Eastern Nights - and Flights Part 5

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 ma.s.s 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 att.i.tude 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.siduously 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) prost.i.tution 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, b.u.t.ter, 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 Barbery d'Aureville; 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 ma.s.sacres; 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. .h.i.t. 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 c.o.c.kpit, 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 s.h.i.+ps 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.

Von Heimburg then praised the British Air Service, with many a pause that invited comment from us. The pauses remained empty, and we managed to exclude the war by pretending to compare painstakingly and a.s.siduously the respective merits of English and Australian girls.

After tea, while bathing in the Mediterranean with the Germans, we saw a strange sight along the sea-front. A line of not less than thirty fis.h.i.+ng-craft were left stranded on the beach, with great holes knocked in their sides, so that they might not be floated. This drastic prevention of the use of small vessels, according to Santel, was because many Greek and Syrian fishermen had spied for the British or deserted to Cyprus.

"The same thing has happened over there," he added, pointing across the bay toward Acre, "and at other places, too--Tyre, Sidon, Beyrout, and every port on the coast-line of Asia Minor."

We noticed, however, that three boats were out at sea, presumably fis.h.i.+ng for the tables of officers and officials.

"If we could get back here some night," whispered C. as we dressed, "we might collar one of those three boats, tow it out to sea by swimming, and sail to Jaffa." This revived my hopes of escape for the first time since the fiasco at Tul-Keran.