CHAPTER XI.
THE LAST YEAR IN AFION
An accurate description of all our ups and downs, of liberty enlarged and liberty snatched away again, and of all the fluctuating fortunes of the camp would be as dull as our lives were, and as little likely to be voluntarily undergone as was our captivity. That gem of time cannot be polished in all its facets, lest the observer should be dazzled. All that will be attempted here is some account of the main events. Another man, looking at that time from a different angle, might write a book that would hardly parallel this upon a single point, and yet be as true a picture.
We were all growing very weary indeed of being prisoners. Prices had continued their inexorable rise, and frequent mass meetings were held to discuss ways and means, for of course there were poor among us who could not afford to get money sent from home, and the pace of the convoy had to be that of the slowest ship. The only alternative would have been to break up into houses where men lived by bread alone, and houses where plutocrats resided who were able to import money at the disastrous rates obtainable. For it cost a very large sum to import money. A cheque on an English bank for £20 would produce a draft of £Tq.26. This would be paid in paper, and to find its true value must be divided by six; so by spending £20 a prisoner could obtain the value of £4 6s. 8d.[2]
Of course we did import money, whatever it cost, even the poorest of us practically had to, unless he would freeze in the winter. The actual necessaries of life, food, fuel, and clothes of sorts, were always obtainable in Turkey; at a price. The country was so completely unorganized, and the railway so congested that food-stuffs might be plentiful in one district and almost unobtainable in another not far away. But where the food was grown it was always obtainable, and fortunately for us, Afion was in an agricultural district.
The winter of 1917-18 was a very severe one. Late in November the street that was our only playground and space for exercise was filled with snow. It ran east and west, overhung by a steep hill on the south, and deprived of sun by the opposite row of houses. No sunlight at all reached that street for quite three months, and during the whole of that time it was paved with snow that had been trodden hard.
There were refugees in the town that winter, people of strange appearance to us who were used to the Turks. They were said to be Kurds mostly, but there were certainly several tribes represented. For some reason or other they had been evacuated from some part of the Turkish Empire further east, and dumped down at Afion. Their clothes were those of a warm climate, and many of the little children had but one thin garment apiece. Nominally, I expect, they were supposed to be fed by their predatory Government: actually they were on or over the verge of starvation. We used to see them from our windows, and on our comparatively rare passages through the town.
There is no sanitation in a Turkish town. All refuse is cast upon middens, which in the course of ages become great mounds. Houses do not last long in Turkey; they are but flimsily built and fires are very frequent. They decay or are destroyed by fire, and they are rebuilt upon these middens. I picked up a Roman coin once where a midden had been disturbed, for they are very old.
And one of the uses of these middens is to provide food for the utterly poor. These poor refugees used to haunt those hideous piles of decaying matter and pick food from them. Dogs and donkeys, children and buffalo calves, old women and cats, used to scramble and scrape for the last pieces.
We had a Rugby football that winter, and in a field by the river, another of the wide threshing floors, we began to play when the snow melted. There were some very good players, and we had one new prisoner who held, and I believe still holds, the ’Varsity record for both the 100 yards and the quarter-mile. There were several matches, and one very great triumph, when The Dardanelles played The World and beat it. There were so few to pick from that I played for the Dardanelles. Until that winter, the last game I had played was in Ceylon in 1902; and I went to bed for three days after the match. But we, the old-timers, beat the World and rejoiced exceedingly.
One other thing that happened that winter must be told, though it is painful to write it. There was a Russian named Constantine B., who had become estranged from the other Russians for a fault of his own. He was afterwards forgiven, and taken back, so it would not become me to say anything about it. For the time, however, he lived separately in a small house with a Russian anarchist and a Russo-Armenian thief, and the three of them were outlaws. Also they hated each other, and used to quarrel. One of their quarrels became acute enough to attract the attention of the Turkish Commandant, the infamous Maslûm Bey, who visited their house to make inquiries, and there lost his temper and struck Constantine B. Constantine was not really a bad fellow. He had done one bad thing, but he was out of place in that house. He was a man of about thirty, tall, well built, with very fair hair. A brave man, and quick-tempered. He put up his arm to protect himself, and he was lost. The Commandant accused him of trying to reach for his, the Turk’s, sword, and had him arrested.
Constantine B. was taken away from the officers’ camp to the church where were some British soldiers; in the little courtyard where we used to box he was stripped and tied head downwards with his feet in the air. The Commandant stood by while Constantine was beaten upon the soles of the feet with raw hide whips until he fainted. An hour later he was beaten again until he lost consciousness once more. As they grew tired the Commandant called new hands to beat him; every Turk there had a turn at beating him. And, when he could feel no more, Maslûm Bey kicked and struck him all over, everywhere on his body, and spat upon him. Then he was taken into a dungeon and thrown upon a heap of quicklime where his face got burnt.
Maslûm’s cup was not yet full. Constantine recovered in time, though he is lame. Maslûm went on to his worst offence. He had flogged our men and the Russians. He had imprisoned British officers in filthy holes, for little or no cause. He had lied, and swindled, and stolen, and grown rich. He now proceeded to overstep even the line which a Turkish officer draws. All through the writing of this book there has loomed ahead of me the grave difficulty of dealing with Maslûm Bey’s greatest offence. It ought to be recorded, but I loathe doing it. Let those who can read between the lines. Some of the British soldiers were very young, fair-haired Saxon boys from Wessex. They had seen a vast deal of cruelty, and they knew how easy it was for Maslûm Bey to flog them, even to kill them, or to send them to places where they would almost certainly die. Four of these became the victims of the abominable wickedness of Maslûm. Under the shadow of a raw hide whip, in the hands of Turkish non-commissioned officers, they were his victims.
All these offences of Maslûm Bey, from the tragedy of Constantine downwards, were duly reported to England by code. The very names of the offences were squeezed into that code. I had the pleasure of sending the messages myself, and the framing of them. They got home safely, and our Government acted at once.
In the end we got rid of Maslûm Bey. He was court-martialled by a commission of utterly corrupt Turkish officers. The British soldiers bravely told their stories. I say bravely, for their lives hung by a hair. A British officer who knew Turkish equally bravely conducted the prosecution for our side; and his life hung by a hair too. But we got rid of Maslûm Bey. He was given five and a-half months’ simple imprisonment. Not six months, for that would have involved loss of rank. His judges did not think he had deserved to lose rank.
That is why I watch the papers to see if Maslûm Bey has been hanged.
We used to stick up for ourselves in Turkey. At one time I knew how many commandants of prison camps were broken by the British in three and a-half years. But my memory is a prison-memory. It is like fishing in a well-stocked stream with a torn landing-net. When you have got a fish, there you see him plain enough; but more often you see but a gleam, and he is gone. The first Commandant of Afion was broken for swindling; the second broke himself by letting prisoners escape; the third was Maslûm Bey; and the fourth was a gentleman. British prisoners broke one Commandant at Kastamouni, and I believe another at Broussa, Russians broke one at Kutahia. And down the line, in the Taurus or beyond it, where there were no British officers, I believe our men broke more than one.
After Maslûm had gone we were very well treated. I don’t think that any prisoners could have expected to have a juster man to deal with than our new Commandant, Zeir Bey. Just think what an opportunity of regeneration Turkey lost in this war. Had the Ottoman Government selected men like Zeir Bey to command each camp, they would have made friends for themselves not only all over the British Empire, but in France and her colonies, in Russia, in Italy and in Rumania. Instead of which they have made bitter enemies.
Our Indians had the greatest contempt and hatred for the Turks, all but a few who were traitors. There were some, a few, real traitors among the Indians; but there were many more who are much more to be pitied than blamed for some of the things they did. Their position was an exceedingly difficult one. Very many of them died, thousands of them; but the Turks were always trying to seduce them from their allegiance. There was even a paper printed in Hindustani by the Germans and given free to the Indians. The Sultan sent for Indian Mohammedan officers and gave them swords. One sturdy Pathan, Kutab Gul, went to prison rather than accept a sword. For the most part the Indians were kept at different stations from the British, at Konia and other places where they could get no guidance from their British officers, where no one knew their tongue, and where they could get no news of the war except such as was faked, and the usual bazaar rumours. And this went on for years. As they would themselves admit, Indian officers are in some respects very child-like people. They believe a lot of what they hear. We had our own means of communication outside, and we knew how to read between the lines of German communiqués. Also we could read French, and in Turkey there are many papers printed in French for the polyglot peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean. But the Indians had none of these means. For instance, if we read “The enemy attacked near Braye and was heavily defeated. By their self-abnegation our brave umteenth regiment of Bavarians threw the enemy back with bloody losses,” we knew what it meant. It was the obituary notice of the umteenth Bavarians, who had been wiped out. If the communiqué went on to say, “Our line, according to a pre-arranged plan, now stretches from X to Y,” we knew just how far the Germans had retreated. If our maps did not show the places, someone among the officers, either British or French, generally knew them. But how were the Indians to know that? They learned Turkish and read the Turkish papers, but that was no good. The Turkish method of camouflaging news is not the same as the German. It is better. They just say nothing. They never admitted the fall of Bagdad. They just kept on saying nothing. So skilled were we in interpreting the German news that I really believe we knew just as much about the war as the average officer outside. Our naval officers reconstructed the Battle of Jutland, boomed as a great German victory, so accurately that the real account we got at last seemed stale news. We certainly knew more about the war than the Turkish officers did locally; and they used to come and look at our great war maps drawn out on a large scale by Capt. Sandes, R.E., from innumerable scraps and pieces out of newspapers.
Sandes did three things. He wrote a book upon the Mesopotamian campaign, now with a publisher. He made maps, and he was the bandmaster. Among the later prisoners there were a number of musicians, and at least one really ambitious composer who wrote many songs and an oratorio. There were three violins and a guitar in the orchestra, and there used to be excellent Sunday concerts in the Yozgat house at the top of the street, which was our Albert Hall. There were also several prisoners who sang really well. This last year saw a great renaissance in the theatrical world too. There was a revolt against the bondage of the old border-line jokes, and an attempt to substitute wit for wickedness. The men in the church used to get up plays, too. Maslûm Bey was a great patron of the theatre, and would save the best actors from being sent away on working parties. He used to bring parties of veiled Turkish women to watch their plays from the gallery. Behind the altar were dark passages on either side, built in the thickness of the wall, and well adapted for the wings of the stage. What he liked best were love scenes, and he used to send down messages in the middle of the acting commanding the performers to make love more briskly.
With the passing of Maslûm we came to the end of our worst troubles. The new Commandant was not so incurably Asiatic. He realized that prisoners, like other men, love life, and freedom, and the open sky. That summer we had a wide and high hill-side made free to us. We could spend the whole day there if we liked. The Lower Camp had an even better recreation ground in a rocky hill just beyond their houses. We were allowed out in smaller parties and for longer distances. Smaller parties was a very great gain, for to walk out in a “crocodile” is so unpleasant that it is almost better to stay indoors. We used to get a sentry, and go off into the hills with our lunch, and picnic all day. And as we could go in several directions there was not much crowding. There was fishing in the stream, and bathing in a big pool, and sketching along the valley above the pipe-line. It was by far the best time we ever had in Turkey, and all because England and her Allies were winning the war. For it certainly was that consideration which caused them to send us Zair Bey.
Among the prisoners there were some who said, “When we win the war the Turks will massacre us all.” But those among us who knew the East said, “When we win the war the Turks will lick our boots and feed out of our hands.” We were right. Had we lost the war it would have been quite another matter, and this history would never have been written.
It was different now from the old days when Toomy and I used to sit by a charcoal brazier and plan revenge. Our great scheme was to introduce rabbits into Anatolia: the country was suitable, and they were to overrun the whole land, worse than in Australia, and eat up all the young crops. We also thought of water hyacinth in the Tigris and Euphrates. But we were winning the war now, and these guerilla operations would not be necessary. But we never thought the end was as near as it proved.