The soldiers got to work behind me; and first the weight on my chest, then that on my thigh, lifted. Two officers helped me to rise, and one of them felt my face.
"Not so bad. I am a doctor. I will bandage it," he said, in French.
I searched to find what was not so bad, and discovered that all this while I had been seeing through the right eye only, for the left was screwed up tightly, with a swollen forehead overhanging it. When the doctor let go my arm to fetch some dressing from his horse, I collapsed, because one thigh would not perform its work.
I fell among pieces of the most completely wrecked aeroplane I have ever seen. After hitting the rock the machine had evidently crashed to starboard, so that I was thrown sideways over the top plane. The starboard wings were matchwood, the struts on the port side had snapped, and the fuselage was twisted into a wide curve, a corner of the rock having cut through one longeron and bent another. None of the main parts—planes, fuselage, centre-section, rudder, or elevator—was whole, and all were intermingled with bits of wire, splinters of wood, and tattered fabric. As for the engine, it had fallen clean out, and was partly buried in earth. It was the engine that had weighed so painfully on my right thigh, while the forward end of the fuselage pinned down my chest.
I thought of burning these remains by throwing a lighted match among them suddenly, but refrained, firstly because I had no match, and secondly, because there was nothing worth the burning. The soldiers had already taken the instruments from the dashboard; and one of them, I noticed, had broken off the joystick for a souvenir.
The doctor bound up my face and helped me to mount a mule, and we left the Arabs to their scowls of disappointment at being cheated out of loot. All this while I had been exceptionally well treated by the officers in Turkish uniform. Not one had spoken roughly, nothing was taken from me, and even my pockets were not searched. Could it be that the Turks treated their prisoners well instead of badly? Even on the British side of the lines we heard stories of how Turkish soldiers had killed British wounded, how Turkish officers had threatened newly taken prisoners with death if they did not give up all they possessed, and how everybody's money and most people's boots were stolen immediately they were captured; although we did not hear anything like the damnable truth of the Turks' atrocities. The mystery soon explained itself.
"Est-ce-que les Anglais viendront bientôt?" said the young officer who had first spoken.
"Qui sait?"
"Moi, je l'espère bien, parce que je suis Arménien. Nous sommes tous des Anglais ou des Arabes."
I had been lucky enough to fall among Arabs and Armenians, whose officers were, one and all, pro-British. They were a labour unit, explained the young Armenian, and their work was to make roads and tracks across the hill-country. Like all the conscript Armenians, Greeks, and Jews, and most of the Arabs, they had not been sent to the fighting front because most of them would have deserted to the British at the first opportunity. The doctor who had dressed my face was a Jew. The commandant, whom I would meet at the camp, was an Arab, and had an intense love for the British. But he would not dare pretend to show too much friendliness, because some of the men acted as spies for the Turks.