The Road to En-dor

by E. H. Jones

  DOCTOR: ‘Why did you try to commit suicide?’

  HILL: ‘I didn’t!’

  DOCTOR: ‘But Moïse saw you hanging.’

  HILL: ‘I didn’t. It is very wicked.’

  DOCTOR: ‘It is very wicked to tell lies.’

  HILL (looking very ashamed): ‘Yes.’

  DOCTOR: ‘It is very wicked to try and commit suicide, but sometimes people feel they don’t want to live any more.’ (Hill, fidgeting nervously and looking more ashamed than ever, nodded.) ‘You did try and hang yourself, didn’t you? I know you are a very religious man, and will tell me the truth.’

  HILL (after thinking for a long time, looking very ashamed, whispered): ‘Yes.’

  DOCTOR: ‘Why?’

  HILL (crying): ‘Jones was going to, and I didn’t want to live without Jones.’

  MOÏSE: ‘The doctor thanks you very much. That is all.’

  * * *

  At the first opportunity Hill told me he had admitted the hanging. (He had denied it at his first examination.)

  ‘If they confront me with you and your admission,’ I said, ‘I think the right line would be for me to bash you on the jaw. Will you mind?’

  ‘Carry on,’ said Hill.

  ‘I’ll have to hit pretty hard and pretty quick.’

  ‘Right-o!’ said Hill.

  But the assault was never necessary. Although the doctors tried in many ways to get me to admit having attempted suicide, they never told me that Hill had confessed. I think they were afraid of the consequences for Hill.

  Later in the same day a lady came to see us. She was accompanied by the Sertabeeb (Superintendent of the hospital). She was Madame Paulus, of the Dutch Embassy, and Heaven knows it went bitterly against the grain to deceive her and wring her woman’s heart with our senseless gabble; but under the circumstances we had no choice.

  ‘I have come from the Dutch Embassy,’ she said. ‘I always come to see sick prisoners.’

  Hill glanced up from his Bible. ‘I am not sick,’ he said surlily.

  ‘No,’ I chimed in, ‘he’s not sick. He’s always like that. And I’m not sick either. They are keeping us here against our wills. I belong to the Turkish War Office, and I’m going to have a Turkish uniform. Tell them to let us go – I say!’ (in alarm) ‘you are not English, are you?’

  ‘I speak English,’ said Madame Paulus gently, ‘but I am not English. I come from Holland. Do you know where that is, Mr. Hill?’

  Hill nodded slightly, but went on reading his Bible. ‘Oh, won’t you talk to me?’ she begged.

  ‘I don’t want to talk,’ he said sourly.

  ‘I’ll talk to you,’ I cried enthusiastically; ‘come over here. Don’t bother about him – he’s always like that. Come and talk to me.’ I called to an orderly to bring a chair and set it by my bed, but nobody paid any attention to me except the Sertabeeb, who spotted the symptom and smiled.

  ‘Why don’t you want to talk, Mr. Hill?’ Madame Paulus went on.

  ‘It is wicked to talk unnecessarily,’ Hill growled.

  ‘Oh no, it isn’t. I see you are reading the Bible. It is a very good book to read, and I am sure it does not say it is wicked to talk. Jesus used to talk.’

  ‘Some of the Bible is wrong,’ said Hill. ‘I’m going to rewrite it.’

  ‘Dear! Dear!’ said Madame Paulus, sympathetically. She turned to me.

  ‘Here are some flowers and chocolate I brought you from the Embassy.’

  ‘Are you sure they are not from the English? Are you certain they are not poisoned?’ I cried. After much persuasion I was prevailed on to accept them. (As soon as she had gone I threw away the chocolate, saying she was an English spy and it was poisoned. Some of the Turks retrieved and devoured it.)

  ‘Here are some beautiful flowers for you, Mr. Hill,’ the gentle lady went on.

  Hill went on reading.

  ‘Oh, won’t you take them? Won’t you put them in water? I brought them for you because I thought you would like them.’ She put them into Hill’s hand. He glanced at them without showing the slightest interest and went on reading.

  ‘There,’ she said, soothingly. ‘But you must put them in water, you know, or they will die.’

  ‘I have nothing to put them in,’ said Hill. ‘It was wicked to pick them.’

  Madame Paulus got a glass from another patient. Hill stuffed the flowers into it, anyhow, and turned back to his Bible.

  ‘Do you like chocolate?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hill.

  ‘Well, here is some I brought you from the Embassy.’ Hill took it and went on reading.

  ‘Won’t you eat it?’ Madame Paulus asked.

  ‘Not today.’

  ‘Why not today?’ she cried, and then – noticing Hill’s breakfast and lunch standing untouched on the table by his bed, ‘Oh! Why haven’t you eaten your food?’

  ‘It is wicked to eat much,’ said Hill, ‘I am fasting today.’

  ‘Oh, dear! Dear! When will you eat it?’

  ‘When I have done fasting,’ Hill sighed.

  ‘When will that be?’

  ‘After forty days,’ said Hill, very mournfully. ‘Jesus used to fast for forty days.’

  With a little gesture of despair Madame Paulus turned to me.

  ‘May I write to your relatives?’ she asked. ‘They would like to know how you are.’

  ‘No!’ I said, in a frightened voice. ‘No! certainly not! They want to kill me. Don’t tell them where I am. They hate me.’

  ‘Oh no! no! No mother ever hated her son. You must give me her address so that I may write. Are you married?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I am. But my wife is the worst of the bunch. She puts poison in my parcels, and I’m going to divorce her, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to divorce the whole crowd of them, wife, mother, father – every one of them, and be a Turk, for they are all bad, bad, bad!’ (I burst into tears.)

  Madame Paulus wrung her hands. She was very nearly in tears herself, poor lady, and I hated the whole business. She turned to the Sertabeeb.

  ‘Il dit qu’il va divorcer sa femme!’ she cried.

  ‘C’est comme ça, cette maladie,’ the Sertabeeb said, sympathetically.

  Madame Paulus and the Sertabeeb conversed together in low tones – I could not catch what was said – and then she turned to Hill.

  ‘You will be going home soon,’ she said. ‘Will you like that? All sick prisoners are going home in July.’

  Our hearts leapt within us. This was the first news we had had of a general exchange of sick prisoners. But we had to keep it up. I could see the Sertabeeb was watching us keenly – as we discovered later, he knew a little English.

  ‘I am not sick,’ said Hill.

  ‘You are both to be sent home in July. Don’t you want to be sent home?’

  ‘I don’t care.’ Hill’s voice sounded full of sadness. ‘There is plenty to do in Turkey.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I am going to convert the Turks first. Then I will go to England.’

  ‘But don’t you want to see your father and mother? And your sisters and brothers?’

  ‘I don’t care! They are all sinners – poor lost sheep – but they do not need me more than the people I see about me. I’ll convert the Turks first.’

  ‘Oh, dear! You shouldn’t say that. What does the Fifth Commandment say?’

  ‘“Honour thy father and thy mother.”’

  ‘Yes. Then why don’t you follow the Bible?’

  I thought Hill was getting into a hot corner, and that a counter-attack was necessary.

  ‘Here! I say!’ I called. ‘You’re not thinking of sending me to England, are you?’

  ‘Don’t you want to go?’ she asked.

  ‘Don’t you know Lloyd George wants to kill me?’ I asked, excitedly. ‘I thought you knew that! Everybody knows he hates me, and it is all Baylay’s fault.’ Once on the subject of good old Baylay I could keep going like a Hyde Park orat
or, and I did.

  Madame Paulus made one more effort to get my home address and failed. She succeeded better with Hill – he gave her some address in Australia.

  ‘Shall I give your mother your love, Mr. Hill?’ she asked.

  ‘If you like,’ Hill answered, without looking up from his Bible.

  ‘But don’t you want to send your love?’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘Oh, dear, dear me!’

  The dear lady went away almost in tears. She had tried so hard, and had shown such a fine courage in that ward full of crazed men, and she thought it had all been in vain – that she could do nothing for us. It was hateful to let her go away like that, deceived and unthanked. Little she guessed what joy she had brought us. For all unwittingly she had given us the one piece of news for which we pined – we were to go Home – and in July! I know that Madame Paulus cheered many a sick prisoner in Constantinople, but never did she leave behind her two more grateful men than her lunatics of Haidar Pasha.

  Before entering the hospital we had arranged with Moïse a code of signals by which he was to let us know what the doctors thought of our malady. If they thought we were shamming, he was to shake hands with us on saying goodbye. If they were not sure he was to bow to us. If they believed us mad, he was to salute. Hitherto he had bowed his way out, and left us each day with anxious hearts. But on the morning following the Board Meeting and the visit of Madame Paulus he drew himself up in the doorway, clicked his heels, and saluted us both, in turn.

  So far, then, all was well.

  Chapter XXIX

  Of Hill’s Terrible Month in Gumush Suyu Hospital

  Hill and I braced ourselves for the six weeks of acting that lay between us and July. We were under no delusions as to the cause of our success so far. Our acting had no doubt been good, but we knew quite well that by itself it would have availed us little. The decision of the doctors had been based on our ‘medical history’, as edited by the Spook and presented to them in the reports of the Commandant, the Pimple, the sentries Bekir and Sabit, and the two Turkish doctors of Yozgad.

  We have no desire to injure, by our story, the deservedly high professional reputation of Mazhar Osman Bey. We would very much regret such a result, and it would indeed be a poor return for the unfailing courtesy and the gentlemanly consideration that was always shown us by him and indeed by nearly all the doctors of Haidar Pasha Hospital. For to them we were not enemy subjects but patients on the same footing as Turkish officers, to be tested for malingering and treated in exactly the same way as their fellow countrymen. It is only fair to them to say that we attribute our success not so much to our acting as to the manner in which, under O’Farrell’s directions, and with the aid of the Spook, our case was presented.

  The evidence Mazhar Osman Bey had to consider was the following:

  1. The reports of Major Osman and Captain Suhbi Fahri of Yozgad. (Chapter XXI.)

  2. The telegraphic and written reports (dictated by the Spook) from Kiazim Bey, Commandant of Yozgad, in which he stated as a fact that we had been regarded as ‘eccentric’ by our comrades for two years, and that our illnesses had been gradually developing throughout our captivity. (Chapter XXII.)

  3. Our spiritualistic and telepathic record.

  4. The attempted suicide at Mardeen, which was vouched for by the magistrates and police of the town, by the hotel-keeper and by a number of independent witnesses in addition to Moïse and the sentries, but denied by me, and only very reluctantly admitted by Hill.

  5. The Pimple’s diary of our conduct, apparently a straightforward record of events kept by order of his superior officer, Kiazim, for the use of the doctors, but really a record of our acting, edited by the Spook.

  6. The answers of the Pimple to questions set him. Owing to O’Farrell’s help, the Spook had been able to foresee every single question that was asked, and the Pimple had been thoroughly tutored in his replies.

  7. Our mad letters to the Sultan, Enver Pasha, etc., the mad drawings of the Island Uprooter, and of the gigantic aeroplane, and the other documentary evidence of insanity found (apparently concealed) in our possession.

  All this evidence was brought forward by the Turkish authorities themselves, who had apparently no motive for seeking to prove us insane. Mazhar Osman Bey was told that the English doctor at Yozgad (O’Farrell) had tried to prevent us being brought to Constantinople and that he refused to admit we were suffering from anything more serious than mild neurasthenia. This certainly did not look like collusion between us and our own medical man. We ourselves strenuously claimed to be quite well and contradicted many of the assertions the Pimple made against us. My resolute denial of the hanging and Hill’s very reluctant admission of it particularly impressed the doctors. So did my apparently inadvertent admission of previous incarceration in an asylum under M– (another suggestion of O’Farrell’s), and subsequent denial of all knowledge of M–.

  The position, so far as Mazhar Osman Bey could see, was that the Turks were trying to prove us mad while we were both anxious to be considered sane. He had not the vestige of a reason for disbelieving any of the statements made by the Pimple and the Turkish officials of Yozgad. For while, in our speech with the doctors, we sought to deny the salient points in the evidence against us, the whole of our conduct in hospital was aimed at corroborating the Pimple’s story. The fact that Hill’s behaviour was so absolutely different from mine was another point in our favour. The only theory that could hold water at all was that we had bribed the Turks, but against such a theory was first the large number of people who had given evidence against us and second the Commandant’s apparently hostile conduct towards us at Yozgad – Mazhar Osman knew we had been ‘imprisoned on bread and water’ for telepathy.

  Only a medical man can decide whether or not the evidence of the Turks and our answers in the preliminary examinations justified Mazhar Osman Bey in being predisposed to a belief in our insanity. We ourselves believed then, and we still believe, that so long as we could avoid traps and keep up our acting on the lines O’Farrell had dictated, no doctor on earth could prove we were malingering. And we had one tremendous asset on our side: Mazhar Osman was too busy a man to be able to devote much of his time to observing us. We never avoided him – indeed I did rather the reverse, and used to rush up to him on every possible occasion – but except for what he saw of us during his morning visit he had to depend on the reports of his subordinates. Had things been otherwise, we think we would have been ‘caught out,’ but as it was we had to deal mainly with men who believed their Chief infallible, and who knew of his inclination to consider us mad. That knowledge probably affected their judgment and their powers of observation.

  Our task was ‘to keep it up’ until the exchange steamer arrived. It was a desperate time for both of us. We were watched night and day. We knew that a single mistake would spoil everything for both. The junior doctors (acting no doubt under instructions from Mazhar Osman), set traps for us, tested us in various ways, and reported the results. We did not take it all lying down. In order to find out what they thought from time to time, and how the wind was blowing, we in our turn set traps for the junior doctors.78

  In my own case the doctors began by suspecting General Paralysis of the Insane, a disease commonly due to syphilis. I knew the diagnosis was bound to be upset by the negative results of the Wassermann tests, and did not feel at all comfortable until they began showing me off to visiting doctors as a rara avis. What Mazhar Osman Bey’s final diagnosis was I never discovered, because it was written on my medical sheet in technical language, and my small Turkish dictionary did not contain the words used; but I think from the interest shown in me by students and strange doctors, it was something pretty exceptional. I also think that for a long time Mazhar Osman Bey was not a little dubious about it. Indeed I believe that out of the kindness of his heart – for he was a kindly and humane man – he decided to risk his professional reputation rather than do me a possible injustice, and
gave me the benefit of the doubt.

  About Hill, I think none of the real experts were ever in two minds. He was quite an ordinary case of acute Religious Melancholia. But he went through a terrible month in Gumush Suyu Hospital, where the treatment meted out to him by the doctors there was such as nearly killed him. To all appearances Hill was a genuine melancholic, or he could never have deceived men like Mazhar Osman Bey, Helmi Bey, Chouaïe Bey, and our own British doctors, as he did. Yet, merely because he was a prisoner of war, these doctors at Gumush Suyu jumped to the conclusion that he must be malingering, and on this supposition they treated him not as an ordinary malingerer is treated, but with a cruelty that was unspeakable.79 That they took no trouble to acquaint themselves with the history of his case may be excused on the ground that it was ordinary Turkish slackness, though it was slackness such as no doctor should be guilty of. But at this time Hill was not merely a malingering melancholic. He was genuinely ill from a very severe bout of dysentery, and was sick almost unto death. The most ordinary microscopic examination would have revealed the nature of his complaint. Whether the Gumush Suyu men made it or not I do not know. But this I know: they showed a callousness and a brutality in their treatment of Hill which drew violent expostulations from the British patients in the hospital, and for which the doctors deserve to be horsewhipped. Whatever their suspicions as to the melancholia may have been, they have no excuse for their utter neglect of a man who was obviously in the throes of severe dysentery; they cannot be pardoned for leaving him for days without medicine or proper diet; and they should answer in Hell for sending him back by a springless donkey cart to Psamatia Camp (the journey took Hill five hours) when he was too weak to walk downstairs without assistance. All these things they did. Captain Alan Bott, then a prisoner-patient in the hospital, protested vigorously, but in vain, against the cruelty of that journey. One thing only his protests achieved – the donkey cart. Without Captain Bott’s assistance Hill would have had no conveyance whatsoever, and some idea of the man’s condition may be gathered from the fact that though his normal weight is 12 stone, at this time he weighed less than 100 lbs.