We were unshaven, unwashed, and looked utterly disreputable. For over three weeks we had been living on a very short ration of dry bread and tea. For the last three days we had eaten next to nothing, and by the 13th April we were literally starving. We sat up all night on the 12th, that our eyes might be dull when the doctors came, and we took heavy doses of phenacetin at frequent intervals, to slow down our pulses. All night we kept the windows and doors shut, and the stove red-hot and roaring, and smoked hard, so that by morning the atmosphere was indescribable. We scattered filth about the room, which had already remained a week unswept, and strewed it with slop-pails, empty tins, torn paper, and clothing. Near the door we upset a bucket of dirty water; in the centre of the floor was a heap of soiled linen, and close beside it what looked like the remains of a morning meal. Over all we sprinkled a precious bottle of Elliman’s Embrocation, adding a new odour to the awful atmosphere. An hour before the doctors were due, Hill began smoking strong plug tobacco, which always makes him sick. The Turks, being Turks, were ninety minutes late. Hill kept puffing valiantly at his pipe, and by the time they arrived he had the horrible, greeny-yellow hue that is known to those who go down to the sea in ships.
It was a lovely spring morning outside. The snow had gone. The countryside, fresh from the rains, was bathed in sunlight, and a fine fresh breeze was blowing. We heard Moïse and the doctors coming up our stairs, laughing and chatting together. Captain Suhbi Fahri, still talking, opened the door of our room—and stopped in the middle of a sentence. It takes a pretty vile atmosphere to astonish a Turk, but the specimen of “fug” we had so laboriously prepared took his breath away. The two doctors stood at the door and talked in whispers to Moïse.
Hill, with a British warm up to his ears and a balaclava on his tousled head, sat huddled motionless over the red-hot stove, warming his hands. On the other side of the stove I wrote furiously, dashing off sheet after sheet of manuscript and hurling them on to the floor.
Their examination of us was a farce. If their minds were not already made up before they entered, the state of our room and our appearance completely satisfied them. Major Osman never left the door. Captain Suhbi Fahri tiptoed silently round the room, peering into our scientist-trapping slop-pails and cag-heaps, until he got behind my chair, when I whirled round on him in a frightened fury, and he retreated suddenly to the door again. Neither of them sought to investigate our reflexes—the test we feared most of all—but they contented themselves with a few questions which were put through Moïse in whispers, and translated to us by him.
They began with me.
Major Osman. “What are you writing?”
Self (nervously). “It is not finished yet.” The question was repeated several times; each time I answered in the same words, and immediately began writing again.
Major Osman. “What is it?”
Self. “A plan.” (Back to my writing. More whispering between the doctors at the door.)
Major Osman. “What plan?”