud with the Armenians had lasted for centuries, but actually he was an advanced Turkish freethinker, and, except perhaps subconsciously, I don’t think religious feeling had anything to do with the bitterness he expressed. It was purely political. The Armenian is very much cleverer than the Turk, very stubborn, and impossible to assimilate. Turks of my acquaintance’s kind look upon Armenians as an enemy race, a weed that must at all cost be eradicated. But his ambitions in the direction of destroying opposition to the Young Turk ideals did not stop with the slaughter of Christian subjects. Quite logically, from his point of view, he realised that the reactionary influence of the Old Turk party was an even more dangerous weed in the garden of progress than was Christianity. His hatred was directed particularly against the orthodox Mohammedans, and especially against the teachers and students of Islamic divinity. “When we have finished this war,” he said, “we are going to kill all the Imâms. Their false teaching keeps the race from advancing.”

I wonder if such people ever pursue their thoughts to an ultimate conclusion! After wiping out all who were not of their own way of thinking, there would remain a depleted race in a vast undeveloped territory where no immigrants would dare to settle, even if they were welcomed. All capital would be frightened away: labour would be scarce: and the strongest of their neighbours would swallow them up. At the time I knew no name for this intense feeling, this mental obsession. But in the light of time it now looks like pure Bolshevism.

It seems that I have drawn a very revolting character. But the interpreter’s was not wholly that. On the whole, he was the best man I met among the many interpreters who dealt with us during the next three years. He was fond of some of the beautiful things of life, a lively critic of literature, a reader of poetry, both English and Turkish, and, from his own account, a personal friend of those among his compatriots who were foremost in striving to rouse their countrymen to intellectual endeavour. I loathed the man’s ideas but rather liked the man. It seemed that he suffered from the absorption of a wrong tone; almost from a disease of the soul, but an infectious disease, not an innate deformity: a calamity of environment, not of heredity. There was something exceedingly sad in the picture he drew of a great national effort going hopelessly astray because its ideals were false. But he did not see that the picture was sad. He thought it glorious.

For the first part of the journey we skirted the Sea of Marmora, along the flanks of bare hills, now tunnelling through promontories, and now looking down upon blue bays. There were trenches dug all along the coast, and armed guards at every bridge and culvert. Far away, to the south-east, we saw forest-covered hills. Then the line turned inland, past the town and lake of Ismid, through a valley of orchards where the apples were almost breaking the trees, and up into the foot-hills. This part of Anatolia is exceedingly fertile wherever the slopes are not too steep to dig. But the hills are very barren, only fit for the most part for the nomad life of the Turkish sheep- and goat-herds. We travelled through hills and valleys all that afternoon, and by dusk had begun the climb that leads up to the great plateau of Asia Minor. The railway followed the line of a river up the valley it had cut through the hills. Followed it up until it became a stream, and followed it on until it became a rushing mountain torrent crossed and recrossed by the line.

When dawn broke the engine was panting up the last few miles of the incline, and we ran out into a wide land of rolling downs and farm country, three thousand feet above the level of the sea. Having lived in mountains before I foresaw a very cold winter.