Part 6 (1/2)

”Thank you a thousand times,” I said when Von Heimburg and Santel left us at Nazareth. ”It has been a most enjoyable day.”

They agreed, without showing enthusiasm.

”But not a very successful one for you, I'm afraid,” I added.

They were quiet for a minute, and then both laughed.

”_So!_ You were prepared,” said Santel. ”Well, I shan't try again.”

Neither Santel nor anybody else tried again to interrogate us at Nazareth; and two days later we were told to prepare for a journey to Damascus.

C. had been discussing the chances of escaping by boat; and when Jean Willi paid me a farewell visit I asked him if a journey from Damascus to the coast would be difficult.

”Very difficult indeed under the conditions of which you are thinking.”

Then, after a pause, ”But I will tell you something interesting, since you will probably be kept in Damascus for about a fortnight. The Armenians run secret caravans from Damascus to Akaba.”

”Thank you. That's very interesting, indeed.” And it was; for Akaba, at the northeastern extremity of the Red Sea, was the base of the Arab army cooperating with the British.

Jean Willi would not listen to thanks, when he said good-bye. I gave him my London address, in the sincere hope of being able to pay back in part the good deeds I owed him.

I left Nazareth under much better conditions than I entered it.

Accompanied by an Arab pseudo-spy, I had arrived half crazed by weakness, pain, and disaster, with a damaged leg and a swollen face, and possessing neither hope nor a hat. I was leaving it in the company of fellow-officers, with my mind and leg and face normal again, and having not only a German hat but renewed hopes of escape, summed up in Jean Willi's hint:

”The Armenians run secret caravans from Damascus to Akaba.”

CHAPTER IV

DAMASCUS--AND THE SECOND FAILURE

Nazareth and Damascus are wonderful names; and apart from historical values each, with the country around it, stands for exceptional beauty.

A journey from Nazareth to Damascus, therefore, ”gives of the most finest pleasure”; as the Greek guard of a Turkish train a.s.sured us in his ”most finest” English. But if you wish to see Syria at its best, travel otherwise than as a prisoner, sitting in a dirty cattle-truck and surrounded by Turkish guards, whose natural odour gives by no means of the most finest pleasure.

Such were the conditions under which we--four Australian officers and myself--came to Damascus. All the way from Nazareth we were guarded closely as a secret meeting of the Peace Conference. Only three weeks earlier Major Evans had escaped from Afuleh and walked forty miles before he was recaptured; so that in our case more than ordinary precautions were taken.

We drove down the steep hill from Nazareth in three rickety carts. Each of the first two contained a pair of prisoners and a pair of guards, with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets; but H., whose giant height and strength the Turks respected, had a cart and two guards all to himself.

At Afuleh we sat until nightfall in a mud hut, with the local population gazing and chattering through the open door, as if we had been strange animals.

We welcomed the change to a covered cattle-truck on the railway, away from prying Turks and Arabs. In this truck, with coats serving as pillows, we lay on the filthy floor throughout the night, while the train jolted eastward over the badly kept track. Whenever I looked at the half-open shutter I met the alert eyes of a guard, whose business it was to prevent us from jumping into the darkness.

The next day we pa.s.sed in playing poker, in looking at the wild hills of Samaria, and, by juggling with the few French words he could understand, in trying to tell the Arab officer in charge of us how contented were the Arab population in those parts of Palestine, Arabia, and Mesopotamia occupied by the British.

This man, like most of the Syrian Arabs, showed himself well-disposed to prisoners. He presented us with bread and hard-boiled eggs, bought with his own money, and refused to take payment. As always, no food had been provided by the military authorities.

So we jogged on, with many a halt, across the Jordan and round and up the winding tracks in the hill country beyond it. We stopped for an hour at Deraa, where a Turkish doctor with pleasant manners and a dirty hypodermic needle visited the truck. Having a.s.sured us that cholera was very prevalent in the British army, he proceeded to inoculate us, so that we might have no chance of taking the disease to Damascus. As a matter of fact, the British army in Palestine was entirely free from cholera, while Damascus, as we afterward learned, was full of it.

Fortunately, nothing worse than sore chests resulted from the use of his rusty, unsterilized needle.