Without my friend I should never have achieved this journey. My gratitude is a private matter, though I state it here, with some mention of my own dull illness, in order to picture in a small way the sufferings of our men from Kut. When some were sick and others hale, the death-rate was not so high, but with many parties, such as those whose ghosts I believe I saw, there was no possibility of helping each other. So starved and so utterly weary were they, that they had no energy beyond their own existence. Many men must have died with no faith left in man or God.
On arrival at Afion-kara-hissar, we were shown into a bare house. For a day I rested blissfully on the floor, asking for nothing better than to be allowed to lie still for ever and ever. But this was not to be. On the second day of our stay we noticed signs of great excitement among our guards. They nailed barbed wire round our windows, and they watched us anxiously through skylights, and counted us continually, as if uncertain whether two and two made four.
Presently the meaning of their precautions was divulged. Some English prisoners had escaped, and our captors were engaged in locking the stable door after the steeds had gone. All the prisoners in Afion-kara-hissar were marshalled in the street, and marched off to the Armenian church, situated at the base of the big rock that dominates the town. Hither we also marched, with our new companions, singing the prisoners' anthem:
"We won't be bothered about Wherever we go, we always shout We won't be bothered about. . . . We're bothered if we'll be bothered about!"
greatly to the astonishment of the townsfolk, who connected the Armenian church with massacres rather than melody. The leader of our band was a wounded officer, in pyjamas and a bowler hat (this being the sum of his possessions) who waved his crutch as a conductor's baton. (Alas! his cheery voice is stilled, for he died in hospital a year later. R.I.P.) I can still see him hobbling along—a tall figure in pink pyjamas, with one leg swinging (bandaged to the size of a bolster) and his hat askew, and his long chin stuck out defiantly—hymn-writer and hero manqué—fit leader of lost causes and of our fantastic pageant to that church.
It was a gay and motley crew of prisoners of all nationalities and conditions of life who entered its solemn and rather stuffy precincts. We were all delighted to be "strāfed" in a worthy cause. Three good men had escaped, and more might follow later.
To anyone in decent health the month we spent in the Armenian church must have been an interesting experience. Even to me, it was not without amusement. Imagine a plain, rather gloomy, church, built of oak and sandstone, with a marble chancel in the east. Two rooms opened out on either side of the altar, and there was a high gallery in the west. In the body of the building the English camped. One of the small rooms was taken by the French, the other we reserved for a chapel. The Russians chiefly inhabited the space between the chancel and the altar, but the overflow of nationalities mingled. Our soldier servants were put in the gallery. When everyone was fitted in, there was no space to move, except in the centre aisle. There was no place for exercise nor any arrangements for washing or cooking. During our stay in the church two men died of typhus, and it is extraordinary that the infection did not spread, considering the lack of sanitation. During the first night of the strafe, the Russians, accustomed to pogroms in their own country, thought there was a likelihood of being massacred, and kept watch through the small hours of the morning by clumping up and down the aisle in their heavy boots. All night long—for I was sleepless too—I watched these grave, bearded pessimists waiting for a death which did not come, while the French and English slept the sleep of optimists. At last dawn arrived, and lit the windows over the altar, and a few moments later the sunlight crept into the northern transept. Then the Russians gave up their vigil, dropped in their tracks, and at once began snoring in the aisle, like great watch-dogs.
The noise the two hundred of us made in sleeping was remarkable. Probably our nerves were rather queer. The church was never silent through the night. Some cried out continually in their slumbers, others went through a pantomime of eating. Some moaned, others chuckled. One sleeper gave a hideous laugh at intervals. One could hear it deep down in his throat, and mark it gradually bubbling to his lips until he grew vocal like some horrible hyena. But it is small wonder that the prisoners in the church were restless. The marvel is that they slept at all. Nearly all of us had lived through trying moments, and had felt the hand of Providence, whose power makes one tremble. We knew the shivers of retrospection. One officer, for instance, wounded in an attack on Gallipoli, had been dragged as a supposed corpse to the Turkish trenches and there built into the parapet. But he was none the worse now for his amazing experiences, except that he suffered slightly from deafness, as his neck had formed the base of a loophole. Then there was a man, left as dead after an attack, who recovered consciousness but not the use of his limbs, and lay helpless in the path of the Turkish retreat. For an hour the passers-by prodded him with bayonets, so that he now has twenty-seven wounds and a large gap in his body where there should be solid flesh. From the very brink of the valley of the shadow this boy of nineteen had returned to life. Again, there was a young Frenchman, who lay four days and nights between the lines, dying of the twin tortures of thirst and a stomach wound; but by a miracle he survived, and now at night, sometimes, when will lost its grip on consciousness, he would live those ninety-six hours again. Then there were the submarine crews, out of the jaws of the worst death conceivable. One crew had lived for a whole day struggling in a net at the bottom of the Dardanelles while the air became foul and hope waned, and the submarine "sweated," and depth charges exploded so close to them that on one occasion the shock knocked a teapot off a table! Hemmed in and helpless, the clammy agony of that suspense might well haunt their sleeping hours.
But on the whole our psychology was normal. Only, at nights, if one lay awake, did one realise the stress and stark horror through which the sleepers had lived. Out of four hundred officers "missing" at the Dardanelles, only some forty were surviving at Afion-kara-hissar. This fact speaks for itself.