Those who had been prisoners for a long time had suffered much; and we later prisoners had some difficulty in appreciating the attitude which was adopted by most of the camp towards certain things. When I first came to the camp, escaping was looked upon almost as a crime against your fellow-prisoners. One officer stated openly that he would go to considerable lengths to prevent an attempt to escape, and there were many who held he was right. There is much to be said on the side of those who took this view. Though it was childishly simple to escape from the camp, to get out of the country was considered next to impossible. On the face of it, it did seem pretty difficult. An attempt to escape brought great hardship and even danger on the rest of the camp; for the Turks had made a habit of strafing, with horrible severity, the officers of the camp from which a prisoner had escaped. This point of view, to one who had been a prisoner in Fort 9, Ingolstadt, where we lived but to escape, was hard to tolerate, and I am now convinced that this anti-escaping attitude was wrong. It seems to me to take too narrow a view of the question; quite apart from the fact, generally accepted I believe, that prisoners-of-war are inclined to deteriorate mentally and morally when they settle down to wait, in as great comfort as possible, but with a feeling of helplessness, for a peace which weekly seemed farther off. It seems to me that we owed it to our self-respect and to our position as British officers to attempt to escape, and to go on attempting to escape, in spite of all hardships. It used to amuse me sometimes to think what would have happened if the prisoners of Fort 9 could have been set down as prisoners in Afion-Kara-Hissar. They would certainly have marched out in a body and taken pot luck with the brigands. There would have been nothing to prevent them. To recapture them would have been a next to impossible task. Many brigands and deserters would have joined them. In fact, I think this would have been quite a nice little diversion in Asia Minor. A hundred armed, determined, and disciplined men could have gone almost where they would and done what they chose in Asia Minor.
About the time I came to Afion, a number of young lately captured officers, mainly flying men, were also brought in. Many of the older prisoners, who had suppressed their wish to escape in deference to the opinion of the majority of the camp, joined hands with the later prisoners and made preparation to escape. I know of at least twenty officers who had every intention of departing in the spring of 1918. Most of the plans were to my mind rather crude, and consisted of walking over 250 miles of almost impossible country and hoping for a boat. We were sent from England, concealed most cunningly in post cards, maps of the route to Smyrna and a method of getting out of the country from the neighborhood. Tempted by this, three stout-hearted fellows tried to walk to Smyrna—a most terrible undertaking. They met brigands, and one of them was shot, probably in the leg, and left wounded on the hills. The other two were stripped, driven from their wounded comrade with rifles, and returned to the camp in a semi-nude condition. Nothing has since been heard of the third, and to the best of my belief the Turks made no effort whatever to save him. His two companions and the senior officers of the camp did their utmost to induce the Turks to send a few men to the place where he had last been seen alive. To take a little trouble on the off-chance of saving a human life is not the sort of thing that appeals to a Turk; so several prisoners offered to go on parole to the place at their own risk, which to unarmed men would have been considerable. But this was forbidden.
Bribery seemed to me the one method which had a real chance of success in Turkey. An officer, whom I will call David, and I first of all opened negotiations with a Greek to be allowed to take the place of the stokers on the Smyrna train. The Greek's courage failed, however, and that fell through. Then we got into touch with the Arabs who wished to desert. They agreed to produce horses and arms; and four armed men on horseback would have had no difficulty in going anywhere. When the whole thing had been settled and it was only a question of final details and deciding the day to go, the second commission came to the camp in order to select sick officers for exchange. As there were very few, if any, sick officers left in the camp, and as the examination was a pure farce, David and I thought we should get a more comfortable journey to Smyrna by bribing the doctor. This was completely successful, and cost me £15. On the whole, I think if you went the right way about it, it was less difficult to escape successfully from Afion than from most of the German camps.
N.B.—For a description of the life in the prison camps of Afion-Kara-Hissar, I can recommend A Prisoner in Turkey, by John Still (published by John Lane The Bodley Head Ltd.).
CHAPTER IV
THE ROUND TOUR CONCLUDED
There is one incident in our otherwise uneventful journey to Smyrna which seems to me worthy of record. We were passing through a particularly wild and uninhabited stretch of country, when the train halted just after it had passed a small bridge over a ravine. I and a friend who spoke Turkish descended to stretch our legs, and saw standing on the bridge a very ragged sentry, so we walked back to question him. He had been there, the solitary guardian of that bridge, for four years. Two years before this he had somehow seen or heard from his wife, and had learnt that three of his four sons were dead and the other was fighting. Since then he had had no news of his family. The only food he received were two loaves of bread thrown out of the train twice a week, and during these four years he had lived and slept in the clothes, now ragged and rotten, which he was wearing. He scarcely spoke to any one from year's end to year's end, and lived perpetually on the border of starvation. He only prayed God to blast Enver's eyes, because he was a year and a half in arrears with his pay of 1/4d. a day or so. Thank God I was not born to be a Turkish territorial. In the Turkish army, I suppose, this fellow would be envied, as having a nice quiet job on the lines of communication.
On arriving at Smyrna we were told, to our great astonishment, for we had given no parole of any sort, that we were free to go where we would and do what we liked.