This was excellent. It would help to keep me awake. I wondered if Hill knew, or if he had succumbed to our enemy—sleep. For perhaps half an hour I lay watching the cupboard, trying to see into the shadows beside it. Then I got out of bed and began a dazed wandering round the room, as Doc. had told me to do, peering suspiciously into corners and under the table and the beds. I heard the soft pad-pad of stockinged feet behind me and knew the watcher had come to the door. Pretending to have heard nothing, I went on with my mysterious search till the circuit of the room was completed. This brought me face to face with the attendant. He stooped at my bedside, picked up my slippers and handed them to me. Apparently I might walk about as much as I pleased. I paid no attention to him, and got back into bed. The attendant returned to his post beside the cupboard.
Half an hour later Hill began to pray aloud. It was comforting to know that he, too, was awake.
Soon, whispering in the dark corridor told me they were changing guard. I waited for about an hour, then I got up, and by the light of the miserable lamp began to write up the History of my Persecution by the English. (I always wrote this at night, after the other patients were asleep.) The new attendant came in and ordered me back to bed. I pretended not to understand him and went on writing. He took me by the arm and dragged me from the table. I managed to bump into Hill’s bed as I was being taken back to my own.
After a decent interval Hill was praying again.
I can remember hearing Hill’s last amen and listening to him bumping his head (Mohammedan fashion) at the end of the prayer. (He mixed up the rituals of every creed with a delightful impartiality.) I can remember pinching myself for what seemed æons, and then plucking at my eyelashes in an effort to sting myself into wakefulness. I saw the blackness of the corridor change to a pearly-grey—and after that I knew no more till I found myself being roughly shaken.
“Chorba! Chorba!” the attendant was saying. He had brought my morning “soup”—a bowl of hot water with a few lentils floating in it.
I sat up with a start. It was seven o’clock, and I had slept nearly two hours.
I glanced round the ward. Hill was kneeling on his bed, saying his morning prayers. The man between us was sleeping. In No. 7 bed a good-looking young fellow was sitting up, watching Hill intently. I was to come to know this man very well. He was Suleiman Surri, the son of a Kurdish chieftain and a very gallant soldier. He was perfectly sane, but his legs were already useless from a disease which entitled him to a place in the nervous ward and which might, in time, land him in an asylum. He employed his time in watching us, and was more dangerous than all the regular attendants put together; for he had an acute and logical mind, and like all good sportsmen was observant of every detail. This man reported everything we did to the doctors, and missed nothing. We bear him no grudge for he was doing his duty as a Turkish officer, and in his reports he neither exaggerated nor minimized. Indeed, we owe him a debt of gratitude for many little acts of kindness, not least among which was his insistence that the other patients should treat our affliction with the same consideration as they showed to their brother officers. Suleiman Surri came from Diabekr. He had imbibed no western “culture,” but he was one of nature’s gentlemen. Courteous, courageous, and full of a glowing patriotism, he was a man whom any country might be proud to call her son, and if Turkey has many more like him there is yet hope for her.
The other patients in the ward were nearly all either mentally deficient or epileptics. Few stayed more than a week or two. At the end of a short period of observation they went off to the asylum, or were given into the charge of relations or, if they were malingering (we saw plenty of that before we left), they were sent back to duty—and punishment.
About 8 o’clock a young doctor came in. He was dressed in the regulation white overall, and his duty, as we afterwards discovered, was to make a preliminary examination and diagnosis for submission to his chief. At his heels, looking decidedly nervous and uncomfortable, trotted our Pimple. An attendant took me by the arm and led me to the table, facing the doctor.