The Road to En-dor

by E. H. Jones

  ‘There is, Doc.! You’ve been in the Commandant’s private house. Describe it to me, carefully.’

  He did so. ‘Anything else?’ he asked

  I shook my head.

  ‘Look here, Bones.’ The little man had grown suddenly solemn. ‘I know the Commandant; I’ve treated him as a doctor, and I know him. He’s dangerous – a bad man. And as for the Cook, he’s a limb of Satan! He’ll poison or shoot you as soon as look at you. I don’t want to spoil a joke, but you’re running a risk – a hell of a risk. You’ve compromised them with their own War Office, and if they find out you are bluffing them about this treasure, don’t blame me if it’s goodbye.’

  ‘That reminds me,’ I said; ‘there is one other thing I want you to do for us. If we send out of prison to ask for medicine, don’t give it; insist on coming to see us.’ He nodded. ‘And don’t you worry, Doc.! We’re coming through all right, and it’ll be a top-hole ramp, anyway.’

  ‘How far is it going to lead you?’ he asked.

  ‘Sufficient unto the day!’ I said. ‘We don’t know.’

  Doc. burst out laughing and smacked me hard between the shoulders.

  ‘Bones, ye vagabond,’ he cried, ‘I believe you are an Irishman after all!’

  * * *

  At 3 p.m. our twenty-four hours of grace expired. Once more we went to the Commandant’s office – Hill and I and the four witnesses. The last act of the little comedy was played. The Commandant began with a graphic picture of the horrors of a Turkish prison and the monotony of a bread-and-water diet. It was excellently done, and calculated to give the most phlegmatic of Britishers cold shudders down the spine. Then he told us how much he loved us prisoners, and would we spare him the pain of putting us in jail by giving up the name he wanted? Hill and I were models of firmness in our refusal. Kiazim Bey, with a gesture of hopelessness, indicated he could do no more for us. Then came the sentence. The common jail for the present would remain in abeyance, but until we saw fit to confess we would be confined in a back room of the ‘Colonels’ House’ – a large empty building opposite the office. We would be allowed no communication whatever with other prisoners, and no orderly, but we might have our clothes and bedding. We would not be permitted to write or receive any letters. To begin with, our food could be sent in by the nearest prisoners’ house. If we remained obdurate, we would later sample a bread-and-water diet. No walks and no privileges of any kind, and the threat of a further court-martial and a severer sentence by Constantinople over our heads!

  Then something happened which neither Hill nor I had foreseen, and which completely took our breath away. Major Gilchrist in his position as adjutant of the camp made an exceedingly polite and grateful speech. No doubt he thought he was being very diplomatic, for on behalf of the camp he thanked the Commandant for the courtesy and fairness with which he had conducted the trial and for the leniency of the sentence!29

  Figure 18: The commandant shook hands with each of us in turn.

  After this ‘vote of thanks’, our four witnesses left the office. They were good fellows, those four. They busied themselves getting up our kit to our new quarters, and seeing the room swept out and all made comfortable for us. While they were doing so, Hill and I and the Commandant and the Pimple were having a noble time together, recalling the various incidents in the trial and congratulating each other on our successful performances. The Commandant thought it all the best joke of his life, and he made us repeat several times Gilchrist’s pæan of praise, rocking in his chair with laughter.

  At last there was a trampling in the hall below. The Chaoush had amassed a guard sufficiently strong to escort us two desperadoes across the street, and was waiting, so the Commandant shook hands with us in turn.

  ‘Remember, my friends,’ he said, ‘you have but to ask for anything you want, and you will get it.’

  Then we were marched across to our new prison, the first men in history, so far as we knew, to be sentenced for thought-reading.

  Chapter XII

  Of The Comrades We Had Left Behind and How Posh Castle Played the Raven

  Our new prison was one of the best built houses in Yozgad, empty of all furniture, it is true (except the chair and table we had each brought with us), but large, airy, and comparatively clean. From the front windows we had a view of the Commandant’s office and the main street. From the side we looked into ‘Posh Castle’, where now lived our friends Doc., Price and Matthews; and at the back there was a tiny cobbled yard, with high walls round it, and a large stone horse-trough, which we promptly converted into that real luxury – a full-length bath. To the south-east we had a wide view of the distant pine-woods, and nearer at hand a certain grey rock projected through the snow on the slope of South Hill. Under its shadow lay the first clue to the treasure.

  Figure 19: ‘The snow on the slope of South Hill’ – the site of the first clue to the treasure.

  Indoors, if we wished it, we could each have a bedroom, a dining room and a study, and still leave a spare suite for the chance guest. Furniture? Simple enough! Move your chair and table to wherever you want to sit, and there you are! When we arrived some of our friends were waiting to see the last of us. Our escort hustled them out. The door slammed, the key grated in the lock, and a sentry took up his stand outside. Our separation from the camp was complete, and our solitary confinement had begun.

  It was natural that Hill and I should be elated at the success of our plan. The simultaneous hoodwinking of friend and foe had for us an amusing side. But mingled with our elation and our amusement was a feeling which no loyalty to our friends in the camp could suppress. For we rejoiced, above all, in our loneliness, in our freedom from interruption, in the fact that we were quit of the others. I make the confession knowing that any fellow prisoner who chances on this story will understand and sympathize. The longing for a little solitude was shared by us all.

  It must not be imagined that the prison walls of Yozgad enclosed a company of particularly obnoxious irreconcilables, or that we were a shiftless crew who gave in to the discomforts of their situation. Far from it. A more companionable set of men never existed, and during our stay in Yozgad we overcame every difficulty but one. For instance: to begin with, there was an entire absence of furniture. Yozgad was no Donnington Hall, and the Turks provided nothing but a roof to our heads, and a bare floor – sometimes of stone – for us to lie on. The camp purchased empty grocery boxes, acquired a saw, a hammer, a plane, and nails, and some of our prisoners evolved designs in chairs and tables and beds which would have done credit to Maple’s. Our food, both in quality and price, was appalling; we learned to cook, and before we left Yozgad there were Messes which could turn out on occasion a five-course dinner that left nothing to be desired. We had no games. Busy penknives soon remedied the deficiency; chessmen, draughts, roulette-wheels, toboggans, looges, skis, hockey-sticks, and hockey-balls were turned out to meet the demand. There was no end to the ingenuity of individuals in supplying their wants or adding to their few comforts. We had cobblers of every grade, from an artist like Colonel Maule, who made himself a pair of rope-soled shoes, to ‘Tony’, whose only boots, owing to their patches, were of different size and vastly different design – indeed, it required a stretch of the imagination to realize they had once been a pair. We had knitters who could unravel a superfluous ‘woolly’ and convert it into excellent socks, heels and all. We had tailors whose efforts (being circumscribed by the paucity of cloth) would have brought tears of delight to the eyes of Joseph. In every house there was an embryo Harrod who kept a ‘store’ containing everything, ‘from a needle to an anchor,’ that the Turks would allow him to buy, and an accountant who evolved a system of book-keeping and book-transfer of debts which enabled those under a temporary financial cloud (a thing to which we were all subject, thanks to the irregularity of the Ottoman post) to continue making necessary purchases until the next cheque arrived.

  These were all material difficulties, and easily adjusted. Our chief probl
em was how to pass the time. It was tackled in a similar spirit and with nearly equal success. We had four-a-side hockey tournaments30 and (when the Turks allowed) walks, picnics, tobogganing, and skiing. There was one glorious point-to-point ski race over the snow-clad hills, with flag-wagging signallers along the course, bookmakers and a selling sweep, and to cap it all a magnificent close finish. That was a red-letter day. Later on there was to be a Hunt Club, with long dogs and foxes and hares complete.

  Figure 20: We had four-a-side hockey tournaments.

  For indoor amusement we wrote dramas, gay and serious melodramas, farces and pantomimes. We had scene-painters whose art took us back to England (we could sit all day looking at the ‘village-green’ scene). We had an orchestra of prison-made instruments, a prison-trained male-voice choir and musicians to write the music for them. Artists, song-writers, lecturers, poets, historians, novelists, actors, dramatists, musicians and critics – especially critics – all these we evolved in the effort to keep our minds from rusting. Indeed, we went beyond mere amusement in the effort: we went to school again! When at last books began to arrive from England a library was formed, and classes were held in Mathematics, Physics, Political Economy, French, German, Spanish, Hindustani, Electricity, Engineering, Machine Drawing, Agriculture and Sketching. We became a minor university, with professors who made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in experience. Memories of their own youth made some of them set ‘homework’, and it was no uncommon thing to run across a doughty warrior, most unacademically dressed in ragged khaki, seeking in vain for some quiet corner of the garden where he might wrestle uninterrupted with the latest vagaries of x, or convert into graceful Urdu a sonorous passage from the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

  Nor did we await the tardy arrival of books to commence our education. Barely had we settled down in Yozgad when some genius realised that the hundred officers and men whom the Turk had collected haphazard within our prison walls possessed amongst them a rich and varied experience. Our genius had a persuasive tongue. He organized lectures. Once a week, after dinner, we of the Upper House gathered in the only place that would hold us all together – the landing. It was unfurnished, dark, and draughty. Each man brought his own chair, each room provided a candle or a home-made lamp. Wrapped in blankets, rugs, bedquilts, sheepskins, anything we possessed to keep out the cold, and packed together like sardines, we settled down to what in those days was the one entrancing hour in the dull week. And what lectures those were! With men who had done or helped to do these things we entered the Forbidden City and shared in the taking of Pekin, combated sleeping-sickness in Central Africa, tea-planted in Ceylon, cow-punched in America, chased criminals in Burma, joined in the Jameson Raid, fruit-farmed in Kent, organized an army for an Indian Princeling, defended a great Channel Port, fought in a Frontier War, went geologizing in the Sudan, and trained the Rangoon river. We controlled in turn a Royal Mint, a great jute mill, a battery of Field Artillery, a colour-photography studio, a submarine, a police court in England, a wireless telegraphy station, a pork factory, a torpedo-boat, and a bee-farm.

  Figure 21: In the pine woods. ‘Winnie’ and Nightingale on skis.

  The list is not exhaustive, but it may serve its turn. Such were the men with whom we had spent nearly two years of our lives. In a month of marching you could not fall in with company more varied, more interesting, or more charming. Yet, because amongst the many difficulties that had been overcome one remained unsolved, Hill and I were glad to get away. Nothing in captivity is so distressing, so discomforting, so impossible to allay as overcrowding, and the unhappy consequences it brings in its train. It is a cancer that eats into the heart of every unnatural form of society. Time is its ally, and slowly but surely it wears down all opposition. In Yozgad we did not quarrel – we got along without that – and we tried not to complain. But every now and then a man would seek relief. As unostentatiously as might be he would change his mess, and though nothing was said, we all knew why. He knew, and we knew, that he was not getting rid of the bonds that were so irksome. He was merely seeking to exchange the old for the new pattern of handcuff, in the hope that it would not gall him in the same raw spot, and we could sympathize with him. Your neighbour may be the most excellent of good fellows, but if he is jogging your elbow for every hour of the twenty-four you will begin to look askance at him. Little idiosyncracies that would pass unmarked in ordinary life assume the magnitude of positive faults. Faults grow into unendurable sins. The fine qualities of the man – his endurance, his courage, his cheerfulness, his generosity – are lost to sight under the cloud of minor peculiarities that close acquaintance brings into view. Indeed, in time, his very virtues may be counted unto him as vices. His stoicism becomes a ‘pose’, his cheerfulness is ‘tomfoolery’, his generosity ‘softness’, his courage ‘rashness’! We knew the worth of the men beside us; but we were being forced to examine them under the microscope. So we were in constant danger of taking the part for the whole, and of losing all sense of proportion. Z was a glorious leader of men: we forgot it – because he snored in his sleep! Distance lends enchantment, because it puts things into their true proportions. To realize the grandeur of a mountain the climber must stand back from it, at least once in a while. And so it is with character.

  I do not know if others – leaders of Arctic Expeditions, for instance – are wont to succeed much better than we did in solving the problems of maintaining feelings of mutual respect amongst their company. Certain it is they have a great advantage over us, because, for them, the close companionship is voluntary and (what is more important) necessary to the attainment of a common object. For us, it was compulsory, and the common object that palliates it was entirely wanting. But we did our best. Outwardly we succeeded; there was no public break in the harmony of our camp. Yet in our hearts every one of us knew that he had failed, and that our only achievement had been to fail in a very gentlemanly way.

  Our new-found solitude came to Hill and myself in a good hour, while the friendships we had formed in the camp were green and the canker-worm of super-intimacy still in its infancy. For we had left behind many friends and, as far as we knew, no enemies. In front of us stretched a prospect of an indefinite period of unrelieved companionship with one another. What dangers to our mutual friendship this involved we knew too well. But we had that on our side which would have relieved the camp of its most serious trouble – a common aim. We no longer merely existed. We were partners in a great enterprise. There was something definite for which to work, something which would compensate us for every hardship – our hope of freedom.

  Absurd as it may seem, Hill and I felt not only happier, but actually freer in our new prison than we had done in the camp. On the face of things there was no excuse for this feeling, for outwardly we were more closely confined than ever. In order to give a fitting air of verisimilitude to his proceedings, Kiazim Bey had issued the strictest orders to our sentries. Indeed, he went rather out of his way to describe us as a pair of desperate characters, and so upset the nerves of our old ‘gamekeepers’ that for the first few days of our confinement they marched up and down outside our house, instead of snoozing in their sentry-boxes as they had been accustomed to do. The genial, wizened little Corporal, Ahmed Onbashi, whose duty it was to verify the presence of all prisoners night and morning, lost all the bonhomie which had made him a favourite, and for at least a week we saw no more of him than a wrinkled nose and a single anxious eye peering at us round the gently opened door of our room. But as the days passed by and we showed no signs of hostility, he gradually regained his old confidence. His escort dropped from two veterans with rifles at the ‘ready’ to the accustomed one with no rifle at all. At last he came one night boldly into the room, and catching sight of our spook-board propped against the wall, he pointed a grimy finger at it, shook his head at us, and uttered one of the very few Turkish phrases that was understood of all the camp – ‘Yessack! Chôk fena!’ (Forbidden! Very bad!) From which we learned t
hat the cause of our downfall was known to our humble custodian.

  The stricter surveillance did not in the least affect our happiness for it had been suggested by the Spook, and our present circumstances were of our own choosing. We knew that, within certain limits, we could lighten or tighten our bonds as we pleased, for we had gained some control over the forces that controlled us. We were no longer utterly and entirely under the orders of the un-get-at-able Turk. We had the Spook as an ally, and the Spook could make the Commandant sit up.

  There was another reason, deeper and more permanent, for this curious, instinctive sense of increased liberty which came to us, and expressed itself in the enthusiastic enjoyment with which we submitted to a more stringent form of imprisonment. At the time we could not have put the reason into words, but it was there all the same, and it was this: so far as we ourselves were concerned, we were well on the way to correct the one serious mistake which the camp as a whole had committed. It was the mistake that lies at the core of all tragedies. We in Yozgad had put the lesser before the greater good, our duty to ourselves, as prisoners, before our duty to ourselves, as men, and to our country. For reasons that have been stated it was considered wrong to attempt to escape. The general feeling was that there was no choice but to wait for peace with such patience as we could muster. We all knew the value of what we had lost when we surrendered to the Turk. But not one of us realized clearly that since our capture we had surrendered something infinitely more precious than physical freedom. It was not the supremacy of the Turk but our own recognition of it and our resignation to captivity that made us moral as well as physical prisoners. We did not see that in giving up trying to free ourselves we were giving up our one hope of happiness until peace came. So that in spite of the outward cheerfulness, the brave attempts at industry, and the gallant struggle against the deterioration that a prison environment brings, an atmosphere of hopelessness pervaded the whole camp. At heart, we were all unhappy, for we had created for ourselves an ‘Inevitable’. The camp had built a prison within a prison, and he who wished to run had to defeat the vigilance of his own comrades before he could tackle the Turk. It is perhaps too much to say that it is a man’s duty to escape, but certainly it is not his duty to bar the way to escape either for himself or for anyone else. Had every prisoner in Yozgad bent his energies to achieve freedom not only for himself but for his fellows, things would have been very different in the camp. Strafed the camp might have been, but it would have been in its duty, happy in discomfort instead of miserable in comparative ease, and welded into unity by a common aim. Prisoners most of us would have remained, but not beaten captives; the victims of misfortune, but not its slaves.