Caught by the Turks Part 3

"Some of your friends have been killed and captured," he said--"the commandant of your flying corps, for instance."

Seeing us incredulous, he accurately described the Major's appearance.

"And there is someone else," the _kaimakam_ continued in slow tones that iced my blood. "Someone who may be a friend of yours. A young pilot in a fur coat."

My heart stood still.

"He was killed by an Arab," the _kaimakam_ added. . . .

Here I will skip a page or two of mental history. The defeat of my country, the death of my friend, the crumbling of my hopes: little indeed was left. . . . . .

Let five dots supply the ugly blank. There is sorrow and failure enough in the world without speculating on tragedies that never happened.

Baghdad was taken later, my friend proved to be captured, not killed, and I write this by Thames-side, not the Tigris.

The inhabitants of Samarra are, I believe, the most ill-balanced people in the world. This trait is well known to travellers, and we found it no traveller's tale. On first arriving at Samarra, we halted in the rest-house on the right bank of the river, and were enjoying our frugal meal of bread and dates when a sergeant came to us from the Governor with orders that we were to be instantly conveyed to his residence, which is situated in the town across the river. We demurred, and our own sergeant protested, but the Governor's emissary had definite orders, and we were hurried down in the twilight. Here we found that there was no boat to take us across. The Samarra sergeant shouted to a boatful of Arabs, floating down the river, but they would not stop. Louder and louder he shouted, till his voice cracked in a scream. Growing frantic with rage, he fired his revolver at the Arabs. Of course he missed them, but the bullets, ricochetting in the water, probably found a billet in the town beyond. The Arab occupants merely laughed in their beards. We also laughed. Then the sergeant declared that we would have to swim, and we urged him in pantomime to show the way.

Eventually he spied a horse-barge down river, with a naked boy playing beside it. Reloading his revolver, a few shots in his direction attracted the lad's attention. Then an old man came out of a hut by some melon beds, to see who was firing at his son.

Another shot or two and the old man and the boy were prevailed upon to take us across. We had secured our transport at last, and the whole transaction seemed (in Samarra) as simple as hailing a taxi.

I bought a melon from the boy, and he s.n.a.t.c.hed my money contemptuously.

To take things without violence is a sign of weakness in Samarra. I noticed afterwards that all the boys and girls in this happy spot were fighting each other or engaged in killing something. And their elders keep something of the f.e.c.kless violence of youth. I do not think that there are any good Samarratans.

After the interview with the Governor already mentioned, which ended by a refusal on our part to speak with him further, we were sent to pa.s.s the night in a filthy hovel, whose only furniture consisted of a bench and a chair. Our sergeant was sitting on this chair when an officer rushed in and jerked it from under him, leaving him on the floor. As a conjuring trick it was neat, but as manners, deplorable. We were glad to get away from the place.

Very few incidents came to diversify the monotony of our desert travel.

One day, however, we met some Turkish cavalry going down to the siege of Kut. They were a fine body of troops, a little under-mounted perhaps, but thoroughly business-like. Their officers were most chivalrous cavaliers. Here in the desert, where luxuries were not to be had for money or for murder, they frequently gave us a handful of cigarettes, or a parcel of raisins, or else halted their squadron and asked us to share their meal. With these men one felt at ease. They were soldiers like ourselves. They did not ask awkward questions, and were told no lies. I remember especially one afternoon in the Marble Hills when we sat in a ring drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, with the panorama of the desert spread out before us, from the southward plains of Arabia to the hills of the devil-wors.h.i.+ppers, misty and mysterious, in the north. We talked about horses all the time. A modern Isaiah delivered himself of the following sentiment, in which I heartily concur:

"Where there is no racing the people perish."

The first-line Turk has many fine qualities, of which generosity and gallantry are not the least. Something in Anglo-Saxon blood is in sympathy with the adventure-loving, flower-loving Turk. But, alas! there is another type of Ottoman, with the taint of Tamerlane. "When he is good he is very very good, but when he is bad he is horrid."

In the latter category I must regretfully place the sergeant who commanded our escort. He came of decent stock (to judge by his charming sisters, and his own appearance indeed) but his mind was all mud and blood. He had been Hunified. Turkey would always be fighting, he said.

The English were almost defeated. The Armenians were almost exterminated. But the Greeks remained to be dealt with, and the cursed Arabs. Finally the Germans themselves. In an apotheosis of Prussianism Turkey was to turn on her Allies and drive them out. Such was his creed.

But a glow of courage lit the dark places of his mind. He loved fighting for the sheer fun of the thing. A few days beyond Samarra we were attacked by some wandering Arabs, who swept down on us in a crescent.

Our guards panicked, but he stood his ground, and, seizing a rifle, dispersed the enemy by some well-directed shots. Whether we were near deliverance or death on that occasion I do not know, but that the panic amongst our escort was not wholly unreasonable was evinced by the fact that only a few hours earlier we had pa.s.sed the headless trunk of a gendarme, strapped upon a donkey. He had been decapitated as a warning to the Samarratans that two can play at the game of savagery.

The sight of the corpse had unnerved our guard, and as for myself, I did not know whether to be glad or sorry when the Arabs attacked us. To be taken by them meant either going back to the English or to the dust from which we came. The alternative was too heroic to be agreeable.

Contrariwise, I was much disappointed when our sergeant finally drove them off. That evening, as if to point the moral, we found the body of another gendarme, also murdered, lying on a dung-heap outside the rest-house. This was at Shergat, the former capital of the a.s.syrians, and now a squalid village, where, however, the widows of Ashur were still "loud in their wail."

Here we dined with the fattest man I have ever seen. He was really a pig personified, but as we both gobbled out of the same dish and ate the same salt, I will not further enlarge on his appearance.

In the upper reaches of the Tigris there are wild geese so tame that they come waddling up to inspect the rare travellers through their land.

I thought it might be possible to catch one of these animals on foot.

Coquettishly enough they kept a certain distance. "We don't mind your looking at us," they seemed to say, "but we _do_ object to being pawed about." With the coming of the railway I am afraid a gun will destroy their belief in human kind.

The geese appeared to enjoy the smell of sulphuretted hydrogen, which prevails in these regions. The whole country is rich in natural oils and bitumen. One day it will make somebody's fortune, no doubt, and then the geese will waddle away from perspiring prospectors. . . .

Before we arrived at Mosul we stopped for a bath at the hot springs of Hammam-Ali, where we met (in the water) a patriarch with a white beard, who confidently a.s.sured us that he was a hundred years old and would continue to live for another hundred, such were the beneficent properties of the water. Before his days are numbered he may live to see a Hydro at Hammam-Ali--poor old patriarch. He told us a lot about Jonah (whose tomb is at Nineveh, just opposite Mosul, on the other side of the river), and I am not sure that he did not claim acquaintance with that patriarch. He was quite one of the family.

Mosul, he told us, was a heaven on earth, a land flowing with milk and honey, where we should ride all day on the best horses of Arabia, and feast all night in gardens such as the blessed _houris_ might adorn.

It was with a certain elation, therefore, that I saw the distant prospect of Mosul next morning, set in its surrounding hills. A fair city it seemed, white and cool, with orange groves down to the river and many date-trees. But a closer acquaintance brought cruel disappointment, as generally happens in the East. The blight of the Ottoman was everywhere; there was dirt, decrepitude, and decay in every corner.

Children with eye-disease, and adults with leprosies more terrible than Naaman's jostled each other in the mean streets. Whole quarters of the city had given up the ghost, and become refuse heaps, where curs grouted amongst offal. Mosul, like our escort-sergeant's mind, seemed a muddle of mud and blood.

With sinking hearts we drove to the barracks, and were shown into a dark, gloomy office, where our names were taken. Thence we were led to a still murkier and more mouldering room, inhabited--nay, infested--by some ten Arabs. Through this we pa.s.sed into a cell with windows boarded up, which was, if possible even damper, darker, and more dismal than anything we had yet seen. After the sunlight and great winds of the desert we stood bewildered. Death seemed in the air.

Then out of the gloom there rose two figures. They were British officers, who had been captured about a month previously. So changed and wasted were they that even after we had removed the boards from the little window we could hardly recognise them. One of these officers was so ill with dysentery that he could hardly move, the other had high fever.

Our arrival, with news from the outer world, bad though it was, naturally cheered them considerably, for nothing could be worse than their present plight.

The ensuing days called for a great moral effort on our part. It was absolutely imperative to laugh, otherwise our surroundings would have closed in on us. . . . We cut up lids of cigarette boxes for playing cards. We inked out a chessboard on a plank. We held a spiritualistic seance with a soup-bowl, there being no table available to turn. We told interminable stories. We composed monstrous limericks; and we sang in rivalry with the Arab guard outside, who made day hideous with their melody and murdered sleep by snoring.

But when there is little to eat and nothing to do, time drags heavily.

Two cells with low ceilings that leaked were allotted to the four of us.

In these we lived and ate and slept, except for fortnightly excursions to the baths. We were allowed no communication with the men, who lived in a dungeon below. Their fate was a sealed book to us. We had nothing to read. Under these conditions one begins to fear one's brain, especially at night. It was then that it began to run like a mechanical toy. Like a clockwork mouse, it scampered aimlessly amongst the dust of memory, then suddenly became inert, with the works run down. I grew terrified of thinking, especially of thinking about my friend in the fur coat.

The night hours are the worst in captivity. One lies on the floor, waiting for sleep to come, but instead of blessed sleep, "beloved from pole to pole," thoughts come crowding thick and fast on consciousness, thoughts like clouds that lower over the quiescent body. Each second then seems of inconceivable duration. But there is no escape from Time.

During the day, however, things were more bearable, and occasional gleams of humour enlivened the laggard moments.

Among our guard there were several sentries who (I thought) might conceivably help us to escape. One dark night, one of these men whispered the one word "Jesus," and made the sign of the Cross, as I pa.s.sed him. After this introduction I naturally hoped that he might be of use. He was a fine figure of a man, with a proud poise of head, and aquiline nose, as if some a.s.syrian G.o.d had been his ancestor. I was gazing at him in admiration the next day, and gauging his possibilities through my single eye-gla.s.s, when a curious thing happened.

Our eyes met. He seemed mesmerised by my monocle. For a long time we stared at each other in silence, then, thinking the sergeant of the guard would notice our behaviour, I discreetly dropped my eye-gla.s.s and looked the other way. The sentry's mouth quivered as if I had made a joke, but instead of smiling, he burst suddenly into a storm of tears.

The sergeant of the guard (a swart, st.u.r.dy little Turk) rushed out to see what had happened. There was the big sentry, wailing, and actually gnas.h.i.+ng his white teeth. I stood awkwardly, looking as innocent as I felt. The sergeant bristled like a terrier, pulled the sentry's poor nose, and boxed his beautiful ears, while the victim continued to blubber and look piteously in my direction.

But I could not help him at all. I had not the slightest idea what was the matter, nor do I know now. Hysteria, I suppose.

Eventually that great solvent of perplexity, nicotine, came to relieve the awkward situation. First the sergeant accepted a cigarette, then, more diffidently, the sentry. Later I put in my eye-gla.s.s again, and convinced them, I think, that its use did not involve the weaving of any unholy spell.

This eye-gla.s.s, by the way, survived all the fortunes of captivity.

Through it I surveyed the moon-lit plains beyond the Tigris when I planned escape in Mosul, as shall be told in the next chapter. Later it scanned the desert's dusty face for any hope of release. At Afion-kara-hissar it helped me search for a pathway through our guards.

At Constantinople it was still my friend. Through it, a month before escape, I looked at the slip of new moon that swung over San Sophia on the last day of Ramazan, wondering where the next moon would find me.

And when the next moon came, I watched the sentries by its aid, on the night of our first escape. And it was in my eye when I slipped down the rope to freedom.

But this chapter is getting "gaga." It has a happy ending, however.

One evening when the

". . . little patch of blue, That prisoners call the sky"

had turned to sulky mauve, and the air was heavy with storm, and our fellow-prisoners were depressed, and the Arab guard was bellowing songs outside, and we were peeling potatoes for our dinner by the flicker of lamp-light, and life seemed drab beyond description, there came great news to us. Two other officers had arrived.

Next moment they peered into our den, even as we had done. And they were angry, amazed, unshaven, bronzed by the desert air, even as we had been.

There in the doorway, ruddy and fair and truculent like some Viking out of time and place, stood the young pilot I had last seen at Aziziah. He was alive, my friend in the fur coat.

The desert had delivered up its dead!