That chat and backchat with the wooden-headed Intelligence Officer was my only conversation, except a few whispered words, with a fellow-human for nearly a week. The Platzkommandant took his revenge for my complaints in two ways—by feeding me very badly, and by inflicting solitary confinement upon me.
Solitary confinement makes a man utterly wretched. Left all alone, and with nothing to distract his mind, a prisoner can only think and think and think—and all his thoughts are morbid.
I had six matches in my pocket and with these I invented all sorts of games and puzzles. But after a few hours my brain, refusing to concentrate on them, drifted back to the sea of bitter despair. At night-time the great difficulty was to keep my mind, not from drifting, but from racing.
After four days of solitary confinement I was fast losing all sense of balance and normality. At times I regretted not being back in the criminal jail with the repulsive Arab for company.
The few words I managed to exchange with the Christian woman who tidied my room each morning were an unspeakable joy. This woman—ragged, bootless, and gaunt—would whisper fierce questions in broken French as she threw water on the dusty floor, or stabbed with a hairpin some of the bed-bugs, while a guard watched through the open door to see that we did not conspire.
"Why come not English? We hungry. Pigs of Turks!"
And I had to whisper back that the English would come and drive the pigs of Turks out of Nazareth.
When she had taken her stooping back and her patchwork clothes out of the room, I would probably not have the chance to speak with anybody, even in a whisper, for the next twenty-four hours.
Apart from the furniture I had nothing to look at but a green hillside, seen through the tiny window. For hours at a time I paced the few feet across the room and back again, then sat on the bed and looked through the little window at what little I could see of Nazareth.
Several times I noticed men, women, and boys walking in a huddled group, with guards around them. Some had their hands shackled, some had a chain linking one arm and one leg, others were chained by the arm to the next person. They moved aimlessly over the hillside, presumably for exercise, while Turkish soldiers pushed or beat any who struggled or straggled.