The Road to En-dor

by E. H. Jones

  After about half an hour, when Hill and I had begun to quieten down, Moïse questioned us for the benefit of the crowd as the Spook had previously ordered him to do. I admitted having attempted suicide, and said I did it because twenty English prisoners were chasing us (the Afion party which was two days’ behind), and Major Baylay was going to kill me. I managed to work myself up into a great state of terror. It was easy enough to do. I had only to let my body ‘go’, as it were, and as a result of our drenching, the extreme cold of the night and the rough treatment we had just come through, it did all that was necessary for a perfect simulation of fear. My teeth chattered and I shook all over as if with ague. The sentries were quite alarmed at the sight, and assured me for the hundredth time that no Englishman could come near me.

  Then Hill, questioned in the same way, sobbed out that he knew suicide was a very wicked thing, but I had told him to do it. Moïse told him angrily that he was a fool to take any notice of me. Hill turned his face to the wall and went on weeping. His acting was wonderful. Next day Moïse told us the ‘control’ had been marvellous.

  I soon found that ‘letting myself go’ had been a mistake; having once begun shivering I could not stop. It was a curious sensation: my body had taken command of the situation and was running away with me. I had an uneasy feeling that a lunatic ought not to feel cold or exhaustion, and I struggled hard to pull myself together, talking the while of my terror of Englishmen in general and Baylay in particular, in the hope that the Turks would ascribe the trembling to fear. They did. They showed me their rifles and knives and knobkerries and promised to kill off my English foes as they had done in the Dardanelles. Gradually my shivering wore itself out, but I felt colder than ever. I began joking with the crowd, telling what I would do to Baylay when I caught him. I was joking in a mist, and their voices were beginning to sound very far away. I knew I was on the point of fainting, and I made a mistake which might well have been fatal to our plans. I twisted my coat-button and said in English to Moïse, ‘Send us to bed.’ It was a foolish, insensate thing to say. Had the crowd in the room contained anyone who knew English that single sentence was enough to show that Moïse was our confederate. The moment the words were out of my mouth I realised what I had done, and could have bitten my tongue out. By sheer good fortune, nobody understood, but I have never forgiven myself. The contrast between my weakness of spirit in Mardeen, and Hill’s superlative endurance later on in Constantinople when he kept a close tongue through a month of incredible illness and suffering in Gumush Suyu hospital, has cured me of any pride in my willpower. But the lesson was not entirely lost, and never again was my hatred of physical suffering allowed to gain the upper hand.

  Luckily the crowd thought the order to change into dry things and go to bed emanated from Moïse. Hill helped to save the situation by sobbing out that he didn’t want dry clothes and preferred to remain as he was and contemplate his sins. He had to be forced into his pyjamas. Meantime Moïse had thrown me a towel and I was drying myself, joking with the mob as I did so. We noticed that at this they began muttering among themselves. Moïse told us later that the hotel-keeper said no lunatic would dry himself under the circumstances. Moïse replied I did it under his orders, which was true enough and satisfied everybody except the hotel-keeper, who was angry at the disturbance we had caused in his hotel and the damage done by the water to his bedding.

  At the time we did not know what the muttering was about, but we saw something was wrong and raised a successful diversion by quarrelling amongst ourselves. Hill wanted to hold a prayer-meeting to ask forgiveness for our suicide, while I wanted him to obey the Turks who were protecting us from the English, and go to bed. In the end Moïse was asked by the hotel-keeper to make me shut up, as I was keeping everybody in the hotel awake. I obeyed Moïse, and so far as Hill was concerned he held his prayer-meeting and then turned in. I refused to go to bed myself, and plagued Moïse to give me back the money he had taken from me at the search, in order that I might buy a rifle from one of our audience to protect myself against Major Baylay and the English. After about an hour of fruitless begging and raving on my part the last of the onlookers went away. Our cart drivers and two villagers were brought in to support Bekir and Sabit in case we turned violent again and I was made to lie down.

  My throat was too sore to let me sleep, so I saw that all six of our guards remained awake all night, with their weapons ready in their hands.

  Chapter XXVI

  In Which the Spook Convicts Moïse of Theft, Converts Him to Honesty, And Promises Omnipotence

  Next morning the hotel-keeper came in early to survey the damage. His suspicions about our insanity had been partially set at rest by Moïse, who had shown him copies of the Yozgad doctors’ certificates of lunacy, but he still had his doubts and was out to get what compensation he could. He produced his broken clasp-knife and demanded another in its place.

  ‘Why should we give you another’ I said, ‘it has nothing to do with us.’

  ‘I broke it in cutting your companion down,’ he said indignantly, pointing to Hill. ‘You’d have been dead by now but for this knife.’

  I told him he was a liar and denied that we had ever tried to hang ourselves. He got furious and said the whole town knew we had attempted suicide. I got equally furious and denied it. For some minutes we argued together, and he called on the sentries to corroborate him, which they did. Then I changed my tune, begged him not to say such a thing about us or we would be put in gaol, and gave him my knife in place of his own. This mollified him a little, but he still stuck to his point that we had attempted suicide. I pretended to grow desperate, dropped on my knees, and beseeching him to deny the hanging for our sakes, I gave the fellow forty liras. He took the notes from me and Moïse (under the Spook’s orders) took them from him. (He surrendered them to Moïse without a word, but his face was a picture.) Then I gave him a tin of tea and this the Spook allowed him to keep. He could retail it at a shilling a cup which would amply compensate him for any damage caused to his furnishings.

  To get to the door he had to step over Hill, who was busy praying in the Mussulman fashion, prostrate on the floor, but with his boots on and facing towards London instead of Mecca! The hotel-keeper shook his head sympathetically, and went away fully convinced we were both hopelessly mad.

  Various local officials came in during the morning and questioned us. We stoutly denied having hanged ourselves. Moïse, under the Spook’s orders, pretended to be alarmed at this and drew up an account of the hanging which was signed by a number of witnesses. This was to counteract our denial at Constantinople should we deny it. The hotel-keeper told everybody how we had tried to bribe him into silence, and boasted of his honesty in the matter of the forty liras. He did not mention the pound of tea. A telegraphic report was sent to the Commandant at Yozgad, and we learned later that Captain Suhbi Fahri and Major Osman were delighted at the correctness of their diagnosis.

  About midday we left Mardeen. We had, as an addition to our escort, the officer in charge of the Mardeen gendarmerie, who rode with us to the next gendarmerie post, twenty miles away, and handed us over to the police there. Indeed we were handed on from police officer to police officer all the way to railhead, for we were now regarded as dangerous lunatics.

  Proof of our dangerous character was forthcoming at every halt, and we were privileged to learn at first hand how Turkey deals with its criminals. Every night until we reached the railway we were put into the strong room of the village where we halted, and in addition to our own sentries, our drivers, Moïse and the policemen in charge, a guard of from six to a dozen villagers was mounted over us. Another attempt on my part to buy a weapon from one of our guards led to us being searched again. Hill allowed them to find about twenty liras more, which Moïse took in charge. They were then satisfied that we had no more money, but when I announced my intention of stealing a rifle to shoot the English, if I could not get one in any other way, Bekir and Sabit began to lose their nerve. In s
pite of the extra guards either Bekir or Sabit remained awake all the time, and held on to his own and his comrade’s rifle with grim intensity. I pretended to think all this vigilance was for my sake – to keep the English from getting at us – and I made a point of getting up once or twice a night, and waking those of our sentries whose turn it was to sleep in order to curse them for not maintaining a better watch. As soon as they settled down again, Hill would get up and pray in a loud voice, startling them all into nervous wakefulness once more. We ourselves could sleep in security whenever we wished to do so, but our unhappy sentries dared not close an eye. We soon had them completely worn out.

  On the last day’s march, while we were resting on the roadside near Angora, I went up to Hill and slipped something into his pocket. Moïse, who had been warned by the Spook to look out for this, drew the attention of the sentries and asked me what it was. I refused to say. He then ordered the sentries to search us. To their consternation they not only found about ten pounds more in notes, but also a revolver cartridge on each of us. Bekir shook Hill savagely and asked where he got the ammunition. (We had brought it from Yozgad.)

  ‘From Jones,’ said Hill, beginning to weep. ‘He put it in my pocket just now.’

  It was then my turn to be questioned. I said that I had bought the cartridges in the last village for five pounds apiece, and the fellow who had sold them to me had promised to bring me a revolver to fit them for twenty pounds, so that I might shoot the English. They vowed I had had no opportunity to buy them. I replied I did it while they slept. Each then accused the other of sleeping in his watch. When they said I can’t have paid for them as we had no money, I pointed to the notes they had just taken from us and laughed in their faces. They searched us carefully again, making us take off most of our clothing, so that they might examine it thoroughly. They found nothing more. When they had quite finished Bekir handed me back my coat. I put my hand in the pocket he had just searched and drew out a gold lira.

  ‘You missed this,’ I said, handing it over. Bekir swore, snapped a cartridge into his rifle and held it at the ready while Sabit searched me for the third time that morning. He found some more notes – I had learned a trick or two from Hill.

  ‘I can’t help it,’ I said, ‘my pockets breed money.’ They next turned on my companion. Hill had made no attempt to put his clothes on again; he was sitting on the grass mournfully reading his Bible. When ordered to dress he murmured something about clothes being a mockery and a snare, and went on reading. He refused to dress and there seemed no prospect of our moving on that day.

  Then Sabit raised his hands to heaven and prayed to Allah to deliver him from these two infidels, who were undoubtedly in league with the devil.

  While this affecting little scene was being enacted at the roadside, a carriage passed us. It had a bagful of bread slung to the axle. The bag must have had a hole in it, because when at last we moved on, we came upon a loaf or a biscuit every few hundred yards for some distance. The sentries got out and collected them – the bread was fresh and they were much delighted. In my role of general manager of the universe I took all the credit.

  ‘There,’ I said. ‘You take our money and it rains bread.’

  Bekir and Sabit, who had an uneasy belief in our magic powers, did not know what to make of it. They had not noticed the carriage.

  At Angora, where we arrived on 1st May, we had to wait six days for a train. In accordance with Spook’s orders we were taken to a hotel instead of to the prisoners’ camp. Bekir and Sabit were by now in such a state of nerves that when, as occasionally happened, either of the two was left alone with us he always sat in the doorway, clinging to his rifle in a position that looked very much like ‘ready to run’. One day when Sabit (who was if anything the more nervous of the two), was keeping the gate in this way, I happened to require some tobacco. My tobacco jar where I kept my reserve stock was made of two eighteen-pounder cartridge cases, my sole memento of the siege of Kut. How Sabit had missed seeing it before I do not know – perhaps Bekir had searched the portion of my kit in which it lay. Sabit watched me suspiciously from the doorway as I rummaged amongst my bedding and when I drew out the shell case he jumped to his feet with a yell, grabbed it from me and stood with it clasped in both hands. He was shivering with fright and kept crying ‘Bomba, bomba, bomba,’ over and over again in a terror-stricken voice. He looked as if he expected the ‘bomb’ to explode at any moment, and he certainly did not know what to do with it now he had got it.

  It took a long time to explain matters in my broken Turkish, but after much persuasion he very carefully opened the lid, and finding only tobacco where he expected to see high explosive, he fell a-trembling more than ever, as does a man who has just escaped some great danger. But this was the finishing touch to his nerves. He and Bekir insisted henceforward on having extra help to guard us, and fetched in King Cole (a Yozgad sentry who happened to be on leave in Angora) to help them.

  Before we left Angora the Afion party arrived from Yozgad, and we were able to do one of their number – Lieut. Gallup – a good turn. During the journey we had noticed a pair of new valise straps round the Pimple’s luggage. They were made of first-class leather with good solid brass buckles, the whole finish being obviously English. Now we knew that Gallup had been expecting a pair of valise straps from home, and that the parcel which should have contained them had never turned up. We decided that these must be the missing straps, and that we would try to get them returned to their owner, so one day at Angora I began to twist my coat-button.

  ‘Sir!’ Moïse was all attention as usual.

  ‘If you want to find this treasure you will have to learn to be honest.’

  ‘Why, what have I done?’ the Pimple asked in alarm.

  ‘You are using stolen goods,’ said the Spook. ‘You must return them to their owners.’

  ‘What do you mean, Sir? My pocket-book, my knife, the tinned food.’

  ‘Go on,’ said the Spook. ‘Name them all, I’m listening.’

  Moïse went on naming things he possessed which he had stolen from prisoners’ parcels, interlarding his list with expressions of regret and appeals for forgiveness. He blamed the Cook, I remember, for teaching him to steal. We felt a fierce anger against the little skunk as he went on telling the tale of his thefts. At last he came to the valise straps.

  ‘Return them all, every one,’ said the Spook angrily, ‘or you will never find the treasure.’

  ‘But I forget whose parcels I got them from,’ the Pimple whined.

  ‘You can begin with the straps,’ said the Spook; ‘they belong to Gallup, and he is in Angora now. As to the other things, I won’t help you. You must put them back into broken parcels when you return to Yozgad, and you must promise to be honest in future.’ Then the Spook went on to give him a lecture on honesty, and the Pimple was deeply affected.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘in future I will be honest. It does me good to talk to you, Sir. But about these straps. How am I to send them back? What can I say? I would rather destroy them than tell Gallup I stole them.’

  The little man was nearly in tears. As the important point was to get the straps back to Gallup we let him off the confession.

  ‘Clean the straps so that they will look unused,’ said the Spook, ‘and parcel them up. I shall make Jones write a note to Gallup under control, which will explain the matter.’

  The Spook then made me write to Gallup saying I had stolen the straps ‘as an act of revenge’, and asking him to take them back and forgive me for my sin. Hill added as a postscript something religious about the ‘blessedness of forgiveness’ and my being ‘sore afraid’. Then Moïse took Gallup the note and the straps. We next met Gallup in Alexandria six months later. Many a man would have twaddled to his fellow prisoners about such a confession, for there is little enough to talk about in prison camps. Except that we had been mess-mates for two years he had no reason to keep silence. But he did, and whether he thought I had added kleptomania to
my other forms of lunacy or not, he had kept the whole matter strictly secret.

  During the journey from Yozgad Hill and I had treated ourselves rather better in the matter of food, but for several days after the hanging we were forced, whether we liked it or not, to resume our starvation tactics, for our throats were too painful to allow us to swallow anything solid, and even the milk and curds which the sentries obtained for us were at first something of an ordeal. As our throats improved we were assailed with the most dreadful longing for cooked food (we had been for six weeks on dry bread), and on our second day in Angora we indulged in a plateful each of stewed mutton and haricot beans. The sentries and Moïse, who shared our repast, thoroughly enjoyed themselves. Next day, on their own initiative, they ordered a similar dinner (at our expense, of course, for they always made us pay for everything and everybody). It was brought into our room from a neighbouring restaurant; but meantime the Afion party had arrived from Yozgad, and my fear of being poisoned by the English reasserted itself. I would not eat anything myself. I forbade Hill to eat anything. And just as the sentries were sitting down to their portion I seized the plates and threw them away. On no account would I allow my only protectors to poison themselves! Everybody must henceforth eat dry bread and nothing else. Simple as it was, the food cost forty piastres (about seven shillings) a plate, but the look of disappointment on the faces of Belch and Sabit was well worth the money.