“WE HAD FOUR-A-SIDE HOCKEY TOURNAMENTS”
The list is not exhaustive, but it may serve its turn. Such were the men with whom we had spent nearly two years of our lives. In a month of marching you could not fall in with company more varied, more interesting, or more charming. Yet, because amongst the many difficulties that had been overcome one remained unsolved, Hill and I were glad to get away. Nothing in captivity is so distressing, so discomforting, so impossible to allay as overcrowding, and the unhappy consequences it brings in its train. It is a cancer that eats into the heart of every unnatural form of society. Time is its ally, and slowly but surely it wears down all opposition. In Yozgad we did not quarrel—we got along without that—and we tried not to complain. But every now and then a man would seek relief. As unostentatiously as might be he would change his mess, and though nothing was said, we all knew why. He knew, and we knew, that he was not getting rid of the bonds that were so irksome. He was merely seeking to exchange the old for the new pattern of handcuff, in the hope that it would not gall him in the same raw spot, and we could sympathize with him. Your neighbour may be the most excellent of good fellows, but if he is jogging your elbow for every hour of the twenty-four you will begin to look askance at him. Little idiosyncracies that would pass unmarked in ordinary life assume the magnitude of positive faults. Faults grow into unendurable sins. The fine qualities of the man—his endurance, his courage, his cheerfulness, his generosity—are lost to sight under the cloud of minor peculiarities that close acquaintance brings into view. Indeed, in time, his very virtues may be counted unto him as vices. His stoicism becomes a “pose,” his cheerfulness is “tomfoolery,” his generosity “softness,” his courage “rashness“! We knew the worth of the men beside us, but we were being forced to examine them under the microscope. So we were in constant danger of taking the part for the whole, and of losing all sense of proportion. Z was a glorious leader of men: we forgot it—because he snored in his sleep! Distance lends enchantment, because it puts things into their true proportions. To realize the grandeur of a mountain the climber must stand back from it, at least once in a while. And so it is with character.
I do not know if others—leaders of Arctic Expeditions, for instance—are wont to succeed much better than we did in solving the problems of maintaining feelings of mutual respect amongst their company. Certain it is they have a great advantage over us, because, for them, the close companionship is voluntary and (what is more important) necessary to the attainment of a common object. For us, it was compulsory, and the common object that palliates it was entirely wanting. But we did our best. Outwardly we succeeded; there was no public break in the harmony of our camp. Yet in our hearts every one of us knew that he had failed, and that our only achievement had been to fail in a very gentlemanly way.
Our new-found solitude came to Hill and myself in a good hour, while the friendships we had formed in the camp were green and the canker-worm of super-intimacy still in its infancy. For we had left behind many friends and, as far as we knew, no enemies. In front of us stretched a prospect of an indefinite period of unrelieved companionship with one another. What dangers to our mutual friendship this involved we knew too well. But we had that on our side which would have relieved the camp of its most serious trouble—a common aim. We no longer merely existed. We were partners in a great enterprise. There was something definite for which to work, something which would compensate us for every hardship—our hope of freedom.
Absurd as it may seem, Hill and I felt not only happier, but actually freer in our new prison than we had done in the camp. On the face of things there was no excuse for this feeling, for outwardly we were more closely confined than ever. In order to give a fitting air of verisimilitude to his proceedings, Kiazim Bey had issued the strictest orders to our sentries. Indeed, he went rather out of his way to describe us as a pair of desperate characters, and so upset the nerves of our old “gamekeepers” that for the first few days of our confinement they marched up and down outside our house, instead of snoozing in their sentry-boxes as they had been accustomed to do. The genial, wizened little Corporal, Ahmed Onbashi, whose duty it was to verify the presence of all prisoners night and morning, lost all the bonhomie which had made him a favourite, and for at least a week we saw no more of him than a wrinkled nose and a single anxious eye peering at us round the gently opened door of our room. But as the days passed by and we showed no signs of hostility, he gradually regained his old confidence. His escort dropped from two veterans with rifles at the “ready” to the accustomed one with no rifle at all. At last he came one night boldly into the room, and catching sight of our spook-board propped against the wall, he pointed a grimy finger at it, shook his head at us, and uttered one of the very few Turkish phrases that was understood of all the camp—“Yessack! Chôk fena!” (Forbidden! Very bad!) From which we learned that the cause of our downfall was known to our humble custodian.
The stricter surveillance did not in the least affect our happiness for it had been suggested by the Spook, and our present circumstances were of our own choosing. We knew that, within certain limits, we could lighten or tighten our bonds as we pleased, for we had gained some control over the forces that controlled us. We were no longer utterly and entirely under the orders of the un-get-at-able Turk. We had the Spook as an ally, and the Spook could make the Commandant sit up.
There was another reason, deeper and more permanent, for this curious, instinctive sense of increased liberty which came to us, and expressed itself in the enthusiastic enjoyment with which we submitted to a more stringent form of imprisonment. At the time we could not have put the reason into words, but it was there all the same, and it was this: so far as we ourselves were concerned, we were well on the way to correct the one serious mistake which the camp as a whole had committed. It was the mistake that lies at the core of all tragedies. We in Yozgad had put the lesser before the greater good, our duty to ourselves, as prisoners, before our duty to ourselves, as men, and to our country. For reasons that have been stated it was considered wrong to attempt to escape. The general feeling was that there was no choice but to wait for peace with such patience as we could muster. We all knew the value of what we had lost when we surrendered to the Turk. But not one of us realized clearly that since our capture we had surrendered something infinitely more precious than physical freedom. It was not the supremacy of the Turk but our own recognition of it and our resignation to captivity that made us moral as well as physical prisoners. We did not see that in giving up trying to free ourselves we were giving up our one hope of happiness until peace came. So that in spite of the outward cheerfulness, the brave attempts at industry, and the gallant struggle against the deterioration that a prison environment brings, an atmosphere of hopelessness pervaded the whole camp. At heart, we were all unhappy, for we had created for ourselves an “Inevitable.” The camp had built a prison within a prison, and he who wished to run had to defeat the vigilance of his own comrades before he could tackle the Turk. It is perhaps too much to say that it is a man’s duty to escape, but certainly it is not his duty to bar the way to escape either for himself or for anyone else. Had every prisoner in Yozgad bent his energies to achieve freedom not only for himself but for his fellows, things would have been very different in the camp. Strafed the camp might have been, but it would have been in its duty, happy in discomfort instead of miserable in comparative ease, and welded into unity by a common aim. Prisoners most of us would have remained, but not beaten captives; the victims of misfortune, but not its slaves.
In getting away from the camp Hill and I had gained a new and more cheerful outlook. But we did not realize that we had already broken down the walls of our moral prison. There was no time to analyse the causes of our happiness. We were obsessed with the immediate situation, and especially with the necessity of getting the proof of Kiazim Bey’s complicity which would make the camp safe. Kiazim was not an easy man to trap: up to date there was nothing he could not explain by a theory of collusion between his subordinates and ourselves. He was perfectly capable of sacrificing the Pimple in order to save his own skin. He could range himself alongside Gilchrist and the other witnesses, and pose as the victim of a plot in which he had had no share. When alone with us he was as frank and open as a man could be. But we had no proof of his share in the plot. With typical Oriental cunning he kept himself well in the background. There was no hope of getting him to commit himself in the presence of others; yet, by hook or by crook, we must produce independent evidence that he was implicated in the treasure-hunt.
Weeks ago we had conceived the idea of snapshotting Kiazim Bey, his satellites and ourselves, digging for the hidden gold. Cameras are a luxury forbidden to prisoners of war, but Hill had made one out of a chocolate box and half a lens, to fit films which a fellow-prisoner possessed.[[21]] The drawback to the camera was its bulk—it measured about twelve inches each way—which rendered concealment difficult. He had had serious thoughts of making the attempt with this as a last resort, but found a better way. On our first night in the Colonel’s House Hill put into my hands a Vest-Pocket Kodak, belonging to Wright, which somehow or another had escaped notice at the time of the latter’s capture. Films to fit it had arrived in a parcel, and Hill had palmed them under the nose of the Turkish censor while “helping” him to unpack. He explained to me that as the films were his own, and the camera without films was only a danger to Wright, he had “borrowed” it for our purposes without asking permission. It contained three films still unexposed—which would prove three ropes for the neck of Kiazim Bey, or for that of the photographer, according as the Goddess of Fortune smiled on Britisher or Turk.
It is not easy to take a group photograph at seven paces (the limit, we reckoned, for recognition of the figures) without somebody noticing what is being done. Discovery would be dangerous, for we were now very much in the Commandant’s power. It was no new idea to the Turkish mind, as we knew from the Pimple, to get rid of a man by shooting him on the plea that he was attempting escape; and in our case the camp was more than likely to believe the excuse. Besides, there are many other Oriental ways of doing away with undesirables, and if Kiazim Bey caught us trying to trap him he would regard us as extremely undesirable. Now that we were actually up against the situation it looked much less amusing than it had done from the security of the camp.