The changes from night to day, from stuffy heat to damp cold, passed unnoticed, and I cared not whether I lived or died. I felt no hunger and very little thirst. This was fortunate, for hunger could not have been satisfied.
Each morning the guards gave each of us a small loaf of bad bread in which pieces of straw, string, and wood were plentiful. A carafe was filled with bad water once a day. In the evening a basin of thin soup, with mysterious chunks floating on the surface of it, was placed between us. Without being influenced by its unsavouriness, I felt not the least desire for the greasy liquid, the small loaf of bread being quite enough food for the day in my then state of unreal detachment from bodily needs and sensations.
As for the Arab, as soon as the basin was brought he squatted on his haunches, dug his hands into the soup, and having grabbed some floating morsel, stuffed it into his mouth. Afterward he lapped up the liquid itself, after the manner of a dog.
On the morning of the third day we were led from the jail to be interrogated at Turkish Headquarters. Although my ferocious headache still remained, the change from the dimness and closeness of the cell to the bright sunlight of the street revived me, and I sniffed the fresh air in gulps.
I was passing through Nazareth, watched with evident sympathy by the sad-faced crowd, when I saw an officer of the German Flying Corps. He looked at my pilot's badge and stopped, whereupon I broke away from the guards and approached him. In violent language I protested against the outrageous treatment, and asked the German as a fellow-aviator and a fellow-European, to see that the Turks moved me from the criminal jail.
The aviator happened to be a friend of Oberleutnant Wolff, who fired the shot that brought me down near Shechem; and, having already heard the details of my capture, he recognized at once the absurdity of the Arab's story that I had brought him across the lines to spy for the British. He himself was furious at my bad treatment, for apart from their air combats the relations between German and British aviators in Palestine were of the best. He promised to go straight to German Air Headquarters and enlist its influence for me.
I left the German and was led by the guards to Turkish Headquarters. For two hours we waited in a corridor; and then, before I had been interviewed, there arrived my friend the German pilot with two staff officers, a monocled major and a lieutenant. I shook hands—and was offered apologies for the brutalities I had suffered. It would all be right now, said the major, as the trio disappeared through the doorway of an office.
They returned with a Turkish colonel, who likewise shook hands and apologized. Finally, escorted by a different guard, I was sent away without having been questioned. The last I saw of the Arab was as he staggered and cringed under a box on the ear delivered by the colonel.
Once again I was led before the Turkish Platzkommandant. Evidently his knuckles had been telephonically rapped as a result of my treatment, for he scowled wickedly as he took my papers and ordered a room to be prepared for me in the barracks.
At first this room seemed a paradise after the slimy cell; but after a few days of utter loneliness its tiny dimensions—ten feet long by six feet wide—seemed to be closing in to crush me. The furniture was a bed with one greasy blanket and a rickety little table on which stood an earthenware jar.