ALIAS FRITZ RICHTER

Photograph of Captain Alan Bott, taken in Constantinople while he was a prisoner. Captain Bott signed it in the name of "Fritz Richter, First Lieutenant in the German Flying Corps." While escaping, he was able, by means of the false signature, to convince a Turkish gendarme that he was a German officer wearing mufti.

EASTERN NIGHTS—AND FLIGHTS

A Record of Oriental Adventure

BY

CAPTAIN ALAN BOTT

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1919

COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF
TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES,
INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

TO

D. O. V.

Transcriber's Note: Inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation have been retained as printed.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Eastern Nights—and Flights

PROLOGUE

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

Most of us who were at close grips with the Great War will remember the habit of speculation about life on the far side of the front. Somewhere beyond the frontier of trenches, we realized, were our opposite numbers—infantrymen, gunners, aviators, staff officers, mess orderlies, generals, captains, lance-corporals—each according to character, rank, and duties, and to the position he occupied by reason of ability, courage, initiative, old age, self-advertisement, or wire-pulling. We saw them through a glass, darkly—a glass that, being partly concave, partly convex, and almost impenetrable throughout, showed us our opposite numbers as distorted reflections of ourselves.

We knew well that a journey through, round, or over this glass would take us into an unnatural world where we should be negative instead of positive, passive instead of active, useless scrap-iron instead of working parts of a well-constructed machine. Yet we never considered the possibility of being obliged, in that unreal world, to live a life of impotence. Our companions, now, might have the bad luck to be dragged there; but our sense of normality would not let us reckon with such an unusual happening in our own case.

And then, perhaps, one fine day or night found us isolated in an attack, or shot down in an air fight; and we would be in the topsy-turvy country of captivity. Some of us, who passed into this country from the curious East, tumbled head over heels upon adventures fantastic as those of any imaginative explorer of the wonderland Through the Looking Glass of fancy.

We were a small band of six scout pilots, one monkey-mascot, and a team of Baby Nieuports, hangared in a large meadow that was the nearest aerodrome to the then front in Palestine.

Slightly to the south was the one-time German colony of Sorona, with houses empty but for ugly furniture and ornaments, left behind when the routed Turco-Germans scurried up the coast-line after Allenby's victory at Gaza. A few miles north was the trench-line, a few miles west were row upon row of sand-dunes, a sea of that intense blue which is the secret of the Syrian coast, and the ancient port of Jaffa, misnamed "The Beautiful."

The particular task of our detached flight of Nieuports was always to be ready, between dawn and sunrise, to leap into the air at a moment's notice and climb toward whatever enemy aircraft were signalled as approaching from the north. Usually we flew in pairs, for the work was of the tip-and-run variety, and needed, above all things, speed in leaving the ground and speed in climbing; and a larger party would have been slower, because of the exigencies of formation flying.

"A A A four H.A. flying S. toward Mulebbis 10,000 feet A A A," would be telephoned by an anti-aircraft battery. The bell (made out of a Le Rhone cylinder) would clang, the "standing by" pilots would fasten caps and goggles as they raced to their buses, the mechanics would swing the propellers into position as the pilots climbed into the cockpits, the engines would swell from a murmur to a roar; and, three minutes after the sentinel-operator had scribbled the warning, two Nieuports would be away across the sun-browned grass and up into the cool air. A climbing turn, at about 100 feet, and they would streak upward, at an angle of 45 degrees, to the air country above Mulebbis. And the next two pilots on the waiting list would come within easy reach of their flying kit.

Even with the fast-climbing Nieuport it was difficult indeed to reach a height of 10,000 to 12,000 feet in time to get to grips with machines which were at that height while we were reading month-old newspapers on solid earth. But practice and coöperation with anti-aircraft gunners, by means of directional shots, enabled us to find the black-crossed trespassers often enough to inoculate them with a wholesome fear of venturing any distance beyond the lines.

At the period of which I write—March to May, 1918—it was not too much to say that enemy machines in Palestine, even when in superior force, never fought our Bristol Fighters, S.E. 5's, or Nieuports, unless there was no chance of keeping at a safe distance. Once, three of us were able to chase five German scouts and one two-seater for twenty miles over enemy country until they reached their hangars at Jenin, out-dived us because of their heavier weight, and landed without the least pretence of showing fight; while we relieved our feelings by looping the loop over their aerodrome.

Those were pleasant days, in pleasant surroundings. Our tents were pitched in an orange grove, which provided shade from the midday sun, privacy from the midnight pilfering of Bedouins, and loveliness at all times. The fruit had just ripened, and by stretching an arm outside the tent-flap, one could pick full-blooded giant oranges. Passing troops bought at the rate of five a penny the best Jaffas, stolen from our enclosure by young imps of Arabs.

In the heat of afternoon the four of us who were not waiting for the next call would mooch through the orange-trees for a siesta; and in the cool of evening we would drive to the sands for a moonlight bathe in the Mediterranean. For the rest, one could always visit Jaffa, where were some friendly nurses, and a Syrian barber who could cut hair quite decently. Apart from these attractions, however, and the mud hovel that may or may not have been the house of Simon the Tanner, Jaffa was just like any other town in the Palestine zone of occupation, with its haphazard medley of Arabs, Jews, and Syrians, all bent on getting rich quick by exploiting that highly exploitable person, the British soldier.

On the evening before my capture I bathed in the company of a German cadet; a circumstance which I thought unusually novel, not foreseeing that my next bathe would also be in the company of a German, although under very different conditions.

One Offizierstellvertreter Willi Hampel had been shot down and captured, and was in the prisoners' compound at Ludd. It was decided that before forwarding Hampel to Egypt, the best way to milk him of information would be for another aviator to discuss aeronautics on a basis of common interest; and I was detailed for the duty. This rather went against the grain; but Willi knew neither French nor English, and I was the only pilot in the brigade who could speak German, so that there was no alternative. From his cage I motored Willi to lunch in our mess, showed him our machines and our monkey, and even took him to tea with an agreeable compatriot, a beautiful German Jewess who was the landlady of some houses at Ramleh.

The information he let slip was not very illuminating—a few truthful statements about machines, pilots, and aerodromes, and a great many obvious lies. But his opinions on our aviators and machines were interesting. Our pilots were splendid, but too reckless, he thought. As for the machines, the Bristol Fighter was the work of the devil, and to be avoided at all costs; the R.E.8 might safely be attacked unless it were well protected; the British single-seaters were good; but the German Flying Corps regarded the B.E. types as sehr komisch.

As Willi was well-behaved and occasionally informative, and as he had been a flying contemporary of mine on the Western front in 1916 and 1917, I took him for a sea-bathe before he went back to his cage, while taking the precaution to swim closely behind him.

Next day the heat was intense, so that I was glad indeed when the arrival of an A.E.G. from the north gave me the chance to climb to the cool levels of 8,000 to 10,000 feet, flying hatless and in shirt-sleeves. The trespassing two-seater spotted us, and retired before we could reach its height.

But the next turn of my flying partner and me, in the late afternoon, brought us the good fortune of sending a Hun bus to earth—from sheer fright and not out of control, unfortunately—in open country. I was well content on landing, for the atmosphere was cooler and almost pleasant, and my day's work should have been done.

But a pony, a monkey, and mischance conspired to send me beyond the lines for the third time that day, and the last time for many months. Instead of leaving the aerodrome at once I remained to play with Bohita, the marmoset mascot. Ten minutes later the bell clanged a warning. One of the waiting pilots raced to his machine, and was away; but the other, mounted on an energetic little pony, was chasing a polo ball. The pony, being jerked backward suddenly, reared up and threw its rider. Seeing that he must be hurt, or at any rate shaken, I climbed into his machine and sent word that I would replace him, so that no time should be wasted. It was then about one hour before sunset.

The first Nieuport had a good start, but the pilot was new to the game, and failed to see the white puffs from directional shots fired by the nearest A.A. battery. The last I saw of his bus was as it climbed due east, with the apparent intention of sniffing at a harmless R.E.8 to see if it were a Hun, and without noticing when I continually switch-backed my machine fore and aft, as a signal that a real Hun was near. I therefore left what should have been my companion craft to its own amusement, and climbed toward the British anti-aircraft bursts.

At about 9,000 feet I reached their level, and picked up the intruder—a gray-planed two-seater of the latest Rumpler type. When I was still some 800 yards distant its pilot swerved round, and, holding down his machine's nose for extra speed, raced back northward rather than be forced to fight. I streaked after it, beyond the trenches.

Now the Rumpler was faster than my Nieuport, but was slower on the climb. My only chance of catching up, therefore, was first to gain height and then to lose it again in a slanting dive, with engine on, in the direction of the Boche; and to repeat the tactics. Although each dive brought me a little closer, this method was a slow business. I remember passing Kilkilieh and seeing Shechem, and still being outside machine-gun range of the black-crossed bus ahead.

It was at a spot west of Shechem, and about twenty miles from the lines, that I got my chance. By then we had nosed down to 6,000 feet. Being able to manœuvre twice as quickly as the big two-seater, the little Nieuport was soon in a "blind-spot" position, and I could attack from a sideways direction, opening fire at 80 yards. The Rumpler dived almost vertically out of the way, and I overshot.

I was turning again, when from above came a succession of raps—tatatatatat, tatatat, tatatatatat—the unmistakable tap-tapping of aërial machine-gun fire. I looked up, and saw three scouts dropping toward me from a cloud-bank.

Swerving right round on an Immelman turn I managed to get underneath the nearest scout as it flattened out. I had just pulled down my top-plane Lewis gun, and was preparing to fire a long burst upward into the belly of the scout, when—poop!—my petrol tank opened with a dull thud. The observer in the Rumpler had fired from a distance of more than 300 yards (far outside what is the normally effective range for aërial fighting), and some of his bullets had ripped through my tank—the only circumstance which, at that moment, could have put my Nieuport out of action. The petrol gushed over my trousers, and swirled round the floor of the cockpit.

I turned south, and was ready to make a last-hope effort to reach the trenches before all the fuel had disappeared, when I received a second shock. On looking over the side, I was horrified to find that underneath the tank the fuselage was black and smouldering. Next instant some wicked-looking sparks merged into a little flame, licking and twisting across the centre of the fuselage.

A thrill of fear that was so intense as to be almost physical went through me as I switched off, banked the bus over to the left as far as the joystick would allow, and, holding up its nose with opposite rudder, went down in a vertical side-slip—the only possible chance of getting to earth before the machine really caught fire.

The traditional "whole of my past life" certainly did not flash before me; but I was conscious of an intense bitterness against fate for allowing this to happen one week before I was to have returned to Cairo the Neutral, where they dined and cocktailed, and where the local staff officers filled the dances arranged for the poor dear lonely young officers on leave from the front. And I shouted blasphemies into the unhearing air.

I have no hesitation in saying that I was exquisitely afraid as the Nieuport slid downward at a great speed, for of all deaths that of roasting in an aeroplane, while waiting for it to break up, has always seemed to me the least attractive. But the gods were kind, for by the time I reached a height of 500 feet the violent rush of air—which incidentally boxed my ear painfully—had overwhelmed the flame and swept it out of existence. The fuselage still smouldered, however, and after righting the bus (now completely emptied of petrol) I lost no time in looking out for a landing-place.

This was a hopeless task. Below was rocky mountainside, contoured unevenly, and possessing neither level nor open spaces, and scarcely any vegetation. There was just one patch of grass, about fifteen yards long; and although this was much too small for a landing-ground, I chose it in preference to bouldered slopes or stony gorges.

After pancaking down to the fringe of the brown grass the Nieuport ran uphill. It was heading for a tree trunk, when I ruddered strongly to avoid a collision, swerved aside, and—crash! crack! splinter!—banged into the face of a great rock. Of what came next all I remember is a jarring shock, an uncontrolled dive forward against which instinct protested in vain, an awful sick feeling that lasted a couple of seconds, and the beginnings of what would have been a colossal headache if unconsciousness had not brought relief.

Consciousness returned dimly and gradually. First of all I saw the rock on which my head was lolling; but I had no sense of unity, nor could I feel any bodily sensations except an oppressive want of breath. I twisted my neck and looked up at the sky, and somehow realized that the sun must have set. Then I noticed, quite impersonally, that a band of ragged Arabs were climbing toward me. Most of them carried rifles, and all had pistols or knives protruding from their sashes and ammunition belts. The foremost had unsheathed a long blade, which he fingered appraisingly as he advanced at a quick walk.

CHAPTER I

PAIN, PURGATORY, AND A PLAN

As my senses became clearer the feeling of oppression in my chest grew more and more acute, and I had to struggle desperately for breath.

Yet I failed to realize that I was directly concerned in the Arabs' intentions and actions, and looked at the motley group from the detached point of view of a film spectator. They were an unkempt group, with ragged robes and dirty headdresses and straggling beards and unfriendly eyes—the sort of nomads who, during the lawless days of war would, and did, cheerfully kill travellers for the sake of a pair of boots, a dress, or a rifle. They had between them a strange variety of arms—guns of every size and shape, belts of close-packed ammunition, revolvers and bone-handled pistols, and curved knives.

And the foremost Arab continued to advance, while fingering the drawn blade of his knife. He was only a few yards distant when another and older man stopped him with a shout. The man with the shining blade answered heatedly. A general argument followed, in which most of his companions took part.

At that time my knowledge of Arabic was of the slightest, and in any case I was not in a condition to grasp the meaning of their words. Yet instinct and deductions from their pantomime made me certain that they were debating a rather debatable point, namely—whether somebody should be killed and stripped, or merely stripped, or whether it would be more worth while to hand him over alive to the Turks, in return for baksheesh.

And again I did not regard myself as interested in the deliberations, nor was I the least bit afraid, being still under the spell of cinematographic detachment. When the Arabs' argument was settled beyond question by the sudden appearance, on a near-by slope, of a detachment of Turkish soldiers, I regarded the scene much as if it had portrayed a film sheriff, with comic sheepskin-booted posse, riding to rescue the kidnapped maiden from the brigands.

The dozen Arabs stood sullenly aside as four mounted officers arrived, followed by a body of running soldiers.

"Anglais?" said a young officer as he dismounted.

And the mental effort of asking myself if I were English brought back most of my senses and understanding, and I discovered that I was intensely uncomfortable. The struggle for breath was almost insupportable, a searing pain permeated my right thigh, my head felt as if it were disintegrating. I tried to move, but an implacable weight held firmly everything but my head, one arm, and one leg. "Anglais?" repeated the young officer. I tried to speak, but failed, and could only nod, miserably.

The soldiers got to work behind me; and first the weight on my chest, then that on my thigh, lifted. Two officers helped me to rise, and one of them felt my face.

"Not so bad. I am a doctor. I will bandage it," he said, in French.

I searched to find what was not so bad, and discovered that all this while I had been seeing through the right eye only, for the left was screwed up tightly, with a swollen forehead overhanging it. When the doctor let go my arm to fetch some dressing from his horse, I collapsed, because one thigh would not perform its work.

I fell among pieces of the most completely wrecked aeroplane I have ever seen. After hitting the rock the machine had evidently crashed to starboard, so that I was thrown sideways over the top plane. The starboard wings were matchwood, the struts on the port side had snapped, and the fuselage was twisted into a wide curve, a corner of the rock having cut through one longeron and bent another. None of the main parts—planes, fuselage, centre-section, rudder, or elevator—was whole, and all were intermingled with bits of wire, splinters of wood, and tattered fabric. As for the engine, it had fallen clean out, and was partly buried in earth. It was the engine that had weighed so painfully on my right thigh, while the forward end of the fuselage pinned down my chest.

I thought of burning these remains by throwing a lighted match among them suddenly, but refrained, firstly because I had no match, and secondly, because there was nothing worth the burning. The soldiers had already taken the instruments from the dashboard; and one of them, I noticed, had broken off the joystick for a souvenir.

The doctor bound up my face and helped me to mount a mule, and we left the Arabs to their scowls of disappointment at being cheated out of loot. All this while I had been exceptionally well treated by the officers in Turkish uniform. Not one had spoken roughly, nothing was taken from me, and even my pockets were not searched. Could it be that the Turks treated their prisoners well instead of badly? Even on the British side of the lines we heard stories of how Turkish soldiers had killed British wounded, how Turkish officers had threatened newly taken prisoners with death if they did not give up all they possessed, and how everybody's money and most people's boots were stolen immediately they were captured; although we did not hear anything like the damnable truth of the Turks' atrocities. The mystery soon explained itself.

"Est-ce-que les Anglais viendront bientôt?" said the young officer who had first spoken.

"Qui sait?"

"Moi, je l'espère bien, parce que je suis Arménien. Nous sommes tous des Anglais ou des Arabes."

I had been lucky enough to fall among Arabs and Armenians, whose officers were, one and all, pro-British. They were a labour unit, explained the young Armenian, and their work was to make roads and tracks across the hill-country. Like all the conscript Armenians, Greeks, and Jews, and most of the Arabs, they had not been sent to the fighting front because most of them would have deserted to the British at the first opportunity. The doctor who had dressed my face was a Jew. The commandant, whom I would meet at the camp, was an Arab, and had an intense love for the British. But he would not dare pretend to show too much friendliness, because some of the men acted as spies for the Turks.

The camp sprawled in a hollow between two hills without any semblance of order. The men were squatting at their evening meal, in little parties, each man dipping his fingers into the large bowl in the centre of his group. The Arab commandant, a fat man with a good-humoured face, was in front of his tent, awaiting our arrival.

He looked at me with grave curiosity on learning that I was English, and, through an interpreter, greeted me ceremoniously. He was sorry indeed, he said, for my misfortune, and he hoped my hurts were not serious. He had little enough hospitality to offer, but it would be a privilege to make me as comfortable as possible. Would I honour the officers by joining them at dinner?

Over a meal of soup, bread, rice, and raisins, I was asked guardedly about my views on the duration of the war, the conditions of life in that part of Palestine occupied by the British, and, above all, if the British would advance soon. Every one seemed to take it for granted that the British could advance when and where they liked. I explained that the Arabs, Syrians, and Jews were very contented and on good terms with our troops; that bread, fish, and meat were cheap and plentiful; that local inhabitants were well paid for everything they sold to the British armies; that the population was overjoyed at being freed from the Turks.

Several eyes gleamed, and most of the company looked thoughtful; but no comments were passed. Those present looked at each other with side-glances, as if distrustful and afraid to speak.

But afterward, when we went outside the tent to drink our coffee by moonlight, the commandant took me aside and unburdened himself while pretending to watch the Jewish doctor rebandage my face. Was it true, he asked (the Jew acting as interpreter), that the British intended to give Arabia and part of Syria to the Arabs?

"Most certainly," I replied.

Was it true that the British were friendly to the Arabs, and gave their Arab prisoners all sorts of privileges not given to the Turkish prisoners?

"Most certainly."

The good-humoured face of the commandant grew hard as he began talking of the Turks' misdeeds. They had massacred many of the Syrian and Arab notables. They had starved to death scores of thousands. They had commandeered all the crops. They had thrown many hundreds into prison, and left them there without trial. The whole of the population hated the Turks, and were only waiting for a British victory to rise up and kill the grasping officials. When the British advanced they would receive such a welcome as conquerors had never before received in Syria.

With that he began to tell me how, after he had been taken for service from his native town of Homs, the Turks told him that if he deserted their lives would be forfeit. By merely talking to me he would be suspect. Would I be kind enough to give him my word of honour not to try to escape while in his charge? If, however, I were sent to Damascus and thought of escaping from there, I might obtain help from an Arab whose address he would give me.

As I could not walk five yards, and still felt deadly sick, I gave the parole readily enough.

The young Armenian helped me across to his tent, and put me to bed. He then wrapped himself in a blanket and lay on the floor, facing the entrance; for, he said, if I were left to sleep alone the men would creep into the tent, to steal my clothes and boots.

At about two o'clock in the morning, after a few hours of fitful sleep, I was awakened and asked to dress. A German staff officer, said the Armenian, had ridden over to see that I was sent away, fearing that the Arabs and Armenians might help me to escape.

Outside, in the moonlight, I found a young, eye-glassed lieutenant—correct, aloof, and immaculate. In atrocious French he asked if I were badly shaken, and if I thought I could ride for three hours. I did not think I could ride for three hours. He was sorry, but I really must ride for three hours. Why, then, had he troubled to ask my opinion if I could ride for three hours? He made no reply, but I heard him giving instructions to the Sanitätsunteroffizier, who had come with him, to have me put on a mule and to ride behind, while a guide led the way to Army Group Headquarters.

A shambling, decrepit mule was commandeered; and, with many a groan, I was helped on to its back. The Sanitätsunteroffizier mounted his pony, drew his revolver, and cocked it with an ostentatious click. An Arab guide took hold of my mule's reins. I said goodbye to the Arab and Armenian officers, and we moved off down a straggling track. The commandant had had no chance to give me the address of his friend in Damascus.

About fifty yards ahead I saw what looked like a Bedouin, galloping across a stretch of grass and disappearing behind a mound. And then, from the camp behind us, came a startled and furious shout: "Mein Pferd! Teufel! Wo ist mein Pferd?" The Sanitätsunteroffizier motioned our guide to turn round, and we retraced our path. The young staff officer—no longer correct, aloof, and immaculate, and with eye-glass dangling unheeded in front of his tunic—was in a loud-voiced rage. He had told "one of these brutes," said he to the Sanitätsunteroffizier, to hold his horse, and he now found that both the horse and the brute had disappeared.

I remembered the Bedouin whom I had seen riding across the patch of grass, and was infinitely amused. It appeared that the man who held the horse had already deserted twice and been recaptured. For his third attempt, who could blame him for taking as companion a German officer's horse, since Allah had sent such a wonderful gift?

And the young German raged and cursed and shouted verbal contempt for all these Asiatic "cattle," among whom it was his misfortune to live. Finally, after promising the commandant all sorts of penalties, he said he would take the best horse from the Arab officers' stable.

The Sanitätsunteroffizier and I again walked our mules along the narrow track. It was a ride that will live always vividly in my memory. The guide dragged my mule up impossible slopes, pulled it over slippery rocks that ended in an almost vertical drop of several feet, and beat it unmercifully on the several occasions when it fell forward on to its knees. Each small jolt sent an exquisite pain through my contused thigh, and my head felt as if it were being beaten by hammers. Everything seemed unreal. The piles of heaped-up stones, so common in this country of nomad Arabs, looked like monstrous gargoyles in the half-light of the moon.

After about an hour I became light-headed again, forgot I was a prisoner, forgot I was on muleback, and almost forgot that I existed. I lost consciousness of everything but the light of the moon, which appeared as a great white hanging sheet, from the other side of which sounded, far away and unnatural, the voice of the Unteroffizier, like the trickling of hidden water. Finally I fainted, and must have fallen from the mule, for when I recovered consciousness my head and arms were sore, and the German was arranging my bandages.

Refreshed by a short drink of water, I was once more pushed on to the mule's back, and continued the purgatorial journey over the rocky hillside. It was four hours after we had started when the Unteroffizier announced that a village in a small valley some quarter of a mile ahead was Arsun, the site of Group Headquarters.

I was taken to the officers' mess, where I found the eye-glassed young officer relating to two early risers—a colonel and a major—how the dirty pig-dog of an Arab had stolen his best horse. The colonel received me kindly enough; but a major, to whom I took an instant dislike, looked at my torn clothes and swollen face and laughed.

The colonel gave me wine, and offered his sympathy. He fought, he said, side by side with the British in the Boxer War, and he had the greatest regard for the English infantryman. Finding that I had flown in the battle of the Somme, he launched into reminiscences of that epic struggle, and told me how desperately hard put were the Germans not to let their retreat degenerate into a rout. Now, however (this was the period of Hindenburg's whirlwind advance toward Amiens), things were better. He believed that Hindenburg, having bled the French white, would bring about a German peace by the coming autumn. I remarked that the French were by no means bled white, and, moreover, that there were plenty of Englishmen and Americans in the world. Here the major interposed with a sneer—

"American! All through the war the Allies have clutched at straws and men of straw. First it was the Russians, then the blockade, then the British, and now that all these three have failed it is the Americans! I know the Americans well. They are all talk, bluff, and self-interest. They will make not the least difference to German invincibility."

And he began a long, boastful account of how he had outwitted the Americans and the English. In August, 1914, he said, he was on special duty in Japan. He slipped across to America, and for a time worked in the United States with Boy-Ed and Von Papen. Afterward, with Dutch papers, he shipped to Holland. When the boat was held up by a British cruiser, he convinced the stupid examining officer that he was a Dutchman.

The major proceeded to draw offensive comparisons between the Germans and the English. The German nation was magnificently organized, whereas the British leaders could scarcely be more stupid. But it was not only a question of organization. From every point of view the German was superior to the Englishman. He was braver, more intelligent, more obedient, and had a higher sense of honour. When it was a question of equal conditions the German invariably beat the Englishman. He turned to the colonel, and, speaking in German, pointed out as a proof of his contentions that I myself had been shot down by a German. Also speaking in German, which appeared to surprise the major, I mentioned that I had been fighting with not one but four German machines after a German pilot had run away over twenty miles of his own territory, that the German aviators on the Palestine front invariably fled from the British unless in greatly superior force, that the proportion of machines shot down in Palestine was about five Germans to one British, and, moreover, that when a German officer had the misfortune to be captured he was treated as a gentleman, and was not made a target for uncivil taunts.

The major rang the bell, and ordered me to be taken to a tent by the cookhouse.

Once more I lay down. This time I was allowed to sleep until awakened by the myriads of flies that swarmed round the cookhouse while lunch was being prepared. I hung about the tent, miserably and dejectedly, for two hours. Then a lieutenant arrived and announced that the major would be graciously pleased to accept an apology for my lack of respect.

If, I replied, the major would express his regrets for having spoken offensively of the English, I would be delighted to exchange apologies with him. The lieutenant and I treated each other to punctilious salutes, and he withdrew; and that was the last I heard of the ill-mannered major.

In the afternoon, after receiving some bread and coffee, I was sent away on ponyback, with a German cavalryman as escort. This trooper was friendly and garrulous. He pronounced himself a Social Democrat and an Internationalist. He was a good German, he claimed, and had fought for Germany since 1914; but he had neither hatred nor contempt for Germany's enemies. It was the Ministers, the politicians, the professors, the journalists, and the general staffs who had manufactured hatred. The German civilians and non-combatant troops were blinded by racial feeling; but, according to my Social Democrat guard, not so the fighting man. He liked and respected many of his officers, especially the colonel whom I had met; but after the war the proletariat would see that they, and the class they represented, discarded their arrogance and ascendancy. And, either ignorant or unmindful of Germany's crimes, this half-baked idealist looked forward with confidence to a wonderful peace that would send him back to his trade of printing, and would bring about an immediate heart-to-heart reconciliation of Germany and the rest of the world.

With such debating-society talk I was distracted from the dull ache in my thigh and the spasmodic pains that came with every jolt from the pony. The heat was intense on my uncovered head, and the flies collected in their hundreds each time we halted to allow a party of ragged Arabs, mounted on camels or donkeys, to pass round some bend of the track ahead of us.

The country was fairly level, however, and it was not long before we reached my next stage—a field hospital corresponding approximately to the British casualty clearing station. There my face and thigh were dressed, and for the first time since capture I could indulge in the glorious luxury of a wash. The doctor in charge complained that the hospital had been machine gunned by a British aeroplane, but he seemed surprised when I told him that the red crescent painted on the side of the building could not be seen by an aviator. He agreed to mark a large red crescent on the ground.

My destination, it appeared, was the Austrian hospital at Tul-Keran, whither I was forwarded by motor-ambulance, with several wounded Turks. It proved to be a dirty, insanitary building, such as the British would scarcely have used as a billet; but at all events it provided a much-needed place of rest.

Most ex-prisoners will agree that the interval when they were first left alone for any length of time was a first-class substitute for purgatory. All at once the realization of being cut off and under most galling restraint becomes vivid and intense. The thought of irrevocable separation from one's fighting companions, and of what they must now be doing, leaves one utterly miserable and dejected.

Fifteen miles to the south our Nieuports would be waiting for the next tip-and-run call to flight. It would, perhaps, be the turn of Daddy and the Babe, who were waiting around the hangars, while the rest trooped across to tea in the orange grove. Soon all of them would be driving along the wired-over, sandy road to the coast. And here was I, herded with unclean Turks in a crowded, unclean room, while the hot sun streamed through the window and made one glad to get protection from it by hiding under an unclean blanket.

Only fifteen miles to the south. And the coast was fifteen miles to the west. The coast? Why, a friend of mine, after he was forced to land in the sea, had effected a marvellous escape by hiding among the sand-dunes during the daytime, and during the night alternately swimming, walking, and rolling through the shallow water on the fringe of the sands, until he had passed the Turkish trench-line. Only fifteen miles; and from aërial observation I knew that the country between Tul-Keran and the sea was more or less flat.

I resolved that when my leg allowed me to walk, I would somehow leave the hospital early one night, try to reach the shore before dawn, hide during the following day, and then run or swim to the British out-posts.

CHAPTER II

THE FLIGHT THAT FAILED

Tul-Keran hospital was altogether beastly. After my head had been shaved until it looked like a door-knob, I was taken to a sheetless, dirty-blanketed bed, in an overcrowded ward that reeked of unwashed flesh. The beds were so close that one had to climb into them from the foot.

On my right was a Syrian doctor with a smashed leg; and on my left, not two feet away, was a young Turkish officer with aggravated syphilis, who groaned and complained all day long. When not in pain he read pamphlets, which had been distributed to all the patients, explaining just how England had shamefully attacked the peace-loving Turks and Germans without warning.

The two windows were both broken, and through them the scorching sun of Samaria poured all day long. Tul-Keran, being in low-lying country, is infested throughout the hot summer by legions of flies. In the hospital they settled in swarms on beds, faces, food, hands, and arms, and flew at random from one diseased patient to another. At night they gave place to hordes of mosquitoes, which pounced upon and bit every particle of a man's body left exposed. The sole relief, by day or by night, was to hide one's head under the filthy blankets; and then the closeness and the reek made one gasp for breath.

But worst of all was my intense agony of mind. As I lay in bed, I thought of my squadron going through its daily round a few miles southwest of me; of my last air fight, and whether I might not have avoided capture by adopting different tactics; of what the sinister word "missing" would convey to various people in England and France; of whether I was destined to spend months or years in captivity; and of the general beastliness of everything. Above all, I railed, uselessly and illogically, against Fate.

The Austrian Staff in the hospital offered whatever kindnesses they could, and treated me rather better than they treated the Turks. Each morning the doctor brought the Vienna Reichspost, and, after a passing glance at my distorted features (I was known as "the Englishman with the face"), stayed to chat for several minutes. He was charming and decorative, with his light blue uniform, his curled moustache, and his medals; but I never once saw him give medical attention to patients beyond ordering medicine or saying invariably that each man was progressing wonderfully well.

A good-hearted but race-proud Austrian priest often stopped by my bedside for a friendly argument. He performed several services for me, such as changing Egyptian notes almost at their full value, instead of at the ruinous rate of exchange offered by Turkish banks and traders.

He was, however, a rabid hater in one connection—he could find no words bad enough for the Czechs and other subject-races of Austria-Hungary. To him it seemed a crime that they should be discontented with the suppression of racial sentiments and institutions, and should agitate for self-expression.

"They must either be loyal to us or cease to exist," he said.

Once I mentioned inadvertently that I had met Másaryk in London and admired him; and that was the end of my friendly relations with this otherwise kind-hearted padre, who afterward was polite but distant.

One morning there came a German officer, very tall, very correct, and wearing the badge of an observer in the German Flying Corps. He clicked his heels, bowed from the waist upward, and inquired: "Hauptmann Bott?"

I admitted to the name and rank, whereupon the visitor introduced himself as Oberleutnant Wolff, the man whose shots had punctured my petrol tank and brought my machine down in the mountains.

Having apologized for the state of my face, he offered to drop over some British aerodrome a letter announcing that I was alive and would like some clothes. In accordance with the polite relations between British and German aviators in Palestine, I was visited by several other flying officers, each of whom—out of pure kindness of heart as I thought—made the same suggestion.

When I had written the note, and addressed it to "British Air Force, Palestine," I was told that it could not be sent unless I addressed it by name to my late squadron commander, giving the number of the squadron and the situation of the aerodrome—all of which would have been highly useful information. I refused to write such an address, and said I would do without my kit.

The stipulation must have been a bluff, however, for Oberleutnant Wolff finally took the original letter, and dropped it upon the British aerodrome at Ramleh, which was well known to them.

Every few days British aeroplanes flew low over Tul-Keran, and bombed either the railway station or local encampments. When this happened Turks and Arabs would scurry from the road while the anti-aircraft guns were firing, and all our orderlies would disappear until the bombardment had ended. Soon after Oberleutnant Wolff's last visit an aeroplane, instead of making for the railway, hovered above a large meadow used as a landing ground, and dropped what must have looked like an enormous bomb. It whirled down slowly, by reason of long streamers attached to the head of it. It did not explode, and the aeroplane left without troubling Tul-Keran any further.

The "bomb" was a sack containing kit for myself and Major Evans (captured three weeks earlier) which a British pilot had risked his neck to bring. A German Unteroffizier opened it before me. He searched nearly everything—boots, underclothes, and trousers, and actually ripped open the lining of a tunic in a hunt for hidden papers. But what he did not find, and I did, was a tiny slip of tissue, sewn into the corner of a collar, with this message scribbled on it: "Dear Bottle—so glad you're alive. Never say die. Dine with me at the Savoy when we meet after the war. The Babe."

Six months later (before the end of the war), when I had escaped from Turkey, I did dine with "The Babe"; but at Floca's, in Salonika, and not the Savoy.

The kit was very welcome, for I had been flying in my shirt-sleeves when shot down; but still more welcome was the knowledge that people at home would know that I lived. With this worry removed I now had a clearer mind for preparing an escape. Moreover, my leg was feeling stronger every day, so that I hoped to make the attempt soon.

While thinking over my plan one morning I was interrupted by a soft-spoken sentence in French from the Syrian doctor with the smashed leg:

"M. le Capitaine, both of us would like to be away from these Turks."

At the time I did not know to what a state of revolt the Syrians had been brought by misery and oppression; and in any case it seemed unwise to let a stranger know that I hoped to escape.

"Naturally," I replied, "I should like to be out of the hands of the Turks, although I suppose they will keep me till the end of the war. For me it is damnable here. But you——"

"For you it is a thousand times better than for me," he said, with intensity, though still speaking in a low voice. "For two years I have been living among people who are half savage and wholly ignorant. Because I am a Christian, they try to treat me like a dog. All the time I was with my infantry regiment I never knew when one of those Turkish beasts would shoot me. Nothing would be done to a Turkish soldier who did shoot me. I am certain I have remained untouched only because doctors are scarce. Several other doctors—Syrians and Jews—ran away and managed to reach the British lines; but I had no chance."

He continued to tell of the disgusting conditions which he had to share with Turkish soldiers, who lived more like animals than human beings. I happened to have met a Syrian doctor who, after escaping from the Turkish army, was practising in Alexandria; at which my bed neighbour was envious and interested. His own intention, if the Turks allowed him to go to his home at Damascus until the broken leg healed, was to slip out of the city with one of the secret caravans, and trek to Akaba, where were the Hedjaz Arabs, allied to the British. He suggested that if he and I were sent to the same hospital in Damascus we might make the attempt together.

So we talked on in the heat of the afternoon, keeping silent for long intervals so as not to excite suspicion. All this while the diseased Turk on my left, who could speak nothing but Turkish and Arabic, was moaning and tossing.

That evening, after thinking matters over, I decided that my slight chances of getting back to the British lines by swimming down the coast could scarcely be lessened, and might be improved, if I asked the Syrian for advice.

He was very sympathetic and quite unsurprised, but he did not think the possibility of success were great, because of the thousands of soldiers in the district through which I should have to pass. Nevertheless, if my leg became stronger I might possibly scrape through, he said. As for him, he would like enormously to come with me, but his leg made him helpless.

My thigh improved very rapidly, and I began to make final preparations. Each day the Syrian and I saved pieces of bread, so that I might have a store to take with me. The supply of water would be more difficult, as I had nothing in which to carry it.

A Turkish general solved the problem for me. One morning the orderlies tidied the room feverishly until it looked almost clean, while announcing that "The Pasha" was coming. General Djouad Pasha, commanding the Turkish Eighth Army, arrived soon afterward, attended by a mixed collection of Turkish, German, and Austrian officers—each of which national groups kept itself separate, and tried to look as if it had no connection with the others. He talked amiably to the Turkish patients—amid a chorus of "Yes, Excellency," and "No, Excellency"—and more than amiably to me. Was I getting better and would I like some wine sent to me? The answer in each case was a truthful "yes."

To the doctor with the smashed leg he was abrupt and aloof when he discovered him to be a Syrian Christian; and a request to be sent home until convalescent was curtly refused.

The general left, with his ill-assorted staff elbowing each other in the doorway for precedence; and I heard the Syrian swearing softly to himself for many minutes.

From Djouad Pasha came, that same afternoon, two bottles of Moselle and a flask of eau-de-cologne, addressed to "The English guest of Turkey."

In that house of a thousand and one stenches the eau-de-cologne was as welcome as a well in a pathless desert. The Syrian and I drank the wine, leaving a little in one of the bottles to mix with the water I should take to the coast.

The only remaining preparation was as regarded clothes. I decided to wear, over a night-shirt, one of the smock dressing-gowns provided by the hospital. In this and a pair of slippers, and with a towel arranged as a headdress, I should not look so very different from an Arab at night-time so long as I kept moving.

Came the day when I walked without the least pain or trouble; and although I still could scarcely see with the left eye, I determined to leave without delay, as I was in danger of being moved from Tul-Keran.

I kept awake from sunset until three A.M. hoping that the Austrian night orderly would follow his usual custom of dozing; whereupon I would slip by him into the yard and thence climb a drainpipe to the wall that rimmed the hospital roof. But the orderly remained obstinately alert until it was too late for my attempt; for I should have to leave early, if I wanted to put a sufficient distance between myself and the hospital before choosing a hiding-place in which to pass the following day.

Having slept through the afternoon I again watched during the night; and again the Austrian kept awake. On the next night I fell asleep at two A.M., disappointed and almost hopeless when, for the third time, the orderly gave me no chance.

It must have been about half an hour later when I was awakened by loud reports and by the chatter of the Turks near me. Guns were firing all around the town, one of them from a field fronting the hospital. I knew that they must be anti-aircraft guns. Either Tul-Keran itself was being raided, or machines were passing from some other place.

Inside the hospital all was disorder. Turkish patients talked excitedly, and crowded into the lower rooms. In the ward opposite mine a man who, some hours earlier, had undergone an operation, called loudly for help. The orderly himself, almost helpless from fright, ran across in answer to the cries.

Now—while everything and everybody were in confusion—or never was my chance to escape from the hospital. I rolled up my blanket and placed it under the quilt so as to give the appearance of a man asleep, donned my dressing-gown, shook hands silently with the Syrian, and went out into the yard.

Somebody passed close by me, and entered the back door. I dodged, and locked myself in the lavatory until he was in the house. When all was quiet I went into the open yard, gripped my parcel (the bottle of water and the store of dry bread tied up in a towel) between my teeth, and began climbing up the drain pipe.

It was a more difficult task than I expected. The wall was flat, and showed few cracks that could be used as footholes. I scraped the skin from face, arms, and legs as I struggled upward, a few feet at a time. At last I was high enough to touch the gutter and haul myself, with many a gasp, on to the roofs edge. While I was doing this the first disaster happened—the package fell from my mouth.

I kept perfectly still, expecting a loud noise; but the parcel fell with nothing worse than a dull thud, the bottle being saved from breaking by the bread around it.

Although nobody came into the yard I did not go down again, for every minute counted; and, moreover I was certain that I should not have the strength to climb that drain pipe a second time. I determined to make the attempt without bread and water and the towel, which was to have served as headdress.

I clambered along the side of the low roof, keeping in the shadow, until I reached the front of the building. All was clear for me; the guns were still firing, the street was deserted, and the sentry, who should have been below, had gone into the hospital for safety.

I caught hold of the right-hand corner of the gutter with both hands, lowered myself until my body was hanging down with arms fully extended, and dropped.

Then came the second disaster. Although the roof was low, and the length of my body deducted five and three-quarter feet from the total drop, yet the shock when I touched earth was considerable. I landed purposely on my left foot, since the left leg was uninjured, but I toppled over, and again hurt the bruised thigh, which throbbed with pain.

I lay in the shadow of the wall for a few seconds. Then, knowing that I could not remain undiscovered for long if I stayed there, I looked around to see if the streets were clear.

Not a soul was about, for the anti-aircraft guns were still barking, seemingly at nothing. I went out into the vague light of the quarter-moon and began walking in the direction of the coast.

A hundred yards to westward I was past the straggling line of buildings, and on the open road. Then came several groups of tents by the roadside. After I had left these behind I cut away to the left, across open country.

All this while I was in such a tense and exalted state of mind that I did not sense whether the night air was warm or cold, nor whether the ground was smooth or rough. Pain, however, was a sensation that could not be buried by abnormal mental tension. My thigh throbbed relentlessly and maddeningly as I stumbled on, taking my direction as best I could from the stars.

By now the guns were silent, and people came from their hiding-places. A small band of Bedouins approached out of the dimness. I sank to the ground until they had ridden by and were on the road.

Again I began to walk; but a few minutes later I had to halt a second time. Two Turkish soldiers, their cloth helmets outlined against a tree, passed some distance to my right, whining an unmusical chant.

I staggered forward for about another hundred yards; and then, weak and half-mad with the persistent, ever-increasing ache in my thigh, I lay down in a small hollow.

The next half hour was perhaps the most bitter period through which I have lived. I should never reach the coast with my injured leg, I realized. Yet here I was, wearing but a night-shirt and a dressing-gown, and helpless in Turkish territory, only a quarter of an hour's walk from the hospital whence I had tried to escape. I could go no farther—or very little farther; and if I remained in the hollow until morning I should inevitably be caught. And if I were caught, Heaven only knows what would happen. And I suddenly realized that it was cold, and that scores of mosquitoes were biting my face, arms, and legs. And the throb, throb, throbbing in the right leg continued.

Then the crescent moon disappeared, and the dark gray light faded into a blackness that covered the crops and countryside and, above all, myself.

I felt suicidal, and remained inert for half an hour longer. Finally, I decided that my best plan was to return to the hospital and try to reenter it unobserved.

I staggered back through the darkness, and, more by luck than judgment, hit the road. Slowly and very painfully I made my way into Tul-Keran. I passed the tents and houses without taking any precaution against being stopped and questioned; but nobody took the least notice, possibly because, in the dark, my dressing-gown would look like the robe of an Arab.

I came within sight of the hospital, and found the sentry strolling aimlessly in front of it, from the main gate to the side entrance around the corner. When he had turned the corner I slipped up the pathway to the front door, which, from past observation, I knew would not be locked. I had been absent for two hours, and already the first glimmer of an eastern dawn had lassoed the countryside.

I unlatched the door, entered the passage—and found myself face to face with the Austrian night orderly. Open-eyed with wonder he stared at my dusty and dirty dressing-gown, my muddied legs and slippers; then grabbed me by the arm, and called out: "Der Englander!"

CHAPTER III

NAZARETH—AND THE CHRISTIAN CHARITY OF A JEW

"The Englishman!" he repeated, gripping my arm harder than ever. Then, after a puzzled pause: "Where have you been?"

"For a walk. I was upset by the air raid. My head has been very bad since the smash, and sometimes I don't know what I'm doing. But I'm better now, and I give my word of honour that I will stay quietly in bed. Only say nothing to the Turks."

This Austrian had always seemed a good fellow; and now, on hearing the word "Ehrenwort"—word of honour—he dropped his attitude of anxiety and suspicion, and became his usual friendly self. A wounded Turk came into the passage to see what was happening, but the orderly sent him away. He withdrew with a look of surprise at my disordered appearance.

"Good," replied the Austrian. "I shall say nothing to the Turks. But when the corporal comes I shall have to tell him, and he will tell the Herr Doktor. But I shall ask the corporal not to mention it to the others."

He led me back to the ward, and there noticed, for the first time, how a rolled-up blanket underneath the discoloured quilt made my bed seem as if it were occupied by a man.

"Na, Na," he said as he straightened the blanket. "This doesn't look as if you only went for a walk. Well, I have your word of honour that you will keep quiet, and the Herr Doktor must decide what is to be done."

Tired out, and so despairing as to care nothing of what might happen, I fell asleep. In the heat of mid-morning I was awakened by the corporal, who told me to come with him to the doctor's room. As I limped painfully along the corridor I was still tired and but half awake, so that while I remembered an unpleasant failure I could not define exactly what had happened.

"Herr Hauptmann" said the corporal with a grin, "your injured leg was not improved by the night walk"—and only then did I remember fully the bitter happenings of a few hours earlier.

Charming and decorative as ever, the blue-uniformed, much-medalled doctor rose from his chair, and shook hands with exaggerated ceremony. The priest stood, silent and bowed coldly, as if to imply that my misdeeds were exactly what one would expect from a friend of Másaryk.

"Night walks," said the doctor, "are bad for people with injured legs and faces. As your medical adviser, I should advise you to remain in bed for the future."

"I hope I shall be permitted to follow your advice, Herr Doktor."

"That being so, perhaps you will tell us exactly where you went, and why you did it."

Well knowing that with so many indications of an attempted escape anything but frankness would be futile, I admitted having tried to return to the British Army.

"So! And now, what do you expect?"

"If I may presume on your kindness, I ask that I may stay here until sent away in the normal course of events. I hope you will let me remain in hospital on the understanding that I give my word of honour to be good so long as I am in Tul-Keran."

"That will be difficult. I myself have no objection, and the word of honour is guarantee enough. But if the news of your escapade got beyond the hospital I should have to make a full report."

The doctor learned from the corporal that, apart from the four of us present, the one person who knew the story was the night orderly, who could be trusted to keep quiet. After a low-voiced discussion with the priest he gave instructions that nobody else must be told. He then promised not to make a report, unless the news leaked out and his hand were forced thereby. I thanked him and withdrew.

But the story did leak out. Either the orderly told it, or the Turkish patient who had seen me in the passage, after my return, formed his own conclusions and communicated them to other people. At any rate, several Turks came into the ward and discussed (according to the Syrian's whispered translations) my adventure of the early morning. One man even went so far as to say that I had gone out and signalled to the British aeroplanes.

The Syrian was greatly concerned about whether anybody knew he had been privy to the attempt; but I was able to reassure him.

Evidently the story became so widely known that the hospital authorities had to make their report. Late in the afternoon I was told to dress and collect my belongings, as the Turks were taking me from the hospital. Having obeyed, I was handed over to an escort of two Turkish soldiers with drawn bayonets.

"Adieu," said the Syrian. "I shall pray for you, and for happier times."

The doctor shook hands ceremoniously when I left; and the priest—affable once more—gave me a heavy stick to help support my thigh, saying that he hoped we should meet as friends after the war.

Bareheaded in the searing sun (for my friends had forgotten to include a hat in my kit) I was led through a gaping crowd to the railroad station.

There my guards joined forces with another Turk who had in his charge the dirtiest Arab I have ever seen. His sole dress was a pair of tattered trousers and a faded overcoat from the left side of which a filthy arm protruded, naked. His headdress, a much-torn strip of dingy rag, seemed to have lain for a long time in some stagnant pool. Clots of dirt dotted his face, his feet, and the lower part of his legs, which were bare. His moustache and straggling beard were powdered with sand and gravel; and on looking closely at his middle, where the trousers tops gave place to uncovered flesh, I saw two lice on the inner surface of the rough cloth.

The Arab and I looked at each other curiously, after the manner of fellow-prisoners seeing each other for the first time. Then an interrogation, interrupted by our arrival, was continued. This consisted of a Turkish officer shouting menaces at the Arab, who replied, whenever he was given a chance, with cringing explanations and pleading gestures.

Presently a German interpreter, who spoke Arabic well, joined the group. He also threatened the Arab, and I saw him place thumb and finger on his wind-pipe, as if to suggest strangling.

This badgering of the poor brute continued, until finally the Arab opened his hands and said something in a resigned tone; whereat a thrill of excitement passed through the gathering. The Turkish officer, before leaving us, wrote several lines on some official papers carried by the Arab's guard.

The Unteroffizier then turned his attention to me, and finding that I could speak German, talked of many things, from Hindenburg's advance in France to his own home in the former German colony at Jaffa.

"You have a pleasant companion," he said, nodding toward the Arab.

I asked who the pleasant companion might be and heard in reply a strange tale. The Arab, it appeared, had been found wandering in the rear of the Turkish trenches. The garment he wore was found to be a relic of what was once an overcoat of Turkish military pattern; so that he was arrested as a deserter, and possibly a spy. He told a rambling tale of how he had been a soldier in an Egyptian battalion fighting for the British, but, after being tortured by his officers, had escaped across the lines.

Even the Turks could not be convinced that British officers tortured their men; and the Arab having shown himself to be a liar, they were more than ever convinced that he was also a spy.

The Turkish officer, in the conversation I overheard, had threatened to hang him unless he confessed to being a spy. Finally the Arab (who, in my opinion, was not a spy, whatever he might be), terror-stricken at the threat that he could only save himself from hanging by a "confession," let himself be badgered into a declaration—true or false—that he was a spy. So they hanged him, as I learned afterward, at Damascus.

For several hours we remained on the platform, where the Arab and I were rival attractions for general curiosity. Then, late in the evening, we were hustled into a truck, marked in German: "12 horses or 40 men." As a matter of fact, more than fifty Turkish soldiers must have crowded into the truck before the train started.

Our party kept together in one of the corners, where we found just room enough to sit down without being trampled upon. I placed the kit bag between myself and the Arab, as a barrier against lice; although, for that matter, most of the Turkish soldiers were verminous.

That night I performed the first of many nightmare journeys on Turkish railways. Although each side of the truck was open for about three feet the atmosphere was intensely stuffy, so that it was difficult to breathe when seated on the floor. The crowd of Turks spat all over the place, and exuded dozens of different smells. The train jolted unevenly, with many a bump and halt, up the badly kept track. Sleep was impossible; and by the time I was hauled on to the platform at Afuleh, nine hours later, I was heavy-eyed and faint with wakefulness, weakness, and disgust.

Afuleh is but a few miles from Nazareth (then the Turco-German General Headquarters on the Palestine front); and to Nazareth we trudged. This beautiful little town is on a high hill around which the road to it winds upward at a steep angle. With its white buildings and its pleasant setting Nazareth offers a magnificent view as one climbs the hill. But really to enjoy it the conditions should be other than, when weak and ill and scarcely able to walk by reason of a bad leg, one must climb painfully up the steep slope under an oppressive sun and with a retinue of half-savage guards.

The Arab and I were led through the old, winding streets to the Turkish Platzkommandant's office. The Platzkommandant—a swollen balloon of a man—asked a question, and the Arab's reply drew all eyes in my direction. Having understood only a few words of the Arabic I wondered how I could be concerned in the charge of spying.

The Platzkommandant glared at me, and after examining my papers, spoke with somebody on the telephone. Then, although not a word had been spoken to me, we were both led outside and through some narrow streets to a stone building. Not until we were inside it did I hear, from a police officer who spoke a little French, why I was there.

Having noticed that rather more consideration was given to me than to him, and thinking he might obtain better treatment by hanging on to my coat-tails, the Arab had elaborated his story by saying that I brought him from the British Army in my aeroplane. Evidently the Platzkommandant, without giving me the chance to deny this fantastic tale, had telephoned to Turkish General Headquarters which had ordered that the spy and I, as accomplices in crime, should be kept together. And here we were, inside what I learned was the civil criminal jail.

I protested with vehemence and ridicule against belief in the Arab's absurd statement. I pointed out that as my machine was a single-seater, his story must be impossible. The police officer promised to forward these protests to military headquarters; but as for him, his orders were that the Arab and I were to remain together. In any case, he added, I was probably being punished for having tried to escape.

Remain together we did, in a superlatively filthy cell. I would rather live in an American jail than in most of the poorer dwellings of the Turkish provinces, where donkeys and dogs and hens and men and women and children herd together in mud huts. As for most Turkish jails, I would rather live in an American pigsty.

Even after my experience on the train from Tul-Keran I was surprised by the first sight of that cell. The walls were neither stone nor wooden, but of hard earth, with holes and cracks all over the surface. The various kinds of dirt that crusted the stone floor, which must have been left uncleaned for years, had mingled and intermingled until they became a thin layer of slime, which gave forth a dank odour. The room was partly underground, although the small, iron-barred window, on a level with the floor of the yard and two feet below the stone ceiling, let in a certain amount of light. Through it crawled all sorts of insects. Hundreds of vermin were to be seen moving in and out of the fissures in the walls.

Unadulterated bravery, without any trace of suppressed or subconscious fear, does not exist; wherefore, if a man who fought in the war tells you that he never felt the least bit afraid, call him a liar of the goriest. But my experience has convinced me that ordinary bravery—the sort of bravery which is self-control in the face of danger—is one of the most ordinary of qualities, possessed by most people of every race, sex, and age. But endurance is another matter. To all but the lion-hearted there comes the point at which the will to endure breaks down under abnormal strain.

Being far from lion-hearted, this now happened to me. When the gendarme banged and bolted the door I became morally dead, and past caring about surroundings or events. Physical weakness, mental agony, a terrible dizziness that resulted from having been bareheaded in the Palestine sun, the succession of privations and revolting surroundings—all these combined to break my spirit.

I grabbed the shrinking Arab, who evidently had not reckoned on being left alone with me, and flung him across the cell. I then sat down in the nearest corner, and, physically and mentally sick, remained inert for many hours.

The next three days I remember as a semi-conscious nightmare. Yet a dreadful nightmare is easier to bear than a dreadful reality, because the horror of it is confined to subconsciousness, and does not touch the surface brain. I sat through hours of inertia, without comprehension, energy, or a sense of my surroundings; so that I cared little for the dirt, the stench, and the general beastliness of the cell, because I scarcely realized them.

Three times I tried to pass the door, so as to protest to the police officer; but each time I was pushed back by the guard, who made frequent use of the words that every prisoner in Turkey knew so well—"yok" and "yassak" ("not," and "forbidden"). I gave up the attempt, and relapsed into a state of moral lethargy.

The changes from night to day, from stuffy heat to damp cold, passed unnoticed, and I cared not whether I lived or died. I felt no hunger and very little thirst. This was fortunate, for hunger could not have been satisfied.

Each morning the guards gave each of us a small loaf of bad bread in which pieces of straw, string, and wood were plentiful. A carafe was filled with bad water once a day. In the evening a basin of thin soup, with mysterious chunks floating on the surface of it, was placed between us. Without being influenced by its unsavouriness, I felt not the least desire for the greasy liquid, the small loaf of bread being quite enough food for the day in my then state of unreal detachment from bodily needs and sensations.

As for the Arab, as soon as the basin was brought he squatted on his haunches, dug his hands into the soup, and having grabbed some floating morsel, stuffed it into his mouth. Afterward he lapped up the liquid itself, after the manner of a dog.

On the morning of the third day we were led from the jail to be interrogated at Turkish Headquarters. Although my ferocious headache still remained, the change from the dimness and closeness of the cell to the bright sunlight of the street revived me, and I sniffed the fresh air in gulps.

I was passing through Nazareth, watched with evident sympathy by the sad-faced crowd, when I saw an officer of the German Flying Corps. He looked at my pilot's badge and stopped, whereupon I broke away from the guards and approached him. In violent language I protested against the outrageous treatment, and asked the German as a fellow-aviator and a fellow-European, to see that the Turks moved me from the criminal jail.

The aviator happened to be a friend of Oberleutnant Wolff, who fired the shot that brought me down near Shechem; and, having already heard the details of my capture, he recognized at once the absurdity of the Arab's story that I had brought him across the lines to spy for the British. He himself was furious at my bad treatment, for apart from their air combats the relations between German and British aviators in Palestine were of the best. He promised to go straight to German Air Headquarters and enlist its influence for me.

I left the German and was led by the guards to Turkish Headquarters. For two hours we waited in a corridor; and then, before I had been interviewed, there arrived my friend the German pilot with two staff officers, a monocled major and a lieutenant. I shook hands—and was offered apologies for the brutalities I had suffered. It would all be right now, said the major, as the trio disappeared through the doorway of an office.

They returned with a Turkish colonel, who likewise shook hands and apologized. Finally, escorted by a different guard, I was sent away without having been questioned. The last I saw of the Arab was as he staggered and cringed under a box on the ear delivered by the colonel.

Once again I was led before the Turkish Platzkommandant. Evidently his knuckles had been telephonically rapped as a result of my treatment, for he scowled wickedly as he took my papers and ordered a room to be prepared for me in the barracks.

At first this room seemed a paradise after the slimy cell; but after a few days of utter loneliness its tiny dimensions—ten feet long by six feet wide—seemed to be closing in to crush me. The furniture was a bed with one greasy blanket and a rickety little table on which stood an earthenware jar.

Next morning I was again taken to Turkish Headquarters for interrogation. The Intelligence Officer who questioned me was very far from intelligent in his methods. He began by saying outright that since I had been moved to better quarters he expected me to show gratitude by giving information. I replied that instead of showing gratitude, I ought to receive compensation. He hinted that it was in his power to move me back to the criminal jail.

"Do as you like," I replied. "But since it is obvious that you are highly civilized, you will do nothing of the kind." Whereupon he smiled fatuously, and proceeded to ask leading questions, speaking in French.

"Is the report true that General Allenby has left Palestine for France?"

"I really don't know. Possibly. Possibly not."

"Have you seen General Allenby lately?"

"No. But I have a friend who once saw him driving along a road in France. But that was two years ago."

"Are the British preparing an attack near the coast?"

"Possibly. Possibly not. I really don't know."

These illuminating replies were noted down, word for word, by the Intelligence Officer. His desire for details about myself was inexhaustible. I did my best to satisfy it by telling him that I was aged eighteen; had been an aviator for five years and a soldier for six; had come from England on a ship named the Hogwash; had been flying the type of aeroplane known as the Jabberwock; had belonged to No. 1 Training Squadron, the best fighting squadron in Palestine; and thought the war would continue for fifteen and a half years longer.

Having presented the Turk with this medley of misinformation, and watched him transfer it to his notebook, I grew tired of invention and protested a lack of knowledge in reply to every question.

That chat and backchat with the wooden-headed Intelligence Officer was my only conversation, except a few whispered words, with a fellow-human for nearly a week. The Platzkommandant took his revenge for my complaints in two ways—by feeding me very badly, and by inflicting solitary confinement upon me.

Solitary confinement makes a man utterly wretched. Left all alone, and with nothing to distract his mind, a prisoner can only think and think and think—and all his thoughts are morbid.

I had six matches in my pocket and with these I invented all sorts of games and puzzles. But after a few hours my brain, refusing to concentrate on them, drifted back to the sea of bitter despair. At night-time the great difficulty was to keep my mind, not from drifting, but from racing.

After four days of solitary confinement I was fast losing all sense of balance and normality. At times I regretted not being back in the criminal jail with the repulsive Arab for company.

The few words I managed to exchange with the Christian woman who tidied my room each morning were an unspeakable joy. This woman—ragged, bootless, and gaunt—would whisper fierce questions in broken French as she threw water on the dusty floor, or stabbed with a hairpin some of the bed-bugs, while a guard watched through the open door to see that we did not conspire.

"Why come not English? We hungry. Pigs of Turks!"

And I had to whisper back that the English would come and drive the pigs of Turks out of Nazareth.

When she had taken her stooping back and her patchwork clothes out of the room, I would probably not have the chance to speak with anybody, even in a whisper, for the next twenty-four hours.

Apart from the furniture I had nothing to look at but a green hillside, seen through the tiny window. For hours at a time I paced the few feet across the room and back again, then sat on the bed and looked through the little window at what little I could see of Nazareth.

Several times I noticed men, women, and boys walking in a huddled group, with guards around them. Some had their hands shackled, some had a chain linking one arm and one leg, others were chained by the arm to the next person. They moved aimlessly over the hillside, presumably for exercise, while Turkish soldiers pushed or beat any who struggled or straggled.

On my sixth morning in the barracks I was visited by the Platzkommandant's aide-de-camp, just after such a party had disappeared from view. I asked if these shackled and browbeaten prisoners were Christians.

"My dear sir," said the aide-de-camp, with all the blandness of the educated Turk when telling a lie, "we never put chains on anybody, and our Christian criminals are as well treated as Mohammedan criminals. You must be mistaken in what you think you have seen."

After this conversation I never again saw these groups of civilian captives at Nazareth; and I began to think that the strain of solitary confinement had focussed my sick brain on sights that my eyes never met. Possibly, however, the aide-de-camp had taken care that the chained prisoners should be taken for exercise on the far side of the hill.

Next day the same officer paid me another visit, as he was learning French and wanted practice. When he was in my room I noticed from the window a strange procession. A few banners were carried at the head of it, then came some Turkish soldiers, and finally a mass of men and women shambling along with bowed heads. Somewhere a band was blowing out the horrible whining discord that the Turks call music. Nothing more melancholy and unenthusiastic than the people's attitude could be imagined.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Two days ago the Turks gained a great victory over the British in the Jordan valley, between Es-Salt and Amman. The Governor has organized this procession to celebrate it. The population is showing its joy."

I looked at the sad-faced rabble below, and remarked that they looked more like mourners at a funeral than celebrators of joy. The aide-de-camp had spoken, however, without the least suggestion of irony.

Next day he left Nazareth for Tul-Keran. He paid me a farewell visit, and, to my great joy, gave me "an English book," which he had bought in the bazaar. The "English book" proved to be a copy of a magazine for children, dated 1906. It was even more consciously educative in its exposition of elementary principles, and more condescendingly inept in its milk-and-water stories, than the general run of such publications. Yet in my state of solitary confinement I revelled in every word. That magazine for children gave me as much pleasure as have the finest books in the world under normal conditions.

My mind stopped racing and wandering and retrospecting while I learned all about wireless telegraphy, in twenty lines; how Joshua smote the Canaanites hip and thigh (with an illustration of the walls of Jericho falling rhythmically before the Israelite trumpeters); How to make lemonade and seed cake; How not to make trouble among one's schoolfellows; The birth and life of jelly-fish; and How to Set a Good Example, being an instalment of the History of Little Peter, the Boy who Feared God, Kept His Hands Clean, and Was Always Cheerful and Respectful and Fond of Chopping Wood for His Mother.

The magazine also showed how to make hats, sailing-boats, houses, and whatnots out of a plain sheet of paper—all of which I practised assiduously through a night of bug-biting sleeplessness.

Best and worst of all was the five-page summary, in schoolmistress English, of "The Newcomes." This had nothing in it but colourless statement of incident; and the sentiment of the book was churned into a welter of flabbiness. As a final insult "adsum" was misspelt "adsem" in the subjoined monstrosity with which the unliterary procureur completed his (or more probably her) prostitution of Thackeray's almost-masterpiece:

When the roll call of the pensioners was made the dying Colonel, hearing his name, lifted his poor old head and said: "adsem" Then he fell back dead. "Adsem" is a Latin word signifying that a person is present.

Yet the protest and anger inspired by this outrage were useful in taking my mind from its lonely bitterness; and I read the child's magazine version of "The Newcomes" many times over, until its power to irritate was expended.

After a few more days my confinement became less solitary. The German major whom I had already seen visited me, with the Turkish Platzkommandant, and asked if I had any more complaints to make. I looked at the Platzkommandant, and said that the food was not only bad, but scarcely sufficient to keep a man alive. The fat Turk scowled his wickedest, but made no comment. The German major expressed regret, and promised that meals should be sent from the General Staff's mess.

Evidently the German Staff in Palestine made a careful study of its own comfort. For the rest of my stay in Nazareth I fed better than I could have done, under war-time conditions, in any London hotel. Meat, fish, vegetables, every kind of fruit, butter, sugar, pastries, good coffee and wine, all were sent in profusion—to the great disgust of the Turkish officers, who were fed rather worse than the German privates.

This diet was a very welcome change from bad bread and water varied by thin soup. Sickness made me far from hungry, however, so that I found it impossible to eat many of the meals. The corporal of the guard, the sentry outside my door, and several of their friends would hang around in the corridor until the tray was taken from my room, then stuff their hands in the dishes and snatch at pieces of meat or vegetable.

For me the food from the German mess was chiefly welcome in that it brought me a good friend—the dragoman who came with it. He was a Jew, originally from Salonika, with a long, tongue-twisting name impossible to remember, so that I called him Jean Willi, French being our conversational medium. He was well-to-do, had been an official of the Ottoman Bank in Constantinople, and spoke seven languages. For the first two years of war he kept out of the army by means of baksheesh. Finally he was taken for service because he offended an influential officer; but his knowledge of languages, together with bribes placed in the right quarters, procured for him the safe appointment of a dragoman to the German Headquarters at Nazareth.

Three times a day—with breakfast, lunch, and dinner—Jean Willi visited me. He tried to come oftener, but the Turks would not admit him.

Everything I wanted he would move heaven and earth to get. He "obtained" a German soldier's cap for me, on discovering that I had no hat. He persuaded the German barber to bring the lunch one day, so that he might cut my hair. A comb, a tooth-brush, soap, books, and a dozen other things were brought by Jean Willi; and, having learned that my ready cash amounted to three and a half dollars, he pretended that the articles were sent by the German officers. Afterward I discovered this to have been a benevolent untruth.

The wayside fallings of a roving life have brought me several Very Good Samaritans, but none other who did as much for me, under great difficulties, as Jean Willi. Before meeting him I was altogether broken in spirit; and with hopelessness filling my mind I had actually begun to fear for my reason. He understood all this and, to the limit of his powers, did his best to remedy it, well knowing that such action would bring him the enmity and suspicions of Turkish officers. His friendly conversation and his invariable kindness were splendid tonics, taken three times a day, at each visit.

When he was away my mind was prevented from slipping back into the stagnation of despair by the books he smuggled into my room. The first of these was a German war novel—"Der Eiserne Mann"—procured from a Boche soldier. It purported to show how loyal were the Alsatians to the German Fatherland. It was untrue, stupidly sentimental, and often farcical; but, after all, so were most of the war novels published in England at that time.

Then, in some dark recess of the house where he was billeted, he found a copy of "Les liaisons dangereuses"—an altogether extraordinary book to be salvaged from a little house in Nazareth. This was my first introduction to Barbéry d'Auréville; and joy and interest in his magnificent characterization completed the rescue of my mind from the slough of despondency.

It was Jean Willi who first gave me an outline of Turkey's spiritual history during the war. The sudden savage onslaught of the Turks against their Christian subjects; the horrible character of the Armenian massacres; the murder of prominent Syrians, the deportation of Ottoman Greeks; the gradual starvation of the rotten old empire, whereby scores of thousands died of hunger, while the Germans were sending trainload after trainload of foodstuffs from the country; the ruthless execution of all who stood in the way of Enver and Talaat; the amazing bribery and speculation; the hundreds of thousands of deserters, and the scores of thousands of brigands—all this was described in such vivid detail by Jean Willi that I scarcely believed he could be relating fact.

Two-thirds of the population, he said, were pro-Entente—not only the Christians and Arabs, but the very Turks themselves—although none dared oppose the violence of the Young Turk party. As for himself, although he had never been to England, this Jew without a country claimed to have a frantic love of the English which he could not explain, like the love of a man for a mistress whom he very greatly respects—his own words.

One day there arrived four Australian aviators who had been captured in the Jordan Valley. R., the pilot of a Bristol Fighter, had landed behind the Turkish lines after his petrol tank was hit. H. had tried very pluckily to pick him up. H. made a splendid landing and—with R. and R.'s observer seated on the lower planes, one on each side of the pilot's cockpit, attempted to take his two-seater into the air with a load of four men. He might well have succeeded if R. had not jerked his body backward, to avoid a hot blast from the exhaust outlet; with the result that the equilibrium was upset, and the craft swung round and hit a pile of stones. The four officers burned their machines before they were captured.

The Australians and I were taken for interrogation to German Headquarters. We had agreed that our best plan would be to claim complete ignorance of everything, and the invariable answer of C., the first to enter the private office of the intelligence officer—one Leutnant Santel—was "I don't know." When H., the second on the list, adopted the same tactics, Santel tried bluff.

"So!" he said, softly, as if speaking to himself. "How happy am I that it is I and not another who makes the interrogation. Most people would order bad treatment for prisoners who refuse a correct reply. Even I may have to do this. If the Pasha says to me: 'What have you learned from these prisoners?' and I reply: 'They say they know nothing,' he will be very angry and order severe measures."

"Uh-huh"—from H.

"Ah, sorry, I forgot you, my friend," said Santel with a start…. "Your aeroplanes are useful in communicating with the Bedouins east of the Jordan, are they not?"

"I don't know."

"But I do know."

"Why ask me then?"—the reply obvious.

"You don't know! You don't know! So! Please leave the room."

H. returned to us; and none of the remaining was questioned that day.

Leutnant Santel adopted a more subtle method next morning. With Oberleutnant von Heimburg ("brother of the famous submarine commander," as Santel introduced him), staff officer of the German Flying Corps at Palestine Headquarters, he came to the barracks and invited C., R., and me to Haifa for the day, on condition that we gave parole until the return.

We accepted and agreed, but while getting ready I remembered how, before my capture, it had been my duty to extract information from a German pilot while entertaining him; and I warned the others not to be drawn into friendly talk about aeroplanes and operations.

It was as we expected. While we were driving to Afuleh aerodrome for lunch in the Flying Corps mess, Von Heimburg and Santel refrained from mention of the war, but at table they performed the usual trick of showing photographs of British aerodromes and pilots, in the vain hope that on recognizing them we would say something useful.

Next we travelled along a narrow-gauge line to Haifa in a swaying truck, the motive power of which was a tractor propellor, driven by a 160 H.P. Mercedes aero-engine. Once again, over tea at the Mount Carmel Hotel in Haifa, the Germans led the talk to Palestine operations and aeroplanes; and once again we led it back to shoes and ships and sealing-wax and cabbages and kings.

When Santel betrayed a desire for knowledge of the habits and exploits of Colonel Lawrence (who was performing such magnificent work as political officer with the Arab army of the King of the Hedjaz) H. said he had never heard of him, but that in Australia he knew a fellow named Lawrence, who—who——

Santel interrupted and did not try to conceal his annoyance. Then he began talking about Miss Gertrude Bell, an Englishwoman who had done brilliant political work among the Mesopotamian Arabs. This time we were able to say with truth that we knew nothing of the matter; although Santel continued to discuss and libel the lady, whom the Germans were going to shoot, he said.