A prisoner of war in the Orient, far more than the traveller, senses the spirit of his surroundings. Temporarily he is of the Orient. Of necessity his captors regard him as somebody more intimate than the transient Westerner who, while moving freely among them, lives according to Western custom and tradition; and of necessity the man who is in the power of Easterns, and forced to live according to Eastern customs, is more likely to realize the mental attitude whereby the crooked road is chosen in preference to the straight, to-morrow never comes, anything unexpected may happen at any time, and—to repeat an illustration of my friend Jean Willi the dragoman—a man may get married in the morning, and be a solitary fugitive for his life in the evening.
So it was with us. The continuity of impressions and experiences reacted on me till I forgot to remember that I was an ordinary Englishman, and became as fatalistic and unsurprised as the Turks and Arabs themselves. Somewhere or other, I knew, we should be punished for having wanted to escape. Of what the punishment might consist we guessed nothing, except that it would probably find us quite unprepared. Meanwhile, it was of absorbing interest to sit on the balcony at Aleppo, and watch the crowd in the bazaar.
On leaving Aleppo we knew neither the next stage of the journey nor our ultimate destination; and we were content that it should be so, for a future that is certain to be unpleasant is better indefinite than definite.
This time our escort consisted of two gendarmes and two soldiers. First we were herded into a third-class compartment, windowless and filthy. Already, before we arrived, unwashed and unkempt peasants had crowded into it; so that our party of eleven was able to occupy seven seats only. One of the gendarmes, who could murder French, advised us never to place our few belongings out of reach.
"Or," said he, "we meet darkness and—pouf!—everything vanish."
We liked the looks of neither the carriage nor the fellow-passengers, and thought how much more pleasant a goods truck would be. R. and I persuaded a gendarme to take us to the office of the station commandant in the hope of being allotted different quarters. The commandant was polite, but pretended that he could offer nothing better.
Then, as we passed along the platform, I saw a clean, covered-in truck, with a few German soldiers inside it. One man leaned idly against the entrance, and him I asked politely if, since there was so much room to spare, they could lend us a corner.
"Ausgeschlossen!" he growled. "Wir wollen keine Englander."
We were about to move on, when—"Was gibt's?" called a Feldwebel as he stepped from the truck.
I explained that seven British officers, two of them wounded, longed for floor-space, so that they would not be herded with odorous Turks.