CHAPTER IV
THE WANK
We had now a breathing space. We had reached the place where the Turks meant to keep us, and though we had yet to learn that Turks never continue to follow the same policy for very long, we now had time to settle in as comfortably as circumstances permitted.
Our space was strictly circumscribed. There was the series of rooms already described as belonging to the officers, and there was the paved courtyard, perhaps thirty yards square. This was common to the officers and about 150 N.C.O.’s and men. Officers were not allowed to visit the men’s dormitories. On the east side of the courtyard was a church, locked up and sealed. Through its windows we could see that a quantity of books were stored there. On the north were further monastic buildings in two stories. We were not allowed upstairs, but the men were allowed the use of a kitchen on the ground floor. The western side consisted of a few sheds and a high wall, and the southern side held all the rooms occupied both by officers and men. These were all two-storied buildings.
The Wank being built on a hill-side with the ground falling away to the south, the officers’ quarters got no sunshine, for their only window which looked in that direction was in the landing at the head of the stairs. From there we could see the town of Angora covering its steep hill, and crowned by a great rambling castle. Below the southern window there was a second courtyard, into which a wide gate opened, which was apparently used as a pen for the monastic flocks at night; and below that again was a third yard, probably used as a pound for their cattle. The whole group of buildings and yards was surrounded by a high wall.
One very marked feature of the Wank was its awful smell. In Turkey there are drains, but they are perhaps worse than none at all. I shall not attempt to describe this disgusting feature of all the houses in Asia Minor I have ever been in, further than to mention that the cesspool is invariably buried underneath the house itself, preferably beneath the kitchen floor. It is, as a rule, ill-made of rough stone masonry. Further comment is unnecessary.
There were several curious relics of antiquity in the courtyard we frequented: a Greek inscription on one of the stones of the pavement; the carven tombs of several abbots, with mitres on their heads and croziers in their hands; and a very large stone head of a man or a god with thick, curly hair and a beard. It might have been a head of Jupiter, and probably came from one of the old Roman temples of Angora; unless, as is not improbable, the Wank itself stood upon the site of some more ancient religious foundation. The buildings we lived in were less than a century old, but the church appeared to be very much older.
The men had little to complain of while they were here. Their food was not particularly good, but it was not inadequate for men who could get no exercise. The only ill-treatment they had received was being robbed of their boots while on the peninsula, and they now appeared in every form of Turkish footgear, from rough army boots to thin slippers. When they began to travel again those were lucky who had boots.
The Turkish Government fed the men, but the officers were supposed to cater for themselves. One of the French officers who had already picked up a few words of Turkish acted as mess secretary, and a chaous, or Turkish sergeant, used to make purchases in the town for us. We had orderlies to cook and clean up.
Things were extraordinarily cheap then. The war had not yet affected country places like Angora, and paper money had not yet come into circulation. When it did so, gold and silver first, and copper and nickel next disappeared entirely from the shops and bazaars; and before I left Turkey a golden pound would purchase six paper pounds, while the exchange for silver was little lower. But at first things were cheap, and we managed quite well on our four shillings a day.
Some explanation of the system of supporting officer prisoners is necessary. The British Government refused to pay Turkish officer prisoners at the rate of pay given to equivalent British ranks. This was the old convention, but it could not be carried out with a country like Turkey, where the rates of pay were so much lower than ours. So Turkish officer prisoners were given 4s. a day for subalterns and captains, while field officers got 4s. 6d. But, in addition to this, Turkish prisoners were catered for at wholesale contract rates, were given firing, light, beds and bedding, as well as all necessary furniture. They were, for prisoners, exceedingly well off. I know this for a fact, for on my release I went over the P. of W. camp near Alexandria and saw their arrangements. The Turkish followed suit in refusing to give us the Turkish pay of our equivalent ranks, substituting for it the same rates as were given by the British, viz., 4s. 6d. and 4s. a day. But they did not give us any of the other necessaries of life. While in the Wank, it is true, we made use of the Armenian furniture, but that was for a very short time; and elsewhere in Turkey, for the next three years, British officer prisoners had to make or purchase every single thing they required—beds, tables, chairs, blankets, firewood, lamps, oil; everything. My share of fuel alone for the last winter in Turkey cost me £Tq.40 in a mess of twelve. Very, very rarely we got Government issues of raisins, sugar, and soap at Government rates. Sometimes we got bread at Government prices, and occasionally firewood. But the general rule was that we fended for ourselves on our four bob, and competed in the open market. Had it not been for the help extended to us by the protecting Ambassador—first American and later Dutch—things would have gone very hard with us. As I mentioned a page or two back, the metal money disappeared and paper sank to one-sixth of its face-value. At the same time, prices soared to such a pitch that, at the end, a suit of clothes cost £Tq.100 (the Turkish sovereign is nominally worth about 18s. 6d.), a pair of boots cost £Tq.40, a quilt cost £Tq.15, tea about £Tq.16 per lb., and everything else in like proportion. But our income remained unaltered in nominal value. For the first three months we were paid in gold, and thereafter in paper. And at the end of the war we were receiving the same number of pounds per mensem in paper as we had received at the beginning in gold. It follows that a deduction of four shillings a day made in England by the paymaster produced for us a sum of four shillings a day divided by a factor which gradually rose to be six. One-sixth of four shillings is 8d. It was fortunate for us that our Government and the protecting Embassies realized the position. Even as it is, the loss has been not inconsiderable.
This excursion into the realms of finance is not meant as a complaint, but it seemed to me necessary to explain how we managed things.
For the first few weeks in the Wank we had no further glimpse of the outside world. In Angora one night there were a number of shots fired, and the next day two or three people were buried in the graveyard outside the walls. That is about the only event I can remember. Probably it was the aftermath of the massacres. The Turkish officer in charge of us used to come nearly every day. He had been a prisoner himself once, in Russia, for he had taken part in the famous defence of Plevna about thirty-six years before. He was of the old school, and found it rather hard to understand why prisoners taken in a holy war should be kept alive at all. Certainly he failed to understand that they had any further rights or privileges. He was irksome to deal with, and abominably pigheaded, also he swindled us, but I don’t think he disliked us personally. His extraordinary and characteristically Turkish denseness of perception was his worst fault, and he was a great deal pleasanter than the slimy rogue who succeeded him. His attitude was simply this: “What! the prisoner demands something! Damn the prisoner, he is lucky to be alive! If I feel like being kind, I will.” And he not infrequently was kind. But with an omnipotent person of this kind in charge of one, possessing life only, it takes some time and much friction to gain a few privileges to make that life worth having.
The old fellow had a fad of teaching us Turkish at one time. He used to call us into the room with the settees round it, sit down at a table, and begin to exchange languages with us. As we knew nothing of his, and he nothing of ours, while there was no common tongue to bridge with, this was slow work. “Ben,” he would shout, and prod his chest with his finger. “Ben,” we would all reply, and point at him. Then he would go off into something infinitely complex, shouting louder than ever, and by the end of the lesson we would have learnt, not that his personal name was Benjamin, but that “Ben” is the Turkish personal pronoun, first person singular. But these lessons did not endure for long. We all got sick of them.
I have racked my brains to think what else we did in those dull weeks, but almost in vain. The gramophone records in my convolutions were so badly scratched that I can hardly decipher a line of them. Chess I remember, for Fabre and I used to play most evenings, and we taught some of the others. I remember reading the paper to the men in the yard. I also remember two awful rows, things inevitable among prisoners, one English and one French. The English row was personal and particular, it culminated in a friendship that will endure. The French row was political, about Caillaux, and they talked so fast that there was a distinctly visible rainbow round the two principals. It did not culminate at all.
Those few things, and stinks, are actually all that I can call to mind.
How wonderful a siren is memory! As a boy at Winchester I suffered untold pangs. This much is an intellectual conviction to me. Yet it is all set in a golden haze of distance, and there are few pleasures I prize more than to return there. And if I have a son he shall go there, where his father, and my father, and his father and grandfather went. And he will suffer the same pains that they all suffered, and will remember as little of them as I do and they did. To-day is the 15th of April, 1919, and already memory has weeded out the pains of that dolorous year, 1915, to a very great extent. In course of time, in second or third childhood, I shall look back to Angora with tears of joy, and wonder why I did not settle there.
But things did begin to happen at last, and the first of them was that we obtained the privilege of promenading for an hour in the afternoon along the bank of the little stream that flowed in the bottom of the valley. There were willow trees there, and we used to peel their branches and make walking sticks carved with snakes, regimental badges, and other rivalries to Grinling Gibbons.
We used to watch the ants, too, and I regret to say that we used to feed them to the ant lions. Fabre was a notable athlete, a Hercules in miniature, and he used to run and jump. But all the time sentries stood round, armed to the teeth, and we were not really free. How the Wank did smell when we got back!
Then something really important occurred, for a new Army Corps Commander came to Angora, and he was a gentleman. His name was Chukri Bey, and I remember it as that of a man of honour. He was an Arab, not a Turk.
The first time he came it was in state, and he made a personal inspection of that awful drain and gave orders to abate the nuisance. The second time he came it was alone on a surprise visit. Again he made a personal inspection, and great was his wrath that nothing had been done.
After this we got much more liberty and better treatment all round, but that I will describe later.
And soon after this another important thing happened, for some more prisoners arrived, six officers among them. They were established higher up on the hill-side, in a temporarily disused agricultural college; and after a few days we met.
Rather an amusing incident occurred on their journey up, which I am sure they will forgive my repeating. They had been kept separate in Constantinople, the three naval officers in an underground dungeon, and the three military officers elsewhere. The first time they were brought together was in the train; and evidently the Turkish authorities expected them to unburden themselves to each other. Fortunately, they were too wise. Among their escort was the one-eyed ruffian I have already described, and their interpreter was a guileless youth who spoke French fluently but not a word of English. To wile away the time, they proceeded to teach this youth English verses, which he repeated after them. By considerable endeavour he became word perfect in a rhyme all about a ruddy sparrow and a ruddy spout together with the sparrow’s adventures therein. Reasonably ribald people will perhaps recognize the schoolboy doggerel. All this the interpreter faithfully recited, and they told him it was one of the best known works of the famous William Shakespeare. When they were safely housed in their new quarters the interpreter came to see us, and he spoke the most perfect English! He had been planted on them as a listener. It is hard justly to apportion the honours. But I think that interpreter should have a future on the stage.
It was not long after this that we lost two of the French officers. The Turkish Government used, about twice a month, to make laborious lists of us, and presumably to lose them again. In these were entered our names, our father’s names, our birthplaces, our religions, and some dozen other useless details. It was a slow business, and the transliteration of English names into Turkish script was not always quite satisfactory as will be conceded when I mention that a French speaking Turkish doctor once transfigured my name into TCHARLISTRI. But in it all there was some idea which we had not grasped; for suddenly they informed us that all Roman Catholics were to be transferred to a place called Afion-Kara-Hissar, a place stated to be more desirable than Angora. One of the French officers was a Protestant, but he was torn ruthlessly from the bosoms of the others, and the R.C.’s were dispatched to Afion. We were very sorry to lose them, and the unfortunate Protestant was exceedingly miserable at having to stop behind.
A few days later all the Protestant non-commissioned officers and men were ordered off to a place two days’ march over hills to the north, Changri by name. Many of them had only thin slippers to walk in, and their bad times began from then, poor fellows. Their bones lie along the highways of Asia Minor, where they built roads and tunnels for their captors, yoked in a slavery as complete as any could be.
We could do nothing at all to help. We gave them what we could to set them forth, and never saw most of them again.
At the last moment, just when they were starting, it was discovered that they were two short. They had been counted wrongly. Turks find it hard to count beyond the number of their fingers and toes which number is the same as with human beings. This was a horrible dilemma. Red tape demanded x men, and the officer in charge could only produce x-2. But even as a ram in a thicket was sent to Abraham when about to sacrifice Isaac, so did the god of Anatolia provide even for this emergency. At this time two sick French sailors returned from hospital. They were only just convalescent: they were Roman Catholics; they were expected at Afion-Kara-Hissar. But all this was of no avail, and the poor protesting fellows were sent off with our poor British.
After they had departed the Wank seemed empty and lonely. We now explored it through and through, but found nothing of interest. The trees were changing their colour; the evenings drew in and grew cold. We became acutely aware that on this upland, winter would be very severe, perhaps terrible. Firewood became a problem, and, to feed the stove, we began to pull pieces off the more easily detachable parts of the Wank. It had to be done quietly, and long planks had to be dodged past the sentries; but we managed to have fires.
Then there came a real change. The Army Corps Commander decided to give us very much more liberty. Sentries’ faces changed with the times; even the old veteran of Plevna began to realize that prisoners were human beings, and life grew bright once more. Accompanied by guards with sidearms only we used to visit the town and the shops, and we began to explore the neighbouring country. It was all hills, range behind range of hills; a most difficult country to travel through without good maps or a guide. Just over the hill behind the Wank there was a valley full of little farms; nice houses with vineyards attached. But all were empty, except such as were full of Turkish soldiers. They had been owned by Armenians, and their owners had gone, never to return.
Another place that we were free to explore at this time was the cemetery which lay on the east of the Wank. It was not without interest, for most of the tombstones had been filched from some Roman or Byzantine ruin, and still bore many traces of their former adornment. The great majority bore inscriptions in Armenian characters which we could not read; but, among them we found to our surprise quite a number of European graves. There were several Danes buried there, a few Frenchmen, and half a dozen British, Scots for the most part. The earliest of these, so far as I recollect, was that of a certain William Black, Mercator Angliæ, who had died at Angora in the year 1683 A.D. I have often wondered what brought old William Black so far afield, and whether he was the ancestor of any of the red-haired children we used occasionally to see in the town. We had a theory that it was he who had taught the inhabitants how to make shortbread, for there was a bare-legged boy who used to hawk shortbread in a glass box along the streets of Angora.
So in small things we found great interest, as prisoners do. Almost every day we used to see Turkish recruits training. They were a sturdy lot of rough young countrymen, splendid material either for war or peace, if only their Government were not so corrupt and inefficient. For the most part they were armed with sticks cut from the willows by the stream, and with these rude substitutes they had to learn the beginning of their drill.
The knowledge they acquired was literally kicked into them by the chaouses, brutal ruffians trained on the Prussian model. I have seen one of them haul a man out of the ranks, box his ears first on one side and then on the other, and then turn him round and kick him savagely. The recruit would stand it all stolidly, and salute before he returned to the ranks. In the evening parties of recruits who had been training out on the hills used to march back to barracks past the Wank, singing their marching song, a simple thing with a very primitive tune to it, said to have come into popularity at the time of the last Bulgarian war.
Some time in October a festival drew near, a public holiday called Kurban Bairam. The troops were to have a great sham fight, and sports were to be held. Chukri Bey, the Army Corps Commander, very kindly invited us to attend, and we stood behind him to watch the sham attack develop. He was a fine figure of a man and a splendid horseman. When the troops were drawn up preliminary to the show he rode at full gallop along their line, turned, rode back to the centre and pulled up short. Then he made a speech, no word of which we could understand, and they all cheered.
The attacking force marched off, and we took up our positions behind the defenders of a low abrupt ridge. Just on our left I remember there was a man with a stick and a kerosine oil tin doing machine-gun. The grey lines advanced from among the distant willows, attacked right across the open, and apparently won the day. They were as full of the fun of it as children playing at soldiers. Chukri Bey then made another speech, pieces of which he translated in French for us, and the show was over.
I have fought in the Great War, but that is the only sham fight I have ever seen in my life, for my training was marred by a period in hospital.
The next day was the sports, and we were given good seats in the official enclosure, just behind the Army Corps Commander and the Vali—the Governor of the Province. Chukri Bey continually turned round and explained things to us in French. He had made arrangements for two or three of our men who had been left behind in hospital to have seats in a good place. We saw the Turk at his best that day. His hospitality, his simplicity, his tough, rugged endurance were all to the fore. And we owed the whole of it to Chukri Bey. When, soon afterwards, he was sent elsewhere, we realised how rare a character his was among enemy officers. He was an Arab and we were told that his wife was an Egyptian princess.
One of the items was a football match played by schoolboys, and four British officers were invited to take part. Two played on either side. Games followed, rather like the games that children play at village school-feasts in England, bearing to those the same resemblance that baseball does to mixed rounders. Then there was some bayonet fighting, one of the rules of which was that the winner of a bout had next to take on two opponents simultaneously. A very up-to-date Turkish officer, girt with stays, and beautiful beyond the power of words, condescended to engage the winner in sword v. bayonet. I don’t think he was very seriously pressed. The bayonet fighting was quite amusing to watch, but the great item of the day was the wrestling. All competitors, and there were about forty of them, strolled out into the arena and stretched themselves. They mingled together, and moved slowly about looking for mates, like young men and girls at a seaside place. Apparently anyone could challenge any other. Then there came a preliminary hug, in which each in turn just lifted his adversary off the ground, seemingly like our boxers’ handshake, to show there is no ill-feeling. After which they fell to, and wrestled until one was beaten. Often there were half a dozen pairs struggling at one and the same time. Some of the grips were very severe; a favourite method was to reach along each other’s arms and seize each other’s breasts, digging in their fingers like claws. It looked as though it must hurt horribly, but these hardy men seemed to enjoy it. One of the best was a negro, but the champion was a Turk. At the end Chukri Bey gave away prizes, simple and useful articles, no gold medals or silver cups; a pair of socks, a tobacco box, a knife, and a pleasant word for each winner.
It was not long after this that our sojourn in the Wank came to an end. The building was wanted as a barrack, and they wished to have us more safely housed in the town itself. So one fine day we were moved into Angora, and housed temporarily in a Greek hotel.