CHAPTER VIII
THE ARMENIAN CHURCH
For the next two weeks we were not allowed out of the church at all, not even into the little courtyard. Three at a time we were escorted by sentries to the latrine beneath the school opposite, and that was the only momentary glimpse we had of the outer world, save what little could be seen through the barred windows. We were treated exactly as the Turks treat their criminals. And after a few days even that small crossing beneath the sky was denied us, for they built a new latrine, a most slipshod, amateur affair, up against the wall of the church, where there was a small door. Fortunately, the building was high in proportion to its floor space, and some of the windows were broken.
Typhus broke out among us, and two people died; one Russian, and one British orderly. But, by the grace of God, the plague stopped there, as though by magic. Fortunately, we were clean when we went in. But the very dust of the place grew septic, and small cuts and grazes grew into sores that were hard to heal.
The Commandant was superseded by a hard-faced man whose service had been chiefly in the wilds of Southern Arabia. This person’s name was Maslûm Bey, and I watch the newspapers daily to see some notice that he has been hanged, but so far I have watched in vain. The charges against him are in the hands of the Government, and I trust his doom is sure. But of that later, if indeed it can be put into a book at all.
Roll call was now held daily, twice a day at first, and in the beginning it was, as it ought to be, very strict. Each person, as his name was called, had to walk up and be recognized. But later on, like all things Turkish, it lapsed into a matter of form, satisfied by an incoherent “Hullo!” and an arm waved from behind a crowd.
Each group of friends formed a mess, which had its table in some corner of the church, or on the altar platform; and on the floor beds were grouped in rows or square kraals, with their owners’ belongings ranged close by. Order of a sort grew out of chaos. The orderlies were luckier than the officers, for they cooked against the wall of the church outside, and a certain number of them were allowed to go shopping so many days a week. For, as the Turks could not undertake to feed us, they had to permit our orderlies to go to the bazaar. These orderlies were really rather wonderful fellows. They managed to pick up enough kitchen Turkish to bargain with the shopkeepers; they knew the ruling rates of all principal articles of food; kept wonderful accounts, despite the dearth of change; chaffed their guards, and were very popular in the town. One could not but have the highest admiration for them. And our cooks, too, did marvels. Led by a French sailor, who in private life was a chef at the Jockey Club in Paris, they became quite expert in dishing up the tasteless stuffs that Turks live on. And, despite some perfectly appalling rows, they kept their heads and their tempers.
There never was such a pandemonium as that church! You can’t lock up a lot of hot-blooded men and starve them of everything that living means without outbreaks of a sort. Not that there were many quarrels among officers: they were very rare indeed, but the noise, and uproar, and shouting, singing, and drinking until all hours of the early morning made the place like a thieves’ kitchen in an old story-book. Hogarth could have painted it, but I don’t know who could have described it. Certainly I can’t. Except for a few hours before dawn, when there was a hush, the place was always full of noise. Drinking parties, gambling parties, singing parties, shouting parties: people learning languages, people arguing, people carpentering, and, in the midst of it all, people thinking out problems in silence, people reading, people writing. I used to sit on my bed and write verses all day long sometimes. Another officer wrote two plays while we were there, and, what is more, rehearsed and produced them. And in that place the Russians made great music. They are a wonderful people in that way. Where the Russians gather together, there you have a choir. And the place was full of musical instruments, violins, guitars, mandolines; played by masters, played by learners, and played by people who did not and never could learn.
The worst feature was the heavy drinking. A good many of us thought that the Turks would, in the circumstances, have been wise to forbid liquor. But they could not resist the chance of making money, and it flowed in. Beastly native spirit for the most part, and synthetic violet-flavoured Greek brandy: some good stuff, too, ordered from Constantinople, and paid for by cheque. “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” was the motto of that place. And, by Jove! we did. There were dinners and there were suppers, for many parcels had come in, and there were “blinds.” People had birthdays; nation feasted nation; or nations feasted themselves. Less quiet than Niagara Falls was that place and nearly as wet. I regret much of this, but do not condemn it. Let no one judge the events of a time like that unless he or she is quite certain he knows what it was like in its entirety. There were men, keen, ardent, fighting men, in the prime of their age, robbed of everything that goes to ballast life. They were held back from that which they had set out to do, to fight for their country. The regulars knew that their whole career perhaps was ruined, that all the chances of the war were not for them, and that stagnation in their chosen profession was the price of their ill-fortune. The civilians who had donned uniform for the great adventure knew that their sacrifice had been in vain, and that there was no great adventure for them any more. The older men knew that their businesses were going to ruin, and the younger knew that they were missing the most important years of their training. All this made gunpowder of men’s souls. And we were starved, not of bread, but of all else that life holds good. Starved of work, starved of amusement, starved of news of a world in the making, starved of the society of women, starved of freedom itself. I do not think that many outside people are fit to condemn the excesses of that place.
There was one man, not an Englishman, who slept all day. But if one awoke in the silent hour one could see him with a little lamp by his side, smoking pipe after pipe of opium. I think the other way was better than that.
It must be added that the French, as a body, behaved extraordinarily well. And with that I will change the subject.
Apart from the noise, the place was intensely irritating to live in. We were so very close to each other. It is unpleasant to be cooped up with too much of one’s fellow man. The sweetest temper would revolt in time. And we were of such wide varieties as regards personal habits. It is the small habits that are sharp enough to prick. But, looking back at captivity, I have often felt horribly small-minded, and I daresay a lot of others have too.
After two weeks’ complete confinement, one day the doors were opened, and we were made free of the tiny courtyard and the flagged path outside. When we were all out at once there was hardly room to turn round, but it was a very great improvement.
The yard, about ten yards square, was used for everything, from football to boxing. Someone had received a set of gloves in a parcel, and they were a godsend. There used to be some very pretty scraps in the mornings, and some very hefty slogging matches. Several of the better performers set up schools of pugilism. It was very good fun, but the filthy drain oozed in the courtyard, and the very dust was poisonous. Several officers got very sore eyes, and the only thing to do with a scratch was to dab it with iodine at once.
I remember George, a Russian Pole with a fiery nature, sitting on a stone by me one day and watching a ferocious but perfectly good-tempered round which drew much blood. He was intensely interested and thought it a noble sport—for Britishers. For, as he said frankly, if anyone were to hit him on the nose like that he would not feel his honour satisfied until he had exchanged shots with the aggressor. This shows what different angles of view different people in that church had.
Meanwhile, two things hung in the balance, and we hungered for news of both.
The three daring escapers had not yet been rounded up, and Kut was still besieged.
After eighteen days of marching through mountains, the three came within sight of the sea. But they were doomed to failure. They could not get down the precipitous gorge by which their guiding river plunged from the mountains, and they had not enough food to go back and round by another way. So they bought food from a shepherd, were given away, and recaptured. It was a sad end to a very brave attempt. Then the despicable meanness of the late Commandant’s lie began to tell against them. They were treated as prisoners who had broken their word of honour, and cast into a filthy dungeon in Constantinople. There they awaited trial for over six months. Then they were court-martialled, and that, at any rate, should have been final. But it was far from it. The court found them guilty of attempting to escape, and gave them a not unjust sentence of two weeks’ confinement. (I think the senior officer got three weeks, but it is immaterial.) A sentence like this, if given at the start and adhered to, would have been just. But they had already spent half a year in gaol, and they spent three more months there before they were sent back among other British prisoners. They only got out when they did by giving their parole. They had to give it. Probably they would otherwise have died or gone mad. Later on they withdrew their parole, got the withdrawal officially receipted this time, and one, if not more, of them escaped again and got clean away. Two of them are now back in the Navy. The other died in Turkey when the end of the war was in sight.
While we were in the church, Kut fell. Some of us could hardly believe it at first, especially those who had belonged to the 6th Division. It seemed too bad to be true. After what we had heard from those few who had already made the march from Mesopotamia to railhead, it was plain that the march of thousands of exhausted men along those desert ways would be a very terrible tragedy. But how terrible it was going to be I don’t think even the men who had made it quite realized. The story of that march from Kut is not for me to write. But the impression that the arrival of the survivors made upon us earlier prisoners will be told in its time.
It was a long while yet before they reached us.
To me personally there came a great piece of news while we were in the church, for a letter dated a couple of months back told me that I was the father of a daughter. The telegram dispatched upon the same day reached me just three weeks after the letter. At that time I was singular in having so close a relation as yet unknown, but before the end came, as new prisoners dropped in, there were quite a band of us gaolbird fathers.
Beside the flagged path there were two Armenian tombs of some pretension, built of marble and carved with the usual imaginary fauna of heaven, all heads and wings. Further East, by the way, these things are flora, and grow on trees. They were crude affairs, of no interest except to their owners, but there was a space between them, and that was of interest to me. For, when the iron door was first opened in the morning, I used to come out and hide myself there and write verses. This is so largely a personal record that I make no apology for the recurrent references to my own method of killing care. It meant very much to me, as each man’s method did to himself. In this quiet nook, before the path was thronged, I wrote a long description in verse of a Russian concert held in the church and of the riotous feast that followed it. Far from the riot I wrote it. But in the church itself, in the very vortex of hellish sound, I wrote a long poem on the great forests of Northern Ceylon. Far from peace, I wrote of the most peaceful place I know. And this paradox holds good, held good with me at least, all through. For in the next winter, with my feet in the Arctic and my head in the Tropics, with a freezing hand I used to write of that sunny land near the Equator. I believe it kept me warm.
Those hours before the multitude awakened were great hours. Even the smelly courtyard was attractive then. For one could look up from it, right up into the air, and see the great cliff that towered above the church turn gold in the light of the early sun. And the cliff was a great place for birds. Rock pigeons nested there in thousands, and swallows, and scores of beautiful little kestrels; and swifts flew, screaming out over the roofs below. Vultures brought forth their young there, whose first steps were on five hundred feet of empty air.
There is a rock in Ceylon very like the Kara-Hissar, a huge upstanding stump of granite called Sigiriya, the lion rock, and I had spent many happy months there, years before, delving into ruins of fourteen centuries ago. But the Kara-Hissar was good to look upon, apart from the memories it awakened, though memories are intensified in prison. In ordinary life one lives chiefly for the present: but in prison one lives almost entirely on the past and for the future.
It was not long before the pear trees came into blossom, and the white acacia. The sentries had kept us rigorously to the flagged path at first, while they used the garden space beneath the pear trees to grow a narrow bed of potatoes. But, either the potatoes failed, or they tired of the effort, for long before the end of our time there we used to walk freely to the outer edge, from where we could look down upon the town below. The Squire had received a drawing-book and a box of paints, and he used to make pictures there.
While we were in the church, before the potatoes had been abandoned, there was quite an exciting episode connected with an attempt at escape. The hero was a cheery Irishman, whom I will call Bart, the owner of one of the dogs, a beautiful Persian greyhound that he had acquired in Angora. He made up a bundle of food-stuffs and concealed it behind one of the Armenian tombs, where it would be handy when he required it, and so that he could come out of the church empty-handed and unsuspicious in appearance. But one of the guards noticed it, and a special sentry was put on to keep it under observation. It was obviously impossible to start like this, and for the time, at any rate, the attempt had to be abandoned. But it still remained to recover the precious pack and its contents. A Turkish sentry pretending not to watch anything is the most transparent thing in the world. It was easy to see what he was at: he wanted to identify the owner so that he might be cast into a dungeon. But it was not so easy to see how he was to be got rid of while the bag was removed. Bart was prepared to remove it rapidly inside a folding deck-chair, but he wanted an opportunity to grab it unawares. The sacred potatoes gave the key to the solution. I fetched Gumush, the greyhound, on a lead, and the perverse creature ran all over the cherished potatoes. As all the guards were co-partners in the garden, they all rushed to prevent the trespass; and the deed was done. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, that pack was safe in the church and its contents distributed. The sentry recovered his head, gave one look at the tomb, and made tracks for the Commandant’s office. But we heard of it no more. The trap had failed, and the bait was gone.
I have mentioned the noise in the church, and it is only fair to tell of the music, real soul-stirring music. It was not made by the English; with a few exceptions they were not a musical lot as far as performance went. But the Russian sailors had a choir, and they sang like angels. It must have made the angels painted on the ceiling envious to hear them.
Their music was of a kind quite distinct from Western European music. Very sad and melancholy as a rule, in a minor key. Generally about eight of them would sing together, taking parts, but sometimes they would all join in, as when they held a sort of funeral service the night after their friend had died of typhus. And very few indeed of them could not sing. It used to put our own caterwauling concerts to utter shame. Most of them were simple, rather rough men; and though we knew them all as Russians in those pre-revolution days, I believe they really belonged to half a dozen different tribes; Cossacks, Ukrainians, Georgians, and Poles. But they could all sing. They sang the thing they called the Pan-Slav hymn. It is the forbidden national anthem of Poland, proscribed, before the war, in Russia, Austria, and Germany; and with equal fervour they sang the grand national anthem of Russia. “God Save the King” they sang, too, and made it sound magnificent. But for the most part they sang folk-songs. The song we liked the best was a beautiful Cossack lullaby. A fellow-prisoner has kindly written it out for me, and it is printed at the end of this chapter. The words given are some I wrote for it while in the church.
The singing of the Russians was the best thing there was in that church.
There were several Indians in Afion at that time, survivors of the Bagdad consular guard; and while we were in the church the last, or one of the last, died. When war broke out there was a guard of two Indian officers and about four-and-thirty soldiers attached to the Consulate. They were interned by the Turks. When disarmed they had all their kit complete, and they were in perfect physical condition. They were not half-famished when captured, like the garrison of Kut. They were not taken near the fighting line, where feelings ran high, as the rest of us were; on the contrary, the fighting line was hundreds of miles from them. But before the war ended every single one of those men was dead. They died of cold, calculated ill-treatment, starvation, and over-marching.
As I tell this tale, as I thread this rosary of months and years, there runs throughout a strand of the blackest tragedy, and it will come out, do what I can.
I am trying to put in all the funny things that happened, too, for there are things too sad to be serious about. But the tragedy is there, and it must be seen.
Still, it is a bad note to end a chapter on. As a crowd we were not downhearted, so I will pass to the tale of the frightened sailor man.
There was a certain sailor man who had heard strange tales about the Turks on his journeys round the world. He had heard how they bastinado men for small faults, and he had probably seen it, too; for at the time of which I write he was a captive in Turkey. In course of time, it happened that this sailor man, who was not a highly-educated person, was smitten with disease, as people in Turkey very often are. And, being at that time in a city, he was sent to a hospital. Now he did not know that typhus rages in the hospitals of the Turks, nor is it probable that he knew that this disease is conveyed by the bite of lice. If he had known this he would perhaps have been even more frightened than he actually was, and with far better cause. One thing is quite certain, and that is that he did not know that all persons admitted to Turkish hospitals are clean-shaved all over. But he bore in mind many horrible stories, most of which were true, and, when a hospital orderly approached him with a razor in his hand, the sailor man’s mind was invaded by the most terrible fear, for he had heard dreadful tales of the mutilations that Turks were said to practise upon their enemies. So he cried aloud with a great voice that it should not be done. And as for the explanations of the man with the razor, he heeded them not at all, for he knew no Turkish. Sooner would he die all at once, he cried, than be done to death piecemeal. And his cry was heard, for he prepared to fight, and the man with the razor did not want to fight him, nor did the doctor, nor did the assistant doctor. So in the end they sent to us for his own officer, who soothed his troubled mind until he allowed himself to be shaved.
THE RUSSIAN LULLABY
Shadows come a’ creeping; Little stars are peeping; Church bells distantly sound. Lie still, my babe, in your cot gently sleeping, Dreaming while the world spins round. Dream of your mother, her watch gladly keeping, Smiling while the world spins round. Through the curtains gleaming, Moonlight comes a’ beaming; Hush! My Baby, we’re found. Deep in the night the old moon sees you dreaming, Sleeping while the world spins round. Bright kind old face, like a sentinel seeming, Smiling while the world spins round.
