Our new prison was one of the best built houses in Yozgad, empty of all furniture, it is true (except the chair and table we had each brought with us), but large, airy, and comparatively clean. From the front windows we had a view of the Commandant’s office and the main street. From the side we looked into “Posh Castle,” where now lived our friends Doc., Price and Matthews; and at the back there was a tiny cobbled yard, with high walls round it, and a large stone horse-trough, which we promptly converted into that real luxury—a full-length bath. To the south-east we had a wide view of the distant pine-woods, and nearer at hand a certain grey rock projected through the snow on the slope of South hill. Under its shadow lay the first clue to the treasure.
Indoors, if we wished it, we could each have a bedroom, a dining-room and a study, and still leave a spare suite for the chance guest. Furniture? Simple enough! Move your chair and table to wherever you want to sit, and there you are! When we arrived some of our friends were waiting to see the last of us. Our escort hustled them out. The door slammed, the key grated in the lock, and a sentry took up his stand outside. Our separation from the camp was complete, and our solitary confinement had begun.
It was natural that Hill and I should be elated at the success of our plan. The simultaneous hoodwinking of friend and foe had for us an amusing side. But mingled with our elation and our amusement was a feeling which no loyalty to our friends in the camp could suppress. For we rejoiced, above all, in our loneliness, in our freedom from interruption, in the fact that we were quit of the others. I make the confession knowing that any fellow-prisoner who chances on this story will understand and sympathize. The longing for a little solitude was shared by us all.
It must not be imagined that the prison walls of Yozgad enclosed a company of particularly obnoxious irreconcilables, or that we were a shiftless crew who gave in to the discomforts of their situation. Far from it. A more companionable set of men never existed, and during our stay in Yozgad we overcame every difficulty but one. For instance: to begin with, there was an entire absence of furniture. Yozgad was no Donnington Hall, and the Turks provided nothing but a roof to our heads, and a bare floor—sometimes of stone—for us to lie on. The camp purchased empty grocery boxes, acquired a saw, a hammer, a plane, and nails, and some of our prisoners evolved designs in chairs and tables and beds which would have done credit to Maple’s. Our food, both in quality and price, was appalling; we learned to cook, and before we left Yozgad there were Messes which could turn out on occasion a five-course dinner that left nothing to be desired. We had no games. Busy penknives soon remedied the deficiency; chessmen, draughts, roulette-wheels, toboggans, looges, skis, hockey-sticks, and hockey-balls were turned out to meet the demand. There was no end to the ingenuity of individuals in supplying their wants or adding to their few comforts. We had cobblers of every grade, from an artist like Colonel Maule, who made himself a pair of rope-soled shoes, to “Tony,” whose only boots, owing to their patches, were of different size and vastly different design—indeed, it required a stretch of the imagination to realize they had once been a pair. We had knitters who could unravel a superfluous “woolly” and convert it into excellent socks, heels and all. We had tailors whose efforts (being circumscribed by the paucity of cloth) would have brought tears of delight to the eyes of Joseph. In every house there was an embryo Harrod who kept a “store” containing everything, “from a needle to an anchor,” that the Turks would allow him to buy, and an accountant who evolved a system of book-keeping and book-transfer of debts which enabled those under a temporary financial cloud (a thing to which we were all subject, thanks to the irregularity of the Ottoman post) to continue making necessary purchases until the next cheque arrived.
“THE SNOW ON THE SLOPE OF SOUTH HILL”—THE SITE OF THE FIRST CLUE TO THE TREASURE
These were all material difficulties, and easily adjusted. Our chief problem was how to pass the time. It was tackled in a similar spirit and with nearly equal success. We had four-a-side hockey tournaments[[20]] and (when the Turks allowed) walks, picnics, tobogganing, and ski-ing. There was one glorious point-to-point ski race over the snow-clad hills, with flag-wagging signallers along the course, bookmakers and a selling sweep, and to cap it all a magnificent close finish. That was a red-letter day. Later on there was to be a Hunt Club, with long dogs and foxes and hares complete.
For indoor amusement we wrote dramas, gay and serious, melodramas, farces and pantomimes. We had scene-painters whose art took us back to England (we could sit all day looking at the “village-green” scene). We had an orchestra of prison-made instruments, a prison-trained male-voice choir and musicians to write the music for them. Artists, song-writers, lecturers, poets, historians, novelists, actors, dramatists, musicians and critics—especially critics—all these we evolved in the effort to keep our minds from rusting. Indeed, we went beyond mere amusement in the effort: we went to school again! When at last books began to arrive from England a library was formed, and classes were held in Mathematics, Physics, Political Economy, French, German, Spanish, Hindustani, Electricity, Engineering, Machine Drawing, Agriculture and Sketching. We became a minor University, with Professors who made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in experience. Memories of their own youth made some of them set “home work,” and it was no uncommon thing to run across a doughty warrior, most unacademically dressed in ragged khaki, seeking in vain for some quiet corner of the garden where he might wrestle uninterrupted with the latest vagaries of x, or convert into graceful Urdu a sonorous passage from the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Nor did we await the tardy arrival of books to commence our education. Barely had we settled down in Yozgad when some genius realised that the hundred officers and men whom the Turk had collected haphazard within our prison walls possessed amongst them a rich and varied experience. Our genius had a persuasive tongue. He organized lectures. Once a week, after dinner, we of the Upper House gathered in the only place that would hold us all together—the landing. It was unfurnished, dark, and draughty. Each man brought his own chair, each room provided a candle or a home-made lamp. Wrapped in blankets, rugs, bedquilts, sheepskins, anything we possessed to keep out the cold, and packed together like sardines, we settled down to what in those days was the one entrancing hour in the dull week. And what lectures those were! With men who had done or helped to do these things we entered the Forbidden City and shared in the taking of Pekin, combated sleeping-sickness in Central Africa, tea-planted in Ceylon, cow-punched in America, chased criminals in Burma, joined in the Jameson Raid, fruit-farmed in Kent, organized an army for an Indian Princeling, defended a great Channel Port, fought in a Frontier War, went geologizing in the Sudan, and trained the Rangoon river. We controlled in turn a Royal Mint, a great jute mill, a battery of Field Artillery, a colour-photography studio, a submarine, a police-court in England, a wireless telegraphy station, a pork factory, a torpedo-boat, and a bee-farm.
