A diary of my days might run as follows:
Monday. Up at 6 a.m. Skipped 200 times. Two eggs for breakfast, tried my new pekmes.[2] Read Hilal.[3] Looked out places on my hidden map. Long argument about the use of cavalry in modern war. Walk in garden. Mutton cutlets for lunch. Completed my new hammock. Argued about Free Trade. Played badminton in garden. Read philosophy with —— and ——. Sakuska[4] party with —— and —— at 7.30. Watched Polly picking opium. Dinner at 8. Soup, eggs, suet; very satisfactory. Bridge and bed.
Tuesday. Up at 6.15. Skipped 250 times, and had a boxing lesson. Painful. Two eggs for breakfast, but one bad. Hilal did not arrive. Argued about yesterday's cavalry news. Walk in garden. No meat for lunch. Bitten by mosquitoes in my hammock. Argued about Protection. Ran round the garden ten times. My wind is getting worse. Sakuska party at sevenish with —— and —— in my room. Polly was seen out walking with a posta.[5] Dinner at 8. Mutton cutlets. Chess and bed.
And so on, ad infinitum.
I had at that time come to the conclusion that I could not reach the coast from Afion-kara-hissar, so for some time I sought a mental rather than a physical escape from my surroundings. Philosophy seemed an ideal subject under the circumstances, and in the company of two friends of like mind, I made some study of "Creative Evolution." Every afternoon we used to forgather for tea, in a little room I had built, where our joint contributions provided a well-selected pabulum of cakes and jam and Bergson, so that the inner and the outer man were Platonically at one. But to plunge from le tremplin de la vie is not easy in captivity. Lack of employment cripples imagination. The average mind works best when it has practical things to do, and mine, such as it is, boggles at abstractions more quickly than it tires of talk.
When this occurred the best thing to do was to laugh. A friend and I used to laugh for hours sometimes over weak and washy stories that would hardly pass muster, even in the small hours of the morning. But they did us good. Generally, however, the time between tea and dinner was spent in learned and weighty discussions on appearance, reality, and the problems of Being and Not-being.
With my two friends
". . . the seed of Wisdom did I sow And with my own Hand arboured it to grow, But this was all the Harvest that I reaped— I came like Water and like Wind I go."
Only unfortunately I did not go. I remained firmly at Afion-kara-hissar. When philosophy failed me, the hours spent in planning escapes and concocting cyphers were those which passed most easily. But the craft of cyphers, interesting though it be, cannot be discussed in print. Like the preparation of poisons, it must remain part of the unpublished knowledge of the world, until the millennium. As regards escapes, some of us thought a great deal, and did very little. There were, however, some ingenious attempts made to get to Constantinople. One officer conceived the idea of going there to be treated for hydrophobia, and, after inflicting suitable wounds in the calf of his leg with a pair of nail scissors, he asserted that a certain dog, well known in the camp, had exhibited strange symptoms of insanity, amongst others, that of suddenly biting him in the leg. This ruse would have succeeded but for the fact that the Turks did not treat hydrophobia with any seriousness. Kismet takes no account of the Pasteur system. Short of actually snapping at someone, the officer could not have established a belief in his infection. He found it simpler to feign another ailment. Two other officers, however, of a still more picturesque turn of mind, declared that they themselves were mad, and actually hung themselves as a proof of insanity. They were found one morning by their astonished sentries suspended from a rafter, and apparently in the last stages of strangulation. Convinced that they were "afflicted of God," the Turks sent them to hospital, and carefully watched for any symptoms of suicidal mania. After various astonishing experiences, in their rôle of madmen, amongst real madmen in a Turkish lunatic ward, they were eventually exchanged.
In sheer manual dexterity, our prisoners also showed great resource. The soldiers who were employed on making a tunnel through the Taurus, to take one example, succeeded in purloining various odds and ends from the workshops where they laboured under German supervision, until they eventually were able to build for themselves a complete collapsible boat. This boat they actually tested at dead of night on a river near their camp, before setting out to reach the coast. That success did not crown their efforts was sheer bad luck. Luck, also, was against most of the forty officers who concerted a simultaneous escape from Yuzgad, and prepared for it in absolute secrecy, down to the smallest detail, for months beforehand. Some of them even made their own boots. Only eight out of the original party actually got out of the country, however. Their story, surely one of the most remarkable ever written, has recently been published.