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Escaping Club

<hr style="width: 65%;" />[300] <h2>CHAPTER IV</h2> <h3>THE ROUND TOUR CONCLUDED</h3> There is one incident in our otherwise uneventful journey to Smyrna which seems to me worthy of record. We were passing through a particularly wild and uninhabited stretch of country, when the train halted just after it had passed a small bridge over a ravine. I and a friend who spoke Turkish descended to stretch our legs, and saw standing on the bridge a very ragged sentry, so we walked back to question him. He had been there, the solitary guardian of that bridge, for four years. Two years before this he had somehow seen or heard from his wife, and had learnt that three of his four sons were dead and the other was fighting. Since then he had had no news of his family. The only food he received were two loaves of bread thrown out of the train twice a week, and during these four years he had lived and slept in the clothes, now ragged and rotten, which he was wearing. He scarcely spoke to any one from year's end to year's end, and lived perpetually on the border of starvation. He only prayed God to blast Enver's eyes, because he was a year and a half in arrears with his pay of 1/4d. a day or so. Thank God I was not born to be a Turkish territorial. In the Turkish army, I[301] suppose, this fellow would be envied, as having a nice quiet job on the lines of communication. On arriving at Smyrna we were told, to our great astonishment, for we had given no parole of any sort, that we were free to go where we would and do what we liked. By the kindness of the American School Missionaries the mission school buildings had been thrown open to the officers and Tommies. The place was beautifully clean but rather crowded, and as I desired solitude above all things, I packed a rücksack and set out to test how far our freedom extended. There was no one to stop me at the station, so I took the train to a small village in the hills above Smyrna and spent two most enjoyable days in a country hotel. The population of Smyrna seems to be the result of inter-marriage between all the nations under the sun. Perhaps there is rather more Greek blood about than any other. They speak no language well, and usually five or six badly. They are a timorous, effeminate community, very immoral and untrustworthy, and seem to live in a perpetual and perhaps justifiable fear of being massacred. They all hated the Turk much but feared him more, and were very friendly to us. Once I had discovered that I was really free to go where I would, it seemed to me that I was in rather a false position. The fact that we were not guarded in any way made me no less anxious to get out of Turkey; and the fact that the Turks had not asked for our parole, which most of us would have refused, in no way relieved us of the duty of escaping if[302] we could. There were other considerations, however. A small minority of the British officers and men now collected at Smyrna for exchange were really sick men; and several of us, who were ardent escapers, did not consider that we were justified in bringing possible punishment on these men by escaping. We therefore decided to wait for the exchange ship and to go by that, so long as it was not necessary to give any sort of parole not to fight against the Germans. In the meantime we prepared a method of escape by which we could clear out of Asia Minor if ever the Turks changed their mind and attempted to send us back to camps in the interior. It was not so easy to find a method of getting away as one might have expected. Nearly every one in the place would take a bribe without hesitation; but they were more likely to betray you at the last moment than do any job in which there was the slightest taint of danger. That is the worst of these half-breeds; they have no morals of any sort. The Turk has his own peculiar morals, and whatever he may be he is not a coward. If you go the right way about it I believe all Turks can be bribed. A good deal of intrigue and preparation is sometimes necessary; but once he has accepted money he seems to consider it dishonest to fail to carry out his part of the bargain. Eventually one of us got into touch with our secret intelligence system and made arrangements for three or four of us to get away if it became necessary. However, the exchange ship was expected any day, so we settled down to wait for it. When we had been there about ten days David came to me with an extraordinary story. He said that a Turk[303] had approached him and suggested that there should be a revolution in Smyrna. Apparently there were a number of Turks in Smyrna who believed that the Turkish empire was completely done, and that the sooner peace was made with the Entente the better. By a revolution in Smyrna they hoped to force the hands of the Government in Constantinople. They hoped, by handing over the place to the English, that Smyrna would be left, when peace came, as an independent state. Above all, I think they feared that it should go to Greece. However, I am not sure that these were the real motives, or all the motives, of the proposed revolution. The motives were a small matter to us. What we had to consider was—(a) Was it possible? (b) Was it desirable from a military or political point of view? We decided to make all preparation, but to refuse active participation till we had information that a revolution in Smyrna was desired by the British. The Turks who brought this proposal to David said the job the Turkish revolutionaries would undertake would be to tie up or murder the commander of the garrison, the military governor, the chief of police, and a few other important personages. David was to select a party of men from amongst the British and hold the railway with a couple of machine guns, incidentally cutting all the telephone and telegraph wires. My job was to capture the Austrian aerodrome just above the town, and then to fly one of their machines to Mitylene and report events to the English. "What about the garrison?" David had asked. "That is all right," said the Turk; "we have a[304] Mullah who will preach a holy war against the Germans, and the garrison will all come over to us." The scheme seemed pretty mad at first, but the more we considered it the more possible did it seem. David felt certain he could do his part, and I went up and inspected the aerodrome, and made a number of inquiries about the personnel and the guard. It seemed that with about a dozen men there would be absolutely no difficulty in capturing the aerodrome, probably without bloodshed. We considered that if the Turks could do their part—and they were perfectly confident they could—we could capture the town and hold it for at least a fortnight. If the wires were cut we could more or less rely on the fact that for a week or so it would be considered only a normal breakdown of the line. The Turk said that the nearest troops were ten days' march away, and there was no rolling stock to bring many troops by train. Such was the rough outline of the scheme, though I may not have got all the details quite correct. We now refused to move any further in the matter till we got into touch with the British and learnt that a revolution was desirable, and that there were ships and troops to take over the town when and if we were successful. To disarm criticism and indicate that I am now more or less sane, I am prepared to admit now that we must have been perfectly mad to entertain the idea for a moment. About this time a certain English colonel turned up in Smyrna and put up at the best hotel. He had nothing whatever to do with the exchange of prisoners; and in order to explain his presence I must digress here to give[305] some account, probably rather inaccurate, of his previous adventures in Turkey. A month or two before the Armistice the colonel had been a prisoner-of-war in a Turkish prison camp about 100 miles from Constantinople. From there he had escaped by means of a judicious mixture of bribery and audacity and made his way to Constantinople. For over a month he lay hid in the town, and at the end of that time had prepared a complete plan of escape. The details of where and how he was going is not part of this story. On the night on which he had made all preparations to depart he received a note from the Minister of the Interior of the Turkish Empire saying that he, the Minister, had heard that the colonel was about to escape, and would be much obliged if he would call on him before departing. As I said before, it is no use being surprised at anything in Turkey; but that it should be possible that, while one department was searching high and low for an escaped prisoner, another department not only knew where he was but when he intended to escape, throws an interesting sidelight on Turkish methods of government. The only explanation seems to be that each department has an entirely independent secret service of its own. The colonel decided that he would go and see the Minister, as he had really not much choice in the matter. This interview between a prisoner-of-war in the middle of an attempt to escape and a Minister of an enemy country must be almost unique, dealing, as I believe it did, with the probable attitude of the Entente towards certain aspects of the coming armistice. At the end of two hours the Minister thanked the[306] colonel courteously and intimated that he would not hinder him further in his attempt to escape. "That won't do at all," said the colonel, "you have already spoilt my plans, and it is now up to you to get me out of the country." "I will send you out by aeroplane," said the Minister, and went to the telephone. In a short time he returned and stated that, to his great regret, it was impossible to obtain an aeroplane for the purpose, as they were all in the hands of the Germans. The Turks are notoriously incompetent as aviators, and this was only to be expected. As an aeroplane was out of the question, the Minister did the next best thing and wrote out for the colonel an official "passe-partout," stamped all over and signed by the highest powers in the land. Armed with this document the colonel was no longer a poor prisoner-of-war. He was more than free; he was a power in the land of Turkey. All officialdom would bow down before him. So he took the train to Smyrna and put up in the best hotel. Soon after his arrival David and I determined to seek his advice in the matter of the revolution, so we introduced him to the spokesman of the Turkish conspirators, and the three of us met one night in the colonel's private sitting-room and discussed the question from every point of view. The colonel viewed the proposed revolution in the same light as we had done, as a wild but not impossible scheme, only to be put into practice if we received definite information that such a thing was desired by the British. We spent the next day or two in futile attempts[307] to find a boatman (they were nearly all Greeks) sufficiently honest, courageous, or patriotic to be worth bribing. Quite suddenly it was announced that the Turkish armistice commissioners had arrived in Smyrna, whence they would leave to go either to Mitylene or to a British battleship, in order to undertake negotiations. The colonel and David, with the help of the colonel's all-powerful pass, made their way to the presence of the commissioners, and somehow or other persuaded them that it would be a good thing to take the colonel with them when they went. They left early one morning in a large motor boat, the colonel promising to send us back word if a revolution was desirable. No word came through to that effect, and less than a week later the arrival of the exchange ship was announced. On board the ship we were once more assailed with doubts on the question of parole. Should we be eligible to fight against the Germans? We nearly got off the ship at Mitylene with the idea of taking a sailing boat back to Smyrna, surrendering to the Turks, and escaping in a legitimate way the same night, as I think we probably could have done. We decided against it, however, after consultation with a distinguished general and the captain of the ship. Our advisers pointed out, firstly, that as far as they knew we had given no parole not to fight against the Germans; and, secondly, that there seemed every prospect that the war with Germany as well as with Turkey would be over before we could return to Europe. We left Smyrna on November 1st, 1918, when I had been a prisoner in Turkey for seven and a half months, so that, in Germany and Turkey together, I had been a prisoner-of-[308]war for under eighteen months. Quite enough. Technically, I think I may claim to have escaped from Turkey as well as from Germany, but I am not particularly proud of the Turkish escape. There is one further incident which happened after I had been enjoying the luxuries of Cairo and Alexandria for a fortnight, and then I have finished. It occurred to me that it would be interesting to visit the officer prisoners-of-war camp between Alexandria and Cairo. I got on the telephone and asked for permission, and as I was speaking something prompted me to ask if by any chance there was a German flying captain by name of Franz Walz in the camp. Yes, there was. This struck me as most humorous, and also a unique opportunity of repaying some of Hauptmann Walz's kindness to me when I had been a prisoner in his power. My visit to the camp was extraordinarily interesting. The place was a high wire enclosure on bare and very sandy soil. It was clean and well ordered, and most of the wooden huts had been made to look quite pretty by small gardens round them. For all that, it was not a place in which I should have cared to have been a prisoner. Not that there seemed much to complain about, except that it must have been pretty dull. The wooden huts were well built and of the right type for the climate and the country: the prisoners seemed to have a reasonable amount of liberty outside the camp, with the possibilities of bathing from time to time, and they could purchase books and clothes with few restrictions, but discipline was a bit too strict for my liking. Quite right from the point of view of the commandant,[309] but I can't help looking at it from a prisoner's point of view. When I asked Walz, he told me some of their causes for complaint, but they seemed to me pretty insignificant, compared at any rate with those things we had to complain about at Ingolstadt; and I told him so. I was told that Walz had been rather truculent when first captured, and I respected him for it. No decent man takes kindly to being a prisoner-of-war. However, he was very friendly to me, and gave me tea in his mess and introduced me to a number of German officers, many of whom had been captured off the Konigsberg, and three or four had been among my hosts in the German flying corps mess at Afule. They seemed a particularly nice lot of fellows, though there were one or two about the place to whom I was not introduced whose looks I did not like, and the feeling was obviously reciprocated. Walz was not unnaturally very depressed both at his own and his country's position. The terms of the Armistice had just been published, and the prisoners ridiculed the idea that Germany would accept them. They only saw our newspapers and did not believe them—prisoners-of-war are the same all the world over—and had no conception of Germany's desperate condition. I did not attempt to enlighten them much, as it seemed to me tactful and generous, remembering my own experiences to keep off the subject as much as possible. Germany accepted the terms the next day. Poor fellows! It must have come to them as a terrible shock. I found that Walz had been told, when first captured, of my own experiences as a prisoner in Germany, and just before I left, he took me[310] aside and said, "Can I possibly escape from a place like this? What would you do here? and if you got out, where would you escape to?" I said that it seemed a most difficult camp to get out of, and if a prisoner got out there were thousands of miles to cross before reaching a friendly country. As a matter of fact, as I told the commandant afterwards, it looked to me as if any prisoner who could learn a few words of English could bluff himself out of the camp any day in broad daylight. A man in English officer's uniform had only to call to the sentry to open one of the many gates and I think it would have been opened. I may be wrong. There would have been no harm done and ample time to retreat, change clothes, and prove an alibi if the bluff were unsuccessful. The second difficulty—the distance, and where to go—was much more serious. The Aboukir aerodrome was within a couple of miles of the camp, and Walz's thoughts as an airman naturally turned in that direction. I was compelled to prevaricate and tell him that the aeroplanes there were all training machines and seldom had more than one hour's petrol on board, and also that the place was well guarded. At this discouraging news, I hope and believe he gave up all attempts to escape. He told me that two German airmen, who had been captured by the English shortly after my own capture, had reported that I had broken my parole when escaping. On hearing this Walz had taken considerable trouble in denying it, and I am most grateful to him for that, quite apart from the other kind things already referred to in this book which he did for me. I count Hauptmann Walz among the many nice fellows whom I[311] met in this war. For his sake, and for the sake of the many kind acts done by Germans to our prisoners-of-war in Turkey, I can never agree to class all Germans together as brutes. Surely it will be better for the peace of the world if we admit that the majority of Germans in this war only did their duty and did it well. This attitude need in no wise lessen our dislike for the German national ideals of "Might is Right," "Deutschland über Alles," or our loathing for the inhuman and unforgivable way in which these ideals were pushed to their logical conclusion. If wars are to cease, future generations must find a "modus vivendi" with the Germans; and surely, having beaten them, we can afford to encourage their good points by recognition of them. The Turk, however, still remains to me the "unspeakable Turk." <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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