The only future for Turkey seems to be for the whole race to go back to the land until from the soil there rises a middle class able in the course of time to produce rulers of men. In the meantime, some European Power or America should have a mandate, not only the League of Nations’ mandate, but the Turks’ own mandate, to do for them the things they cannot do; to provide judges and governors, railway and postal controllers, and to officer a police force. Personally, I believe they would, by British or Americans, be the easiest people on earth to rule.
I must write one word on our other enemies, the Germans in Turkey. There was a German in the Taurus who boasted that, by his treatment of British prisoners, he had killed more enemies than anyone on the Western front. But he was almost alone in that respect. With few exceptions, Germans in Turkey treated Britishers in misfortune as brother white men in an Eastern land. Especially was this so in the air service, where chivalry ran higher than in any other branch of the fighting. German airmen who had brought a Britisher down always treated him well; very often they went over our lines and, at the risk of their machines or their lives, dropped a note from the captured one asking that his kit might be sent along. Then one of our machines would fly back, unmolested, and drop the kit. There were several officers in Afion who had received their kit in this way. There was also an officer who had been defeated in a fight in the air, and to whom his victor gave his own silver watch with an inscription engraved upon it commemorating the combat. The German passed through Afion long afterwards, and came to see if he could do anything more to help his late enemy. Another officer in Afion was taken prisoner in Palestine, in thin clothes, and had to proceed up to Afion, where it was cold. In the train he met a German officer who was going on leave home, and this man divided up his shirts, his socks, and his underclothes, and fitted the Englishman out. Since coming to England I have seen in the papers that a clergyman was fined £10 for giving a German prisoner some tobacco, and a farmer 40s. for giving a German prisoner half a loaf and a bottle of ginger-beer. Is there not a better way of looking at things than this? I am not pro-German, very far from it, but I am pro anything generous or kind, and I know what it is to be a prisoner.
CHAPTER XV
THE SHIP
At last the ship came, and lay off Phokea, outside the Gulf of Smyrna.
We went off in tugs, out of that lovely bay, more beautiful, to my mind, than the bay of Naples, and we went on board the Australian hospital ship “Kanowna,” where they gave us a royal welcome.
This was the 1st of November, 1918.
August the 9th, 1915—November the 1st, 1918.