The Escaping Club

by A. J. Evans

By the kindness of the American School Missionaries the mission school buildings had been thrown open to the officers and Tommies. The place was beautifully clean but rather crowded, and as I desired solitude above all things, I packed a rücksack and set out to test how far our freedom extended. There was no one to stop me at the station, so I took the train to a small village in the hills above Smyrna and spent two most enjoyable days in a country hotel.

The population of Smyrna seems to be the result of inter-marriage between all the nations under the sun. Perhaps there is rather more Greek blood about than any other. They speak no language well, and usually five or six badly. They are a timorous, effeminate community, very immoral and untrustworthy, and seem to live in a perpetual and perhaps justifiable fear of being massacred. They all hated the Turk much but feared him more, and were very friendly to us. Once I had discovered that I was really free to go where I would, it seemed to me that I was in rather a false position. The fact that we were not guarded in any way made me no less anxious to get out of Turkey; and the fact that the Turks had not asked for our parole, which most of us would have refused, in no way relieved us of the duty of escaping if we could. There were other considerations, however. A small minority of the British officers and men now collected at Smyrna for exchange were really sick men; and several of us, who were ardent escapers, did not consider that we were justified in bringing possible punishment on these men by escaping. We therefore decided to wait for the exchange ship and to go by that, so long as it was not necessary to give any sort of parole not to fight against the Germans. In the meantime we prepared a method of escape by which we could clear out of Asia Minor if ever the Turks changed their mind and attempted to send us back to camps in the interior. It was not so easy to find a method of getting away as one might have expected. Nearly every one in the place would take a bribe without hesitation; but they were more likely to betray you at the last moment than do any job in which there was the slightest taint of danger. That is the worst of these half-breeds; they have no morals of any sort. The Turk has his own peculiar morals, and whatever he may be he is not a coward. If you go the right way about it I believe all Turks can be bribed. A good deal of intrigue and preparation is sometimes necessary; but once he has accepted money he seems to consider it dishonest to fail to carry out his part of the bargain. Eventually one of us got into touch with our secret intelligence system and made arrangements for three or four of us to get away if it became necessary. However, the exchange ship was expected any day, so we settled down to wait for it.

When we had been there about ten days David came to me with an extraordinary story. He said that a Turk had approached him and suggested that there should be a revolution in Smyrna. Apparently there were a number of Turks in Smyrna who believed that the Turkish empire was completely done, and that the sooner peace was made with the Entente the better. By a revolution in Smyrna they hoped to force the hands of the Government in Constantinople. They hoped, by handing over the place to the English, that Smyrna would be left, when peace came, as an independent state. Above all, I think they feared that it should go to Greece. However, I am not sure that these were the real motives, or all the motives, of the proposed revolution. The motives were a small matter to us. What we had to consider was—(a) Was it possible? (b) Was it desirable from a military or political point of view? We decided to make all preparation, but to refuse active participation till we had information that a revolution in Smyrna was desired by the British. The Turks who brought this proposal to David said the job the Turkish revolutionaries would undertake would be to tie up or murder the commander of the garrison, the military governor, the chief of police, and a few other important personages. David was to select a party of men from amongst the British and hold the railway with a couple of machine guns, incidentally cutting all the telephone and telegraph wires. My job was to capture the Austrian aerodrome just above the town, and then to fly one of their machines to Mitylene and report events to the English. "What about the garrison?" David had asked. "That is all right," said the Turk; "we have a Mullah who will preach a holy war against the Germans, and the garrison will all come over to us."

The scheme seemed pretty mad at first, but the more we considered it the more possible did it seem. David felt certain he could do his part, and I went up and inspected the aerodrome, and made a number of inquiries about the personnel and the guard. It seemed that with about a dozen men there would be absolutely no difficulty in capturing the aerodrome, probably without bloodshed. We considered that if the Turks could do their part—and they were perfectly confident they could—we could capture the town and hold it for at least a fortnight. If the wires were cut we could more or less rely on the fact that for a week or so it would be considered only a normal breakdown of the line. The Turk said that the nearest troops were ten days' march away, and there was no rolling stock to bring many troops by train. Such was the rough outline of the scheme, though I may not have got all the details quite correct.

We now refused to move any further in the matter till we got into touch with the British and learnt that a revolution was desirable, and that there were ships and troops to take over the town when and if we were successful. To disarm criticism and indicate that I am now more or less sane, I am prepared to admit now that we must have been perfectly mad to entertain the idea for a moment.

About this time a certain English colonel turned up in Smyrna and put up at the best hotel. He had nothing whatever to do with the exchange of prisoners; and in order to explain his presence I must digress here to give some account, probably rather inaccurate, of his previous adventures in Turkey.

A month or two before the Armistice the colonel had been a prisoner-of-war in a Turkish prison camp about 100 miles from Constantinople. From there he had escaped by means of a judicious mixture of bribery and audacity and made his way to Constantinople. For over a month he lay hid in the town, and at the end of that time had prepared a complete plan of escape. The details of where and how he was going is not part of this story. On the night on which he had made all preparations to depart he received a note from the Minister of the Interior of the Turkish Empire saying that he, the Minister, had heard that the colonel was about to escape, and would be much obliged if he would call on him before departing. As I said before, it is no use being surprised at anything in Turkey; but that it should be possible that, while one department was searching high and low for an escaped prisoner, another department not only knew where he was but when he intended to escape, throws an interesting sidelight on Turkish methods of government. The only explanation seems to be that each department has an entirely independent secret service of its own. The colonel decided that he would go and see the Minister, as he had really not much choice in the matter. This interview between a prisoner-of-war in the middle of an attempt to escape and a Minister of an enemy country must be almost unique, dealing, as I believe it did, with the probable attitude of the Entente towards certain aspects of the coming armistice.

At the end of two hours the Minister thanked the colonel courteously and intimated that he would not hinder him further in his attempt to escape. "That won't do at all," said the colonel, "you have already spoilt my plans, and it is now up to you to get me out of the country."

"I will send you out by aeroplane," said the Minister, and went to the telephone. In a short time he returned and stated that, to his great regret, it was impossible to obtain an aeroplane for the purpose, as they were all in the hands of the Germans.

The Turks are notoriously incompetent as aviators, and this was only to be expected. As an aeroplane was out of the question, the Minister did the next best thing and wrote out for the colonel an official "passe-partout," stamped all over and signed by the highest powers in the land. Armed with this document the colonel was no longer a poor prisoner-of-war. He was more than free; he was a power in the land of Turkey. All officialdom would bow down before him. So he took the train to Smyrna and put up in the best hotel.