‘Yallah …’
‘Enough!’ Crabbe whirled round and yelled back at the Turk. He knew the man couldn’t understand a word he said but he hoped the guard would pick up his meaning from the tone of his voice.
‘Yallah!’ the guard repeated, shaking his fist at Crabbe.
Crabbe faced him square on and mimed spooning food into his mouth. ‘Enough for today. Time to finish and eat.’
A second guard pushed his way towards them. He pulled a whip from his belt and lifted it high in the air before bringing it down full force across Crabbe’s shoulders.
Crabbe screamed.
‘No work. No money. No money. No food. No food you don’t eat,’ the guard shouted in pidgin English.
Crabbe staggered and fell back. Barney and Crocker caught him and propped him upright.
The guard with a whip stepped closer to Crabbe and repeated. ‘No work! No food!’
Crocker released his hold on Crabbe, took another canvas bucket of stones from a prisoner and emptied it into the truck. ‘Look, work,’ he addressed the guard.
A whistle blew, loud and piercing.
‘Finish,’ Crocker tried smiling at the guard who didn’t smile back.
‘Truck!’ The guard raised his whip above Barney’s head. Crabbe grabbed the end and pulled it from the guard’s grasp. He grasped the handle and slammed it across the guard’s cheek.
Half a dozen guards charged towards the melee. Barney and Crocker were pushed aside as the newcomers joined their Turkish comrades. The guard who’d lost his whip cracked Crabbe soundly on the jaw. The major crumpled to the ground. The guards closed in around him. He curled on the floor and attempted to protect his head with his hands and arms as the guards booted him from all sides.
Blood spurted from Crabbe’s nose, ears, and mouth, sinking into and staining the dust on the track.
‘Bastards! Leave him alone!’ Without sparing a thought for the consequences Crocker grabbed one of the guards’ whistles and blew it, hard. More guards came running and so did the prisoners, although they trailed and limped at a slower pace.
Shouts and screams filled the air as the more robust among the prisoners tried to pull the guards away from Crabbe. A shot was fired. Both guards and prisoners turned to the commandant who was standing on a block holding his revolver high in the air. The commandant shouted in Turkish and the guards began herding the prisoners back towards their accommodation.
Crocker and Barney fought to stay with Crabbe. Crocker bent over him and refused to move even when the guards tried dragging him away. Crocker pointed at Crabbe and shouted as loud as he could, ‘Major,’ while holding the insignia on the collar of the remains of Crabbe’s tunic.
The commandant stepped down from the block and loomed over them. Crocker stared up at him. The commandant barked at the guards and four of them physically lifted Crocker and dragged him away, still shouting and screaming. Two more guards pushed Barney behind the truck.
‘Push! Push!’
Barney put his shoulder against the truck and pushed with all the strength left to him. It didn’t budge an inch.
The guards started laughing.
‘Push! Push!’
Barney looked down at Crabbe’s bloody broken body on the track and tried pushing again.
The guards’ laughter escalated, ominous, terrifying.
A gun butt was rammed into Barney’s back, another his stomach. The last thing he saw as he fell headlong alongside his major was his blood drying in the dust alongside Major Crabbe’s.
Chapter Nineteen
Turkish Prisoner of War Camp
October 1916
‘If there’s a louse left in this house, it’s a dead lonely louse, sir,’ Greening said proudly to John as they walked through the rooms, Baker, Williams, Roberts, Jones and all the other orderlies had scoured with boiling water and evil smelling powders. John had bought the powders from one of the merchants who were allowed to ‘sell’ goods to the British POWs in exchange for promissory notes, exchangeable for gold at the end of the war.
John had been amazed at the trust placed in the British POWs by the merchants, the high value of credit extended to them and the quantity and quality of the goods on offer that included food and much-needed clothes.
‘There’s no way of knowing if the boiling water or the powders killed off the blighters. But they certainly appear to have gone.’ John bent down and examined cracks in the floorboards. He spotted a mouse hole in a skirting board but when he looked at it closely he saw that it had been blocked up with clay.
‘It’s an old one, sir,’ Greening reassured him.
‘So I see. You’ve done a great job here, Greening.’
‘I only supervised, sir.’
‘Like an officer,’ John joked.
‘Exactly, sir.’
‘When I first saw this place a month ago, I doubted that it would ever be fit for habitation let alone a hospital, now it’s probably cleaner than the hospital in Kut was, even in the early days of the siege.’
‘So can I tell the orderlies to move the quilts in, sir? The cold weather’s coming and the sick are freezing in the tents in the garden.’
‘Yes, Greening. As discussed keep the surgical cases on the ground and first floor. The medical cases on the second. Mrs Gulbenkian, Rebeka, and Hasmik can move into two of the attic rooms on the top floor. I’ll take the third. You take the small room at the foot of the attic stairs to the right. Dira can take the one on the left. Baker, Roberts, Williams, and Jones can share the one at the back as it’s the largest. If they all agree, Evans can join them. He seems to have become a volunteer orderly since he recovered.’
‘More like our resident joker and jester, sir, but the men seem to like him. I’ll ask our orderlies what they think of the idea of him moving in here with us. I’ll get things going now, and we’ll have this hospital organised and operational by the end of the day.’
‘Greening,’ John stopped the sergeant as he was about to leave.
‘Sir.’
‘Let the men know how much I appreciate what they and you have done here.’
‘I will, but we enjoyed having something to do. It was a pleasure, sir.’
‘Pleasure?’ John repeated. ‘Killing lice and scrubbing out a filthy building is a pleasure?’
‘The men will do anything for you, sir. They even set up a sweepstake on who would kill the most bedbugs.’
‘Who won?’
‘Need you ask, sir?’
‘Evans?’
‘He found a filthy old mattress in one of the attic rooms he christened “Bedbug Heaven” then proceeded to turn it into “Bedbug Hell”. None of the guards here seemed to know who lived in this building before we took it over and moved in, but judging by the amount of blood Evans squashed out of the little beggars the poor souls must have been anaemic, sir.’
‘Bedbugs are known to be inveterate survivors, even during long droughts and famines when they’ve had no humans to feed on. There haven’t been any problems with the Armenians, have there?’ John asked.
‘Not since you asked me the same question yesterday, sir. Every POW is looking out for them, and with one or two exceptions, on the whole our guards ignore them.’
‘What kind of exceptions?’ John asked, instantly on the alert.
‘It’s the little girl, sir. I’ve seen one or two of the guards trying to give her cake and sweets, nothing wrong with that, they’re probably fathers who are missing their own children, but for all of that she never takes anything off them, which isn’t surprising after hearing what they’ve been through from Miss Rebeka. Can I give you a hand to move your things out of your tent and into the building, sir?’
‘My things are my doctor’s bag and kitbag,’ John answered in amusement. ‘I think I can manage those on my own. What on earth is going on out there?’
The sounds of shouting and excitement echoed in from the garden. John and Greening left the building. Bowditch and Grace were standing b
ehind a rough wooden table set beneath the veranda of the officer’s accommodation emptying out sacks of letters.
‘Is that what I think it is?’ John shouted.
‘Mail, sir.’ Grace ran his hands through the letters, lifted them high in the air, and allowed them to fall through his fingers.
‘There’s Red Cross parcels too, sir,’ Bowditch added. ‘Some have names on and some are for general use. The colonel’s ordered the general ones put into storage for the common good. He asked if you could find a secure cupboard in the hospital to lock them into.’
‘If there isn’t one, I’ll find someone who can make one, Bowditch.’
‘Here’s a parcel for you, sir.’ Bowditch looked through the pile of Red Cross boxes that had been heaped on a wooden bench behind him, extracted one, and handed it to John. ‘You probably have letters too, sir, but as you see, we haven’t had time to sort them yet.
John took the parcel and looked around at the men. Even with the food procured though the merchants most looked as though they were starving, but they were undoubtedly healthier than they’d been when he’d arrived a month ago. And certainly a lot fitter than they were when they’d left Kut.
‘Baker,’ he spotted the corporal and called him over. ‘You’ve had letters?’
‘Three, sir, from my wife, my mum, and my sister.’
‘Do you have the key I gave you to the store cupboard where we decided to keep drugs and medical supplies?’
‘Safe, sir.’ Baker took it from his tunic pocket.
‘Put this in there for me please,’ John handed him the Red Cross parcel. ‘And if you want to read your letters in peace you can shut yourself inside. No one will think of looking for you in there.’
‘I may just do that, sir.’ He took the parcel. ‘But this food parcel is yours, sir. Shouldn’t you keep it in your quarters?’
‘I’ll open it later and check the contents. We’re not badly off for food at the moment, but things can change and it won’t hurt to have extra supplies we can draw on if we have a sudden influx of sick.’
‘I’ll lock it in the cupboard, sir.’
Baker left and Greening joined John. ‘Six letters for you, sir.’
‘Thank you.’
‘It’s good to know that the outside world hasn’t entirely forgotten us, isn’t it, sir.’
‘It is. You heard from your wife, Greening?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Greening beamed. ‘I have a son, sir. John Mason Alfred Greening.’
‘You named him after me!’ John was shocked.
‘The Alfred’s for me, sir. After Kut … well you know what we all went through there, sir – I wrote to Harriet and told her that if we had a son I wanted him named after the finest man I knew. I know it’s an imposition, sir, and I shouldn’t do it, but if we were in Basra I’d have asked if you’d minded standing godfather, sir.’
‘It would be an honour, Greening, and I’m touched that you invited me, much less named your son after me.’ There was a sudden unaccountable lump in John’s throat that made his voice oddly tremulous. ‘But how did you get your letter to Harriet?’
‘I gave it to Major Knight to take downstream, sir. When General Townshend surrendered, Major Knight passed the word around that he’d take anything we wanted sent out with him when he escorted the sick, sir.’
‘Well congratulations, Greening. We’ll toast young John’s health tonight.’
‘In what, sir?’
‘We’ll find something.’ John winked. He took his letters, went into his tent, moved the kitbag and doctor’s bag he’d packed earlier, sat in his camp chair, and looked at the return addresses.
One was from Michael Downe, another from David Knight, both sent a month ago from Sheikh Saad. One from Georgiana had only taken three weeks to travel up from Basra but a letter from his brother Tom, also posted in Basra, had taken over six weeks. There was one from his parents with a six-month-old postmark. The sixth, with an Indian return address, was from Maud.
He opened Georgiana’s letter first. As he read he imagined her frown as she pushed her spectacles back up her nose as she wrote, squinting down at the paper in between dipping the pen into the ink well.
Dear John,
It’s extremely odd to be writing this when I know perfectly well the odds of you ever getting it are almost negligible. However, here goes. I do hope that you are well and totally out of character caring for yourself better than you are looking after your patients. What’s that phrase Helen was so fond of using in the London Hospital? ‘Physician heal thyself because if you don’t you won’t be a blind bit of use to your patients’. Well, this is the point at which I stop rambling and say what I have to before I run out of paper.
Charles is dead, John, killed by a sniper at some awful place on the Tigris between Basra and Baghdad. David, Peter, and Michael were with him when it happened and they have all written the same thing. That there wasn’t a single thing any one of them could do. One minute Charles was with them, talking and walking from one tent to another across the camp, the next he was dead with an Arab bullet in his skull. I know what reading this is doing to you. I loved the stiff upper-lipped idiot too, and I can’t imagine carrying on living without him but living without him we must. I am too devastated to resort to platitudes about King and Country and a better place. The better place was here on earth with us. How dare Charles go and get himself killed! He left an absolute fortune which wasn’t surprising when I thought about it. He and his father lived fairly frugally and there were an awful lot of generals in his family trees on both his mother and father’s sides. Aren’t they the ones who get the pick of the loot after battles?
Anyway, Charles appointed me and Michael executors of his will. Which brings me to the second awful bit of news, apart from bequests to Chatta Ram – Charles’s half-brother as well as his bearer – I’ll save that story – and Kitty, Charles’s nurse girlfriend, Charles left the bulk of his estate to Maud’s son, Robin, and acknowledged the baby his son. How the hell that happened I have no idea. If you want me to do anything for you about Maud – like start divorce proceedings – I will. Unfortunately I can’t whiplash her, which is what I’d like to do as she disappeared after leaving the child at the Lansing and asking Mrs Butler to put him into an orphanage. At the risk of you thinking I’m being the over-protective cousin, she was never the right one for you, John. Too silly and flighty by half.
Robin is with Angela at present – how long for, neither I nor Angela have any idea. Now the baby is wealthy I suppose guardians need to be appointed and to that end I have written to Charles’s father to ask him what he’d like to do with the child. As Robin is undoubtedly a bastard I can guess his reply. Damn, I’m running out of paper so my writing is getting smaller. Hope you can read this. Tom was invalided out and sent back to Blighty, he and Clary married in Basra just before they left. David feels terribly guilty at leaving you to go into captivity while he is living in the lap of luxury with the Relief Force – now rechristened the Baghdad Force I suppose.
John, I really am sorry that it didn’t work out for you and Maud, but you don’t need my sympathy. This bloody awful war is messing up everyone’s lives. I love you and will always be here for you, and I’m staying in Mesopotamia until the bitter end – or Michael leaves, whichever comes first.
Your loving cousin, who kisses your photograph (on the cheek) and says a prayer for you every night,
Georgie
John sat back and considered what Georgiana had written. He explored his feelings and was disconcerted to realise that he didn’t feel anything much at all. He tried to recall his reaction when he found the cache of letters Maud had exchanged with one of her lovers among the effects of a man killed in battle. All he remembered about that night was getting drunk and remaining drunk for months afterwards – in fact, right up until the moment he’d been court-martialled and sentenced to death in Kut.
But then that had been a somewhat sobering experience.
Ho
w did he feel about his wife’s child? But not just Maud’s child, Charles’s too, poor boy, abandoned by Maud to live out his life in an orphanage, or if he was fortunate, an adoptive home.
He thought about the boy for a moment. He was Charles’s son and Charles was dead, so the boy was in need of a guardian. Peter and Angela would be ideal, especially as they were already caring for the child, but what if they had their own child. And then there was General Reid. No one could deny he was the boy’s closest living relative, apart from Maud, who’d abandoned him, but General Reid had at best been an absent and remote father to Charles even when they’d lived under the same roof.
The obvious course would be to take the boy back to Clyneswood and Stouthall where he, his brother, sister, cousins, and Charles had grown up. Tom would probably already be back there with Clary. At the end of the war Georgie would possibly return to Clyneswood and him –
He had a sudden vision of a Sunday afternoon in the garden on a sunny day, playing cricket with Tom, Michael, Harry, Charles, Georgie, and his sister Lucy, while their respective parents drank tea on the terrace with the vicar.
Tom and Clary would hopefully have children. Charles’s son – he scanned Georgie’s letter to check his name – Robin should have at least one or two cousins to play with, if not, there were always the village children.
He had a sudden longing to be sitting on the terrace where his parents had sat, watching the next generation play cricket, tennis, and rounders.
His dreams had never moved far from Stouthall, or the old Georgian manor in a West Country village that he had planned to buy and live in with Maud and a houseful of children. The one and only thing that had changed in his dream was the identity of his wife.
Bagtsche Turkish Prisoner of War Camp
October 1916
Captain Gerald Vincent walked down the long dark stone corridor in company with a Turkish guard and German sergeant. The stench was foul and overpowering. Raw sewage mingled with cold sweat, vomit, and the feral odour of rats. He looked through the metal gratings into cells floored with filthy damp quilts and blankets so louse-ridden he could see the creatures moving from six feet away.
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