At the cost of a good deal of time, temper, needles and thread, we had each succeeded in making ourselves a pack: to furnish the canvas we sacrificed our valises. Up till almost the last night, however, we were busy repeatedly cutting off straps and sewing them on again in a different place, in a wild endeavour to persuade our equipment to ride with a reasonable degree of comfort.
Food was an item of vital importance in any plan of escape, and we had decided to follow the example of Keeling's party and pin our faith mainly to a ration of biscuits. We had also for some months past been collecting from our parcels all tinned meat, condensed milk, and chocolate.
We brought our biscuit-making to a fine art. One of the ground-floor rooms had been set apart as the officers' shop for carpentry and bootmaking—for we had long taken to making our own furniture and repairing our own boots. Here then was started the "Bimbashi"[7] Biscuit Department of Escapers, Limited. At one bench would be Grunt and Johnny busily engaged in the uncongenial task of taking the stalks off sultanas, and the pleasanter one of eating a few. At another stood Perce with his bared forearms buried deep in a mixture of flour, sugar, and sultanas, to which from time to time Nobby would add the requisite quantities of water and eggs. The Old Man presided at the scales and, weighing out the dough into lumps sufficient for twenty biscuits, passed them on to Looney. Armed with rolling-pin, carving-knife, and straight-edge, the latter would flatten out each lump until it filled up the inside of a square frame which projected slightly above the bench to which it was fixed. When a level slab had been obtained, the ruler would be placed against marks on the frame and the slab cut five times in one direction and four in the other. It then only remained to transfer the twenty little slabs to boards, prick them with any fancy pattern with a nail, and send them to be baked by one of our orderlies. The biscuits were each about the size of a quarter-plate and half an inch thick, and when cooked weighed five to the pound, and were as hard as rocks. Their best testimonial was that, without being kept in tins, they remained perfectly good for six months.
The biscuit-making concern was run regardless of expense. A pound of flour was costing at that time two shillings, sugar ten shillings, sultanas five; and eggs three pence apiece. (These, by the way, were only about half of what we soon after found ourselves paying at Yozgad.) The final cost was something like half-a-crown a biscuit.
For their escapes Keeling and his companions had decided, if questioned, to say that they were a German survey party, and for this purpose had forged a letter purporting to come from the commandant of the Angora Division, and ordering all whom it might concern to help them in every way. They had written to say this letter had been of the greatest assistance to them. As we were going in a different direction, we thought that the same story would serve again. Grunt, being the best Turkish scholar of the party, accordingly drafted a suitable legend in a crisp style such as might be expected to emanate from Enver Pasha's pen; while Johnny, aided by infinite patience and a bit of blue carbon paper, set to work and produced a faithful imitation of an office stamp found on a Turkish receipt. We hoped that the elaborated lettering of such a crest would be as little intelligible to the average Ottoman as it was to ourselves, but as a matter of interest decided to show the original to our Greek interpreter and casually ask its meaning. It was as well we did so, for it was the stamp of the Prisoners-of-War Camp, Changri.
After this unfortunate set-back, our pair put their heads together, and finally evolved a design of their own, bearing the inscription: "Office of the Ministry of War, Stamboul."
All this time, of course, we were subjecting ourselves to a course of rigorous training—football, running in the early mornings, Müller's exercises, and cold baths. We spent half the day walking round and round the exercise-field, wearing waistcoats weighing twenty pounds. These, if disclosed from under the coat, would have reminded any one but a Turkish observer of one of those advertisements of a well-known firm of tyre-makers; for each waistcoat was lined with a series of cloth tubes filled with sand.
Nobby, who detested sewing more than any of us, went to the trouble of making a practice rucksack holding sixty pounds of earth. The whole of our last few weeks at Changri, one may say, were spent by the party in preparing for the escape in one way or another.