“Now,” said the Spook, “what you fear is that one or more of these fellows will escape while out hunting, and then you will get into trouble with the War Office for allowing them to hunt in the face of orders. If you take my advice, nothing of this will happen. Constantinople will not know. I shall arrange everything for you. You need only concern yourself with Maule—I shall see to the rest. Go to Maule AT ONCE. Tell him of the standing order. Say you had overlooked it when you gave permission for the Club, but that you will not go back on that permission now, although it may get you into trouble, if he will meet you halfway. Then ask him for his parole not to escape while out hunting, and tell him you expect him to hold himself responsible that none of the others in the Hunt Club will use it as a means to escape. If you do this I guarantee everything will be all right. But if you persist in your decision to withdraw your promise, you will be helping OOO & Co. and will have extra difficulty in finding the treasure.”
The séance ended about 3.30 p.m. The Pimple said he had no time to tell us anything. He went off hotfoot to the Commandant. By 6.30 he was back. He burst into our room in great excitement as we were starting dinner, and cried out:
“It is all over! Wonderful! Wonderful! It is marvellous!”
“What is wonderful?” we asked.
Then Moïse remembered that he had been forbidden to tell us of the Spook’s advice. His face was a study.
“What is wonderful?” we repeated.
“The—the beautiful lady,” he stammered. “She—she was very kind to me! The Spook—the Spook introduced us.” He plunged into a long and confused story, to which we listened with the utmost solemnity, of a superlatively beauteous damsel whom he said he had discovered under the Spook’s guidance in one of the back streets of Yozgad.
At a later séance he asked for permission to tell us the whole story. The Spook gave it. We then learned that the Commandant had gone to Colonel Maule at once, and carried out the Spook’s instructions. The Colonel had gladly given his own parole not to escape whilst out hunting, and had added that as President of the Club he had already taken a similar parole from all other members of the Hunt, and therefore the Commandant might be quite easy in his mind that the privilege he had granted would not be abused!
This was one of a number of coincidences which greatly added to the renown of our Spook. Colonel Maule had taken these paroles from our fellow-officers after we had left the camp, and neither Hill nor I knew anything about them. We could almost equally well have persuaded Kiazim Bey to let his promise stand without sending him to Maule at all, and our object in sending him was to get a playful smack at our Senior Officer by putting him on parole as a quid pro quo for the paroles he had taken out of us. Indeed, this was why the Spook limited Kiazim’s attentions to the Colonel, who we knew had no intention of escaping, and forbade interference with the rest of the camp. But after Maule’s statement, following so naturally on the Spook’s promise, nothing on earth would have convinced Kiazim that it was Maule himself (and not the Spook acting through him) who had put the others on parole. The incident became for the Turks one more marvellous example of our Spook’s power of controlling the minds of others, and in the face of this experience Kiazim readily believed that the Spook would keep Constantinople in ignorance of his disobedience to orders. So permission was graciously granted, and the Hunt Club became one of the institutions of Yozgad. The authors of “450 Miles to Freedom” called it “the most useful” of the concessions granted at Yozgad. “Some of the happiest recollections of our captivity,” they say, “are those glorious early mornings in the country, far away from the ugly town which was our prison. Here, for a few brief hours, it was almost possible to forget that we were prisoners of war.” Hill and I are very glad of that!
It is of course possible that the Commandant would have disobeyed his own Government without the interference of Hill and myself. Perhaps the camp could have saved the position off its own bat. Perhaps the parole not to escape would have been sufficient of itself to induce the Commandant to disobey his own War Office. But we doubt it very much. There were other factors that counted more in his decision. These were, his belief that Constantinople would never know, his fear that if he angered the camp escapes would certainly take place, and his dread lest the Spook communication about the treasure be “blocked” by ranging the thought-waves of the camp against himself and on the side of OOO.