Caught by the Turks

by Francis Yeats-Brown

Here I caught sight of my two companions, and was able to fling them a few words through the "Yok, yok" of the sentries. They also had been separated, and put amongst criminals. Their lot had been no different to mine.

"A slight mistake has occurred," said the Prison Commandant to me, "but now you shall have one of the best rooms in the prison. Only I am afraid you will be alone there, until after your trial."

Of course I did not believe him, but I was glad that I was to be alone.

I was taken to a room on the upper floor, furnished with a bed and blanket, and with a window opening on to a corridor, where people were always passing. The Commandant had spoken the truth. It was quite a good room, as prison apartments go, and the traffic of the corridor amused me.

At nine o'clock that night I was able to get a dish of haricot beans, my first meal of the day.

Then I settled down to a month of solitary confinement.

I think I may claim to write of this torture, which exists not only in Turkey but through the prisons of the civilised world, with some expert knowledge. I use the word "torture" because it is nothing less. Solitary confinement is a punishment as barbarous and as senseless as the thumbscrew or the rack: more so indeed, for it is better to kill the body than to maim the mind. The spirit of man is more than his poor flesh; the war has reminded us of that. And if it has also reminded us that our prison systems are archaic, so much the better for the world.

At times, in gaol, a tide of pity rose in me for all life created that is caged by man.

Take a felon at one end of the scale, and a canary at the other. The felon is imprisoned for twenty years. For twenty years, less some small remission for good conduct, an abnormal brain lives in abnormal surroundings, where hope dies, and ideals fail. He has sinned against society, and therefore society murders his mind. Corporal and capital punishment, I have come to believe, are saner than the cruelties, immeasurable by "the world's coarse thumb and finger," suffered by the mind of man in solitary confinement or the common gaol. The sentimentalist who shudders at the cat and gallows forgets the worse, slow, hidden horrors that pass unseen in the felon's brain. Perhaps the sentimentalist does not realise them. Perhaps also the old lady who keeps a canary does not realise the feelings of her pet. She may think she is protecting it from the birds and beasts outside. But I feel now that I know what the canary feels. . . . However, it is difficult to argue about questions involving imagination.

I lived on hope, chiefly, during the days that followed. With nothing to read, no cutting instrument of any sort, no washing arrangements, and no one to speak to, the time passed hideously. I used to gaze at my watch sometimes, appalled at the slow passage of time. The second-hand had a horrible fascination for me. It simply crawled round its dial and each instant, between the jerks of the little hand, the precious moments of my youth were passing, beyond recall. Madness lay that way. If I had been a real criminal, I wondered, would I have repented? Unquestionably the answer was, "No!" Solitary confinement would have made me a permanent enemy of society.