The ghosts of the prisoners of the Tower, or of the Bastille, could they revisit earth, would undoubtedly have found themselves more at home in the Military Prison, Constantinople, than anywhere else in the world. The dark ages were still a matter of actuality in the dark dungeons of Constantinople in 1918. To be tried, for instance, was there considered something very up-to-date. Most prisoners were not tried, until their sentence was nearly over, when they were formally liberated.
After a month of solitary confinement, and a week of confinement with the Bulgarian, which was an even worse travail of the spirit, I received the joyful news that the preliminaries for my court-martial were almost complete.
I attended this first sitting with the thrill of a debutante going to a ball. I determined to make up arrears of talk. And I did. I began at the beginning of my life, sketched my education, and came by easy stages to my career as an officer in the Indian Cavalry. The clerk who recorded my evidence wrote for two hours without pause or intermission, but it is worthy of record that at the end of that time we had only reached the point where an officer of the Psamattia fire brigade, hearing, as I thought, a suspicious movement on the roof of the house across the street, kept a stern and steadfast gaze in our direction, while we crouched trembling under cover of the parapet. At this point the proceedings were adjourned.
But the Court had let fall a useful piece of information. Robin was back in prison, but was being kept even more secret and secluded than I.
However, love laughs at locksmiths, and it takes more than a Turkish sentry to defeat a persevering prisoner. We sighted each other in passages, we met in wash-places, we flipped notes to each other in bits of bread, or sent them by a third party concealed in cigarettes. By such means, I learnt Robin's remarkable story. . . . After being caught at Malgara, ten days after his first escape, he was taken back to the Central Gaol, where he was treated as a Turkish deserter and given nothing but black bread to eat. He thereupon went on hunger strike for three days, and alarmed the Turks by nearly dying in their hands. Later he was allowed to purchase a liberal diet, including even wine and cigars, which he declared were necessary to his health, but his constitution being enfeebled by privation, he developed alarming swellings over his face and scalp, which were probably due to some noxious ingredient of the hair-dye he had used. In this condition he was sent to hospital, and from hospital he escaped again. A Greek patient was his accomplice.
Giving this man ten pounds to buy a disguise with, he made an appointment with him for nine o'clock outside the German Embassy (!) and then set out on his adventures dressed in a white night-shirt. How he eluded the sentries is a mystery to me, although I inspected the place after the armistice. Patients were then saying (Turks, who are sometimes sportsmen, among them): "Here is where a British officer escaped. Thus and thus did he climb—past the sentries—along that buttress—down into the street hard by the guard-house!". . . . He arrived punctually at nine o'clock at the German Embassy, in his night-shirt. But the Greek accomplice was not there. He was at that moment drinking and dicing with Robin's money. For half an hour Robin waited for him by a tree in the shadows of a side street leading to the sea. The few people who passed him stared hard, and then moved nervously across to the other pavement. They thought he was a madman.
Robin, I think, felt he was a madman too. In his present situation and dress, detection was only a matter of time. However, chance might be kind and send him a disguise. Cold and disconsolate, he ascended the main road that led to the top of the Grand Rue de Pera, and taking his way through the traffic, dipped down into the ruins beyond. The saint who protects prisoners must have guided that tall white figure, that paddled across the busy town. . . . And more, once he was hiding in the ruins, the saint must have sent along the small boy who passed close to him in that lonely spot of cypresses and desolation. All-unknowing of the fate that awaited him behind the angle of the wall, the small boy strode sturdily along, thinking perhaps of the nice bran-bread and synthetic coffee that awaited him for supper. Robin pounced out of the shadow, and seized him by the scruff of the neck. . . . The victim instantly began to blubber.
"Give me all your clothes," said Robin.
"Who are you?" sobbed the little boy.
"Brigand," said Robin shortly.