This block of four houses was known as the Lower Camp, for the Armenian quarter, or Upper Camp, was on higher ground and about a mile distant from it.
The Lower Camp consisted of a row of four houses under one continuous roof. Each house contained a kitchen and two rooms on the ground floor, as well as an open space in the centre, and three bedrooms upstairs, grouped round a central landing which served as a mess-room. The orderlies lived downstairs, and the officers upstairs, two in one small room at the back, and four in each of the two larger rooms in front.
Behind the houses was an open space, of rather over a quarter of an acre in extent, bounded by the backs of the houses on one side and by walls on the other three. This was known as the garden; for, when first we got there, it contained a couple of dozen cherry-trees about as big as walking-sticks. But these did not long survive, for a quarter of an acre is not a large playground for forty active officers and a dozen equally active orderlies, to say nothing of dogs and Turkish guards.
From the upper rooms we had wide views in both directions, out across the plain and far away into the distant hills. The front faced approximately south-east, and thirty miles away we could see the fine range of mountains known as the Sultan Dagh, capped with snow until far on into the summer. From the back windows we could see the Kara-Hissar, and a number of other rocky hills, like islands in the plain; and, in the distance, rolling hills and mountains one behind another. A good deal of the plain visible between the rocks was saline, and in early summer was blue with masses of a wild flower we knew as sea lavender.
It was really a beautiful view, especially in the spring, when the land was not so colourless as at other times. The soil of the plain was very soft and friable, and much dust used to hang in suspension, giving very vivid colours to the sunsets; sunsets of golden pheasants and peacocks’ tails, and sunsets of red-hot copper. I have seen every shadow on the wall in the evening as blue as the bluest sea.
In the late summer great dust-storms used to roll up across the plain. We could see them gather on the distant hills, and come speeding towards us like banks of fog. And, as we hurriedly closed all the windows and fixed them tight, the storms would break upon the rocks, towering up high into the air in waves of brown, while the main body drove furiously towards us and lashed at the windows. A high wind would blow furiously for a few minutes, and then the storm would pass on across the plain, and rain would sprinkle the dust.
Some day that plain will be a great natural aerodrome, where people will halt on their way from Europe to the Far East.
The inhabitants of the house I was in, No. 3, were practically the same as in the house by the city wall in Angora. No. 1 was principally Mesopotamian, No. 2 chiefly the old Afion crowd, and No. 4 largely composed of the second Angora house. During the next two and a-half years many new prisoners came, and the old inhabitants had periodical times of restlessness when they shifted round, but the nuclei of the houses remained more or less constant, and the characteristic tone of each house remained practically unalterable. It is a very curious thing this tone or soul of each small subdivision of a community. I suppose every home in England has its own personal tone. Certainly each house in a public school has. Each ship has, and each regiment; and, in a larger way, each nation has, and will retain it despite Bolshevism.
We had not long been in the Lower Camp when new prisoners began to arrive. I cannot pretend to remember the order of their coming, for I kept no diary and have not a single note to help me; it does not, in any case, matter.
The yeomanry taken at Katia in the Sinai peninsula passed through on their way to a town in the north of Anatolia. We only had a glimpse of them as they passed; but we were able to supply them with a few books.