From very early times, indeed, Angora must have been occupied. It is well supplied with water, very defensible, and situated at the junction of great caravan routes which penetrate northwards to the Black Sea and eastwards, through Sivas, to the Caucasus. In the plain to the north-west of the town there are barrows much like those on Salisbury Plain.
Many battles have been fought in the plain before Angora, and the city has often been sacked and burnt.
No place I have ever known has such an atmosphere of evil history looming in its streets. Should some prophet (or is it profit?) of psychometry venture to sleep there, she would probably die in horrible agony.
Even to the present day Angora is a great rendezvous of caravans. When we were there it was still the terminus of the railway stretching out toward central Asia, and we used to see long strings of laden camels approaching the town from far away. They pass with silent step along their wide, worn routes, tied in strings of four or five, each one’s nose to the saddle of the one ahead, and with a donkey to lead the procession. They looked as if they had walked straight out of the Old Testament, and many of the men with them looked much more like what the Patriarchs must have been than the benevolent old gentlemen in stained glass windows can do.
Kurds we used to see, and Turks, and men of tribes we could not place. Generally they wore huge astrakhan hats of black, curly lamb’s wool, and as a rule their broad belts were stiff with daggers and pistols, with generally a rifle slung across their shoulders as well. I often used to think what a wonderful experience it was for our untravelled men to see these strange people from the back of beyond. Strings of camels used to penetrate the dim, winding lanes of the city, and nasty, snarling, tusky creatures they were to dodge about among. But the real gathering place of the caravans was a trampled space of many acres which lay out beyond the railway station. A Golgotha it was, a place of skeletons and skulls. For centuries, for millenniums, perhaps, it had been the place where men and camels met and exchanged the news of Asia, mostly of wars and rumours of wars, of invasions, murders, massacres, the sack of cities, and tales of brigands in the hills. For all these mountain roads are infested by armed bands, even to the present day.
In the town itself there are two or three fairly good streets, paved with cobble-stones, and flanked by small boutiques, but most of the streets are narrow gullies; steep, winding, and dim. The houses have usually stables on the ground floor, while the stories above project and shut out the light; so much so that it is quite a feature of these thread-like lanes to find each house built with one shoulder thrust out, facing half-right one side of the street, half-left the other, and enabling the windows to collect some of the light which falls along the lane.
I think, between us, we explored the whole town. Under Chukri Bey’s benevolent régime we had almost complete liberty, very much more than a prisoner could expect. Save that we had to be accompanied by guards, we were free to wander where we would, in the town and out of the town. We used to go shopping in the covered bazaar, where whole streets were shut up, their owners murdered. We used to explore the castle, and climb its crags. We used to take walks down the valley among the irrigated vegetable gardens. We used to walk among the hills. And through those hills some of us intended one day to walk to the sea. Not now, but in the spring.
The people were not at all hostile to us. I think they rather liked us. We used to shop a great deal. Our power to buy was limited only by our purse. But we used to shop for hours, like a pack of women in Kensington, all shopping no buying. For we had practically no money, and we had not only to buy blankets and clothes for the winter, but also to set up house, buy crockery, cutlery, cooking pots. Four bob a day, even when it still is four bob, is not much to set up house on. So we shopped much but bought little. There was a large store in the main street, run by Spanish Jews, and we used to swarm in there in a gang. A very funny sight we must have been, dressed all sorts of ways, some of us with shorts on, one young Australian, I remember, wore long pink drawers under and below his shorts and a fur cap on his head. For we wore the headgear of the country. We were advised to, to avoid exciting too much attention; and some of us wanted to acquire a set of disguise. Personally I had no other headgear of any kind, except a sort of Glengarry made of pieces of puttee stitched together. My helmet had been lost soon after I was captured. But the townsfolk did not seem to think us strange. They were remarkably polite. Several officers out for a walk one day met a man with a shot-gun, and asked to be allowed a shot. He handed over the gun; they tossed for the shot; a naval officer won, put up a woodcock and killed it.
Who, then, it may be asked, were the murderers, the people who killed about a million Armenians and quite a lot of Greeks? Well, just anybody and everybody. A Turkish peasant with a plough in his hand is a generous, open-hearted, simple fellow. A Turkish peasant with a gun in his hand is a brigand. The lower orders of the town are straightforward, simple people, but come a massacre, and they take their part. Probably things in France were not a bad parallel at the great St. Bartholomew’s Eve. And it must always be remembered that the great drive of the Armenians was a Government affair, a national policy. Turks cannot stand having power. A private soldier who becomes an N.C.O. becomes, nine times out of ten, a black-guard. An ordinary citizen who becomes an official becomes, ten times out of ten, a thief. A common man who is invited to kill his Christian neighbour, free of all danger of punishment, does so. Throughout captivity the guards were faithful mirrors of the powers above. In the time of Chukri Bey they were kind, faithful dragomen who did their best to save us from being swindled in the bazaars. In the days of his successor, their vocabulary was limited to “Yok” and “Yassak”—“no” and “forbidden.”
Beneath the surface of life in Turkey there was always a grim undercurrent of cruelty. And in that land there is more unnecessary human suffering than in any land of the world. There were dens in the town of Angora where Christian deserters—Conchies, perhaps—were kept, sometimes in chains. We used to see them marching out between their guards to work on the railway. Thin, grey, starved creatures, dying on their feet. Later on our men suffered in exactly the same way and about four-fifths of them died.