Soon after his arrival David and I determined to seek his advice in the matter of the revolution, so we introduced him to the spokesman of the Turkish conspirators, and the three of us met one night in the colonel's private sitting-room and discussed the question from every point of view. The colonel viewed the proposed revolution in the same light as we had done, as a wild but not impossible scheme, only to be put into practice if we received definite information that such a thing was desired by the British. We spent the next day or two in futile attempts to find a boatman (they were nearly all Greeks) sufficiently honest, courageous, or patriotic to be worth bribing.
Quite suddenly it was announced that the Turkish armistice commissioners had arrived in Smyrna, whence they would leave to go either to Mitylene or to a British battleship, in order to undertake negotiations. The colonel and David, with the help of the colonel's all-powerful pass, made their way to the presence of the commissioners, and somehow or other persuaded them that it would be a good thing to take the colonel with them when they went. They left early one morning in a large motor boat, the colonel promising to send us back word if a revolution was desirable. No word came through to that effect, and less than a week later the arrival of the exchange ship was announced. On board the ship we were once more assailed with doubts on the question of parole. Should we be eligible to fight against the Germans? We nearly got off the ship at Mitylene with the idea of taking a sailing boat back to Smyrna, surrendering to the Turks, and escaping in a legitimate way the same night, as I think we probably could have done. We decided against it, however, after consultation with a distinguished general and the captain of the ship. Our advisers pointed out, firstly, that as far as they knew we had given no parole not to fight against the Germans; and, secondly, that there seemed every prospect that the war with Germany as well as with Turkey would be over before we could return to Europe. We left Smyrna on November 1st, 1918, when I had been a prisoner in Turkey for seven and a half months, so that, in Germany and Turkey together, I had been a prisoner-of-war for under eighteen months. Quite enough. Technically, I think I may claim to have escaped from Turkey as well as from Germany, but I am not particularly proud of the Turkish escape.
There is one further incident which happened after I had been enjoying the luxuries of Cairo and Alexandria for a fortnight, and then I have finished.
It occurred to me that it would be interesting to visit the officer prisoners-of-war camp between Alexandria and Cairo. I got on the telephone and asked for permission, and as I was speaking something prompted me to ask if by any chance there was a German flying captain by name of Franz Walz in the camp. Yes, there was. This struck me as most humorous, and also a unique opportunity of repaying some of Hauptmann Walz's kindness to me when I had been a prisoner in his power. My visit to the camp was extraordinarily interesting. The place was a high wire enclosure on bare and very sandy soil. It was clean and well ordered, and most of the wooden huts had been made to look quite pretty by small gardens round them. For all that, it was not a place in which I should have cared to have been a prisoner. Not that there seemed much to complain about, except that it must have been pretty dull. The wooden huts were well built and of the right type for the climate and the country: the prisoners seemed to have a reasonable amount of liberty outside the camp, with the possibilities of bathing from time to time, and they could purchase books and clothes with few restrictions, but discipline was a bit too strict for my liking. Quite right from the point of view of the commandant, but I can't help looking at it from a prisoner's point of view. When I asked Walz, he told me some of their causes for complaint, but they seemed to me pretty insignificant, compared at any rate with those things we had to complain about at Ingolstadt; and I told him so. I was told that Walz had been rather truculent when first captured, and I respected him for it. No decent man takes kindly to being a prisoner-of-war. However, he was very friendly to me, and gave me tea in his mess and introduced me to a number of German officers, many of whom had been captured off the Konigsberg, and three or four had been among my hosts in the German flying corps mess at Afule. They seemed a particularly nice lot of fellows, though there were one or two about the place to whom I was not introduced whose looks I did not like, and the feeling was obviously reciprocated.
Walz was not unnaturally very depressed both at his own and his country's position. The terms of the Armistice had just been published, and the prisoners ridiculed the idea that Germany would accept them. They only saw our newspapers and did not believe them—prisoners-of-war are the same all the world over—and had no conception of Germany's desperate condition. I did not attempt to enlighten them much, as it seemed to me tactful and generous, remembering my own experiences to keep off the subject as much as possible. Germany accepted the terms the next day. Poor fellows! It must have come to them as a terrible shock. I found that Walz had been told, when first captured, of my own experiences as a prisoner in Germany, and just before I left, he took me aside and said, "Can I possibly escape from a place like this? What would you do here? and if you got out, where would you escape to?" I said that it seemed a most difficult camp to get out of, and if a prisoner got out there were thousands of miles to cross before reaching a friendly country. As a matter of fact, as I told the commandant afterwards, it looked to me as if any prisoner who could learn a few words of English could bluff himself out of the camp any day in broad daylight. A man in English officer's uniform had only to call to the sentry to open one of the many gates and I think it would have been opened. I may be wrong. There would have been no harm done and ample time to retreat, change clothes, and prove an alibi if the bluff were unsuccessful. The second difficulty—the distance, and where to go—was much more serious. The Aboukir aerodrome was within a couple of miles of the camp, and Walz's thoughts as an airman naturally turned in that direction. I was compelled to prevaricate and tell him that the aeroplanes there were all training machines and seldom had more than one hour's petrol on board, and also that the place was well guarded. At this discouraging news, I hope and believe he gave up all attempts to escape. He told me that two German airmen, who had been captured by the English shortly after my own capture, had reported that I had broken my parole when escaping. On hearing this Walz had taken considerable trouble in denying it, and I am most grateful to him for that, quite apart from the other kind things already referred to in this book which he did for me. I count Hauptmann Walz among the many nice fellows whom I met in this war. For his sake, and for the sake of the many kind acts done by Germans to our prisoners-of-war in Turkey, I can never agree to class all Germans together as brutes. Surely it will be better for the peace of the world if we admit that the majority of Germans in this war only did their duty and did it well. This attitude need in no wise lessen our dislike for the German national ideals of "Might is Right," "Deutschland über Alles," or our loathing for the inhuman and unforgivable way in which these ideals were pushed to their logical conclusion. If wars are to cease, future generations must find a "modus vivendi" with the Germans; and surely, having beaten them, we can afford to encourage their good points by recognition of them. The Turk, however, still remains to me the "unspeakable Turk."
Transcriber's Notes:
Obvious punctuation errors repaired.
High-resolution images can be displayed by clicking on the images in the text.
Hyphen removed: look[-]out (pages 216, 245), country[-]side (pages 185, 260).