It amounts to this: the doctors in charge at Gumush Suyu took advantage of Hill’s sickness to try to break his spirit by mal-treatment of what they knew was a genuine disease (dysentery) and by putting his life in danger. No British doctor—no doctor of any nationality worthy of the name of doctor—however much he suspected a man, would do such a thing. I believe a genuine melancholic would have died under their hands. Hill’s life was saved by the fact that he was not a melancholic and by the care taken of him by Captain T.W. White, a prisoner-patient in the ward. Hill confided in White, who smuggled medicine and milk to him, and helped him in many ways. It was not till after the worst of the dysentery had been mastered by these means that the Turks began to treat him for it. But even with White’s help, Hill only just got through alive. On reaching Psamatia after his terrible journey he nearly collapsed, but he set his teeth and carried on. He deceived not only the Turkish and the British doctor[[59]] there (both of whom were intensely indignant at the treatment to which he had been subjected) but also the medical representatives of the Dutch Embassy at Constantinople,[[60]] and was sent back to Gumush Suyu and thence a few days later to Haidar Pasha for “proper treatment by mental specialists” and “to await the exchange boat.” For all their cruelty the Gumush Suyu doctors were fairly outwitted, and in sending Hill back for “proper treatment” by mental specialists they admitted not only defeat but their own black ignorance.
Hill and I blame no doctor for suspecting us of malingering. Every one of them had a perfect right to his own opinion. We expected to be “put through it” and we bear no grudge against any of the doctors—and there were plenty of them—who tried their legitimate tricks on us. Thus, when Hill was “fasting,” a thing he often did for days at a time, Mazhar Osman Bey instructed the attendants to leave his meals standing on the table by his bedside, and also drugged him to excite his appetite. What such temptation means to a starving man (even without the drugging) only those who have themselves starved can guess; but it was a fair, a perfectly fair and honourable trick. Or again, when Talha Bey offered to provide me with “an anti-toxin against the poison in my parcels” and gave me a couple of ounces of ink to drink, I downed it with a smile and said “I liked it, for it tasted powerful”—didn’t I, Talha? (And I overheard Talha tell a friend about the “experiment” afterwards, and express his sorrow for doing it, like the good-hearted fellow he was.) These, and many things like them, were legitimate tests enough, and all “in the game.” But to withhold medicine from a man in Hill’s state, to give him wrong diet, to turn him out of hospital on that wicked journey and to put his life in danger, as those disgraces to their profession undoubtedly did at Gumush Suyu—that was unfair and unpardonable. Hill is twelve stone again to-day. He is not a vindictive man, but I think it might be advisable for the Gumush Suyu doctors who “treated” him to keep out of his reach.
Had we known that our acting was to be kept up not for six weeks but for six months, I think we would have lain down and died. The delay was not due to any mistake on our part, but to a series of postponements of the arrival of the exchange ship, due, I believe, to Lord Newton’s inability to obtain from the Germans a satisfactory “safe conduct” for the voyage. No doubt the British authorities were right to hold back until the safety of the ship was assured, but there was not a prisoner of war in Turkey, sound or sick, who would not have voted cheerfully for running the gauntlet of the whole German Fleet.
To Hill and myself the wait seemed interminable. Each postponement was just short enough to encourage us to “carry on,” and somehow or another carry on we did. Indeed we had no choice. We dared not confess we were malingering, because it would have thrown added suspicion on any genuine cases of madness which might crop up amongst our fellow prisoners, and the one point in which O’Farrell had neglected to instruct us was how to “get better” without rousing suspicion. But even had we known how to “recover” I think we would still have kept it up, for Freedom was our lode-star.
It would be easy to fill another volume with the things we saw and did and suffered during those six months in the mad wards at Haidar Pasha. My own task was hard enough. I had to be ready to “rave” at a moment’s notice whenever anyone cared to bring up one of my half-dozen fixed delusions; I had to suspect poison in my food; get up at all times of the night to write the History of my Persecution by the English and my Scheme for the Abolition of England; form violent hatreds (Jacques, the unhappy Jew chemist at Haidar Pasha, used to flee from me in terror of his life), and equally violent friendships; be grandiose; sleep in any odd corner rather than in my bed; run away at intervals; be “sleepless” for a week at a time; invent mad plans and do mad things without end. I refused to answer to my own name and became either “Hassan oghlou Ahmed” (Hassan’s lad Ahmed) or “Ahmed Hamdi Pasha,” as the whim seized me. I wore a most disreputable fez, boasted of being a Turk, cursed the English, and ran away in terror from every Englishman who happened along. All the time I talked nothing but Turkish and to all appearance lived for nothing but to become a Turkish officer. The biggest criminal in Eastern Europe—Enver Pasha—was my “hero,” and I fixed a photograph of him above my bed.[[61]] And every minute of the day or night I had to be ready for a trap, and have an answer pat on my tongue for any question that might be asked. Yes! I had a hard task and a wearing one.
But hard as my task was it was nothing—it was recreation—compared to what Hill had to do. For all those terrible six months my companion in misery sat huddled up on his bed, motionless for hours at a time, crying if he was spoken to, starving (“fasting” he called it) for long periods, reading his Bible or his Prayer Book until his eyes gave out (as they used to do very badly towards the end), then burying his head on his knees, presenting to all comers a face of utter misery and desolation, and speaking not at all except to pray. By the end he had read through the Bible seven times, and could (and did) recite every Prayer in the Prayer Book by heart. To him one day was exactly like another. The monotony of it was dreadful and his self-denial in the matter of food was extraordinary. Partly from this self-imposed starvation and partly from dysentery, ‘flu’ and maltreatment in Gumush Suyu hospital, he lost over five stone in weight. His emaciation was terrible to look upon, for he became a living skeleton; yet still he kept up his acting and his courage. It was the most wonderful exhibition of endurance, of the mastery of the mind over the body, I have ever seen. Many a time I have returned of an evening to the ward, worn out by the unending strain of my own heartbreaking foolery, and ready to throw up the sponge. Always I found Hill resolutely sitting in that same forlorn, woe-begone attitude in which I had left him hours before, and always the sight of him there renewed my waning courage and steadied me to face at least “one more day of it.”
But our doings and sufferings as madmen, and the adventures, grave and gay, through which we passed when, under the cloak of insanity, we collected information of military and political interest in the hope that we would reach England before the end of the war—these things, and what we learned of the Turks and the Turkish character, are another story. I must return to the Spook and what happened at Yozgad after our departure.
CHAPTER XXX
IN WHICH WE ARE REPATRIATED AS LUNATICS
As has already been told, the War Office promised Moïse his commission as soon as we reached Constantinople. He asked for, and obtained, a month’s leave in order to return to Yozgad, nominally to collect his kit and settle his affairs there, really to find the treasure. He said good-bye to us about the middle of May. I did not see him again until July.