Part 9 (1/2)

I expect they are forgetting it. People do forget things.

But I must go back to our own history, the history of the Lower Camp in 1916-17.

That winter was a mild one. We played football about two or three times a week on a small ground about half a mile from the camp. a.s.sociation was the rule that year, but the following winter we played Rugby. The football ground was a long, rather narrow strip between two ploughed fields, and the reasons it was not ploughed up were two. It sloped toward the road, and all the lower portion was used as a thres.h.i.+ng floor at harvest time. The Turkish method of thres.h.i.+ng is a very remarkable one, very early, I imagine. When the straw stacks have ripened sufficiently they are broken up, and large circular mats of straw with the grain in it are arranged upon the ground. On these mats sleds made of three planks, and, drawn by horses, are driven round and round, as though in a circus. Under the sleds are grooves containing rows of sharp flints which cut all the straw up into chaff and separate the grain from the husk. Then the whole ma.s.s is winnowed in the wind, and divided into two heaps, one of food for man and the other of food for beasts. Which of the two our bread was made of I forget.

This thres.h.i.+ng naturally requires a good deal of s.p.a.ce, and it protected the lower part of our football field. The upper half was conserved in quite a different way, for it was a Hebrew cemetery.

There was a large slab or soft rock in it, roughly squared and conveniently situated for those who wished to watch the game.

Three of us were sitting on this one day when a Turk, driving a cart along the road, turned his horse and drove up to this stone. He asked us to move to one side, and then gravely led the horse three times round the stone, after which he dug out a piece of earth from under the stone and gave it to the horse to eat. The only thing we could get out of him was that the horse was ill and that it would now get well. To prove his point he beat it all the way back to the road and made it canter. There was only one thing remarkable about the stone, and that was that it was pierced all over by nails hammered in, nails of all shapes and sizes, and some of them entirely rusted away, leaving only a stained hole. But just think of the plight of that poor horse! Officially speaking, it was now well, registered as A1. Any further weariness would be put down to malingering, and treated accordingly.

In the spring of 1917 we began to get a little more liberty. For some time the Commandant answered all applications to be allowed to go out for walks by saying that the weather was not yet fine enough, a subterfuge so transparent that I suspect he was laughing at us. His sense of humour was a very grim one. He appeared one morning and told the senior officer that three British soldiers were to be hanged that day. Of course there was a vigorous protest made; but, after a while, the Commandant smiled and went away. He then visited the senior French officer and told him that three Frenchmen were to be hanged. After he had enjoyed his joke sufficiently, it came out that three Turks actually were hanged on that day. There was n.o.body to protest for them, poor devils! The Turkish method of hanging is to erect a tripod, rather like a strong, high camera-stand. The victim stands below the centre of this, a noose is pa.s.sed round his neck, and the legs of the tripod are pushed closer and closer in until the man is lifted from the ground and strangled. The men at the Medrisseh often saw public execution take place, I believe.

But when spring grew fine enough we actually did go for several long walks, and saw the little yellow crocuses thrusting their heads up on the hill-sides. It was good to see flowers grow again. The wild flowers were wonderful round Afion. But that spring we saw little of them. The policy was changed again, and instead of being allowed out for walks in the country, we were allotted a little corner of one of the hills overlooking the town. Here we used to march, twice a week, and sit for an hour or two on the gra.s.s. It was steep and rocky, and there was nothing else to be done there. People used to take books out there, or pencils and paper and try to draw the one view. Then we would walk back to tea, through the slums of Afion, down narrow roads, past huts and graveyards, past kitchen middens where dead cats' and horses' skulls lay, and where children played: st.u.r.dy, grimy little urchins who used to abuse us, and make their favourite cutthroat sign, drawing their baby hands across their necks.

I forget when the policy was changed again. It was always being changed.

Capricious and wavering as thistledown. But in the summer we had quite a lot of liberty. We used to gather huge armfuls of purple larkspur, pink orchis, and yellow dog-roses. It was a good time for most of us, but early in the summer five officers were suddenly taken from their friends and shut up in a separate house in the Armenian quarter. They were allowed a short time twice daily for exercise in about 50 yards of the street, but for the rest were no better off than if they were in gaol.

They were not released until about Christmas time. All this was because the Commandant suspected them of planning to escape.

The Upper Camp grew a great deal larger that year. All the Russians came back again, and with them a great many more Russian officers who had been interned at Sivas for several years previously. From Yozgat, too, a large number of British officers came, among whom were two of the three who had escaped in March, 1916. From being a camp of one British house and one French, the Upper Camp now spread the whole length of one street, and into two neighbouring by-streets. The whole community of prisoners in that camp lived in Armenian houses.

My personal opinion is that the camps as a whole lost interest a great deal after this. They certainly became more respectable, but the character of the place altered. It improved on the whole, but it was duller. In the old days we had at least this in common, that we were all different; we had all come into Turkey in different ways and at different times. Now that queer distinction disappeared, for most of the new-comers were from Kut, the senior officers in nearly all of the houses were from Kut, and Kut rather dominated the conversation. We old-timers were a little sick of Kut. They were mostly old regular soldiers, and senior to the rest of us. Let me hasten to say that I have never met a nicer lot of men. That was part of the difficulty. They were nicer than we were. But they had all led the same sort of lives before the war, and during the war. They had all fought in the same battles, and been in the same siege. They had all the same adventure to tell. I have great friends among them, and I hope they will smile if ever they read this. But the old-timers will smile, too, and recognize the truth that is in me.

One result of this influx was that we all became very unsettled. The fact was that we had stagnated too long, and were growing very queer. We were used to new prisoners dropping in one or two at a time, and trying to teach us how to be prisoners. We knew how to be prisoners; we had learned it in a bitter school; so we smiled at these new babes in the wood, let them kick against the p.r.i.c.ks a little, and took them to our bosoms. They made no difference. But you can't take old regular lieutenant-colonels to your bosom, you have to wait until they take you to theirs. They do in time, at least these did. But they unsettled the whole place, and it was probably very good for us.

The result was a break up of many happy homes, a great deal of arrangement and rearrangement of houses, and when we settled down again it was like a new Parliament with a different cleavage of parties, and a strange Government.

At the end of all this I found myself in the Upper Camp, in a house of twelve almost equally divided between Kut and non-Kut. It was a very happy house. I don't think anyone in it really hated any of the others; and, in prison, that means that you like each other very much, and will always be glad to meet each other again for the rest of your lives.

It was a very respectable house. Much too respectable to be popular.

Indeed it was a byword for respectability, until Good Friday, 1918; but that is antic.i.p.ating.

We thought, a lot of us, that the war was going to end that year, so who can say that we were downhearted?

CHAPTER XI.

THE LAST YEAR IN AFION

An accurate description of all our ups and downs, of liberty enlarged and liberty s.n.a.t.c.hed away again, and of all the fluctuating fortunes of the camp would be as dull as our lives were, and as little likely to be voluntarily undergone as was our captivity. That gem of time cannot be polished in all its facets, lest the observer should be dazzled. All that will be attempted here is some account of the main events. Another man, looking at that time from a different angle, might write a book that would hardly parallel this upon a single point, and yet be as true a picture.

We were all growing very weary indeed of being prisoners. Prices had continued their inexorable rise, and frequent ma.s.s meetings were held to discuss ways and means, for of course there were poor among us who could not afford to get money sent from home, and the pace of the convoy had to be that of the slowest s.h.i.+p. The only alternative would have been to break up into houses where men lived by bread alone, and houses where plutocrats resided who were able to import money at the disastrous rates obtainable. For it cost a very large sum to import money. A cheque on an English bank for 20 would produce a draft of Tq.26. This would be paid in paper, and to find its true value must be divided by six; so by spending 20 a prisoner could obtain the value of 4 6_s._ 8_d._[2]

Of course we did import money, whatever it cost, even the poorest of us practically had to, unless he would freeze in the winter. The actual necessaries of life, food, fuel, and clothes of sorts, were always obtainable in Turkey; at a price. The country was so completely unorganized, and the railway so congested that food-stuffs might be plentiful in one district and almost un.o.btainable in another not far away. But where the food was grown it was always obtainable, and fortunately for us, Afion was in an agricultural district.

The winter of 1917-18 was a very severe one. Late in November the street that was our only playground and s.p.a.ce for exercise was filled with snow. It ran east and west, overhung by a steep hill on the south, and deprived of sun by the opposite row of houses. No sunlight at all reached that street for quite three months, and during the whole of that time it was paved with snow that had been trodden hard.

There were refugees in the town that winter, people of strange appearance to us who were used to the Turks. They were said to be Kurds mostly, but there were certainly several tribes represented. For some reason or other they had been evacuated from some part of the Turkish Empire further east, and dumped down at Afion. Their clothes were those of a warm climate, and many of the little children had but one thin garment apiece. Nominally, I expect, they were supposed to be fed by their predatory Government: actually they were on or over the verge of starvation. We used to see them from our windows, and on our comparatively rare pa.s.sages through the town.