Alan Bott

“ Often I have left the satisfying solidity of London, the restful beauty of a Thames backwater, the comforting hospitality of New York, the wealth-conscious heartiness of Chicago, to hear the chanted summons to prayer from the minaret that faced my prison in Damascus, watched the intrigues that coloured Constantinople during the twilight of the Turkish Empire, discuss Bolshevism and the price of revolvers with Vladimir Franzovitch, as he sits on a camp bed in his tiny room at Odessa. ”

“ Gone was the Bosphorus, and in its place we saw the leaden waters of the Black Sea. From the port-hole of Josef's cabin we could distinguish many miles west of us the coastline of the country in which White had spent three years of the most dreadful captivity.
Feodor soon left us, for he had to bring other stowaways into the light of day. From every concealed cranny of the vessel men and women, almost as light-hearted as ourselves at deliverance from the Turks, were coming into the open. ”

“ Usually one bottle of water sufficed for the morning toilet of two of us. Cuthbert and Alfonso remained unworried by the shortage. They never washed.
Nerve-edging irritation will ever link itself to an enforced companionship from which there is no escape, however temporary; and when repulsive surroundings are the milieu for such propinquity the irritation is akin to madness. The reek, the vermin, the heat, the hunger, the confined space, the dirt, and the depression combined to stab our sensibilities, so that by the third day we almost hated each other, individually and collectively. ”

“ A lean man, who until then had been too busy drinking to speak, began to describe the mutiny in the Baltic Fleet, of which he had been a sailor. In his intensity he seemed to live again through the horrors of it, as with gloating gesture he described how unpopular officers had been thrown into the sea with weights tied to their feet.
"That was bad, very bad," protested White in his halting Russian. "If you are in power and somebody has done wrong, he should be given a fair trial and, if convicted, put in prison. But to kill men merely because you dislike them is very wrong." ”

“ I left Nazareth under much better conditions than I entered it. Accompanied by an Arab pseudo-spy, I had arrived half crazed by weakness, pain, and disaster, with a damaged leg and a swollen face, and possessing neither hope nor a hat. I was leaving it in the company of fellow-officers, with my mind and leg and face normal again, and having not only a German hat but renewed hopes of escape, summed up in Jean Willi's hint:
"The Armenians run secret caravans from Damascus to Akaba." ”

“ All the writings of biased minority mongers who have confined their investigations to consorting with Soviet officials at Moscow and Petrograd, all the blinkered sympathy of labour agitators who devote their lives to fostering a diabolic discontent, all the chirruping of the mentally perverted women and men who, at a safe distance of thousands of miles from actuality, have adopted theoretical Bolshevism as the latest fashion in parlour enthusiasms, cannot condone the fact.
Money and life were the only cheap commodities in Odessa. ”

“ We drove down the steep hill from Nazareth in three rickety carts. Each of the first two contained a pair of prisoners and a pair of guards, with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets; but H., whose giant height and strength the Turks respected, had a cart and two guards all to himself. At Afuleh we sat until nightfall in a mud hut, with the local population gazing and chattering through the open door, as if we had been strange animals.
We welcomed the change to a covered cattle-truck on the railway, away from prying Turks and Arabs. ”

“ Of all the cities in the Near and Middle East Damascus is at once the most ancient, the most unchanged by time, the most unreservedly Oriental, and the most elusive.
Constantinople is Byzantium—cum Mohammedan lust for power—cum Ottoman domination—cum Levantine materialism—cum European exploitation and Bourse transactions, in a setting of natural andarchitectural magnificence; a city that expresses itself variously and inharmoniously by a blendless chorus from an unmixable mixture of creeds and races; a charming, feminine city with a wayward soul; a cruel, unstable city of gamblers ”

“ We could not grumble at the food, for we messed with the Turkish officers, who, while not feeding as well as German privates, never actually went hungry.
Indeed, we met with much kindness and consideration at Damascus. In every prison camp of Turkey the officers and guards took their cue from the commandant. If, as at Afion-kara-Hissar during the reign of one Muslum Bey, the commandant was a murderer, a thief, and a degenerate, unspeakable outrages were committed. If, as at Baranki Barracks, Damascus, under Mahmoud Ali Bey, the commandant was good-natured, conditions were passable. ”

“ Slightly to the south was the one-time German colony of Sorona, with houses empty but for ugly furniture and ornaments, left behind when the routed Turco-Germans scurried up the coast-line after Allenby's victory at Gaza. A few miles north was the trench-line, a few miles west were row upon row of sand-dunes, a sea of that intense blue which is the secret of the Syrian coast, and the ancient port of Jaffa, misnamed "The Beautiful." ”

“ The Street called Straight, the glass-roofed, unique bazaar and a dozen other city-marks are bafflingly suggestive of contact with a dozen periods of greatness. And last year, when the demoralized Turks marched out of the city under the Arab flag that flew defiantly from the city gate, Arab thinkers began to dream of yet another period of greatness, in which Damascus was to be the centre of a re-united Arabian Empire.... ”

“ When normal life is upset by abnormal conditions the cauldron of crookedness bubbles over with a thousand and one conspiracies. Every other man is intriguing for himself, his safety, his pocket, his party, his family, or his government appointment, or from sheer inability not to intrigue. Such a period was the late summer of 1918, when we were disguised spectators of the misery and oppression that preceded the downfall of the Turkish Empire. ”

“ That little room in a mud hut was the home for ten days of seven British officers and two Turkish guards. Side by side, and with bodies touching each other, there was just space enough for eight people to lie on the floor. Already, when we arrived, one could sense the presence of Cuthbert and Alfonso without seeing or hearing them; and with each washless day their natural odour became more and more intensive. ”

“ But if you wish to see Syria at its best, travel otherwise than as a prisoner, sitting in a dirty cattle-truck and surrounded by Turkish guards, whose natural odour gives by no means of the most finest pleasure.
Such were the conditions under which we—four Australian officers and myself—came to Damascus. All the way from Nazareth we were guarded closely as a secret meeting of the Peace Conference. Only three weeks earlier Major Evans had escaped from Afuleh and walked forty miles before he was recaptured; so that in our case more than ordinary precautions were taken. ”

“ This beautiful little town is on a high hill around which the road to it winds upward at a steep angle. With its white buildings and its pleasant setting Nazareth offers a magnificent view as one climbs the hill. But really to enjoy it the conditions should be other than, when weak and ill and scarcely able to walk by reason of a bad leg, one must climb painfully up the steep slope under an oppressive sun and with a retinue of half-savage guards.
The Arab and I were led through the old, winding streets to the Turkish Platzkommandant's office. ”

“ The production of it was the chief industry of Afion-kara-Hissar ("afion" is Turkish for "poppy," "kara hissar" being "black rock") . Enormous poppy-fields spread all round the town in vivid splashes of red and white.
Yet with all the trivial gossip and light scandal there was a very real sense of comradeship. If any man were sick the remainder would fall over each other in their desire to be of help. If any house were short of wood during the bitter months of winter its inmates could always borrow from such as had enough and to spare. ”

“ But escaped prisoners did not live upon the surface. They were in touch with seditious elements beneath it. Once when Yeats-Brown was in a certain café with some Greeks, and the talk was becoming wild as the árak bottle passed, there entered a detective known to everybody, even to the British officer, who was the youngest initiate in "crime" present. And without a whisper or a wink the talk swung, easily and naturally, from the rankest sedition to the most harmless commonplace.
"We will destroy the Young Turks!" said a speaker, "we will destroy the Young Turks and cut them in little pieces!" ”

“ I had been lucky enough to fall among Arabs and Armenians, whose officers were, one and all, pro-British. They were a labour unit, explained the young Armenian, and their work was to make roads and tracks across the hill-country. Like all the conscript Armenians, Greeks, and Jews, and most of the Arabs, they had not been sent to the fighting front because most of them would have deserted to the British at the first opportunity. The doctor who had dressed my face was a Jew. The commandant, whom I would meet at the camp, was an Arab, and had an intense love for the British. ”

“ The waitress gave no answer, but without showing the least excitement or even surprise, half opened a folding doorway that led to the kitchen. I planted myself behind it, while she entered the inner room and talked to the Turkish sergeant.
A minute later I heard the three of them—Pappas Effendi, Fulton, and the guard—tramp past my doorway and out to the ferry stage. Just then the arriving steamer hooted.
"Now," said this waitress-in-a-million, "they have gone, and so must you. The Turks may come any moment, and if they find you here I shall suffer more than you." ”

“ Later, dressed as a sailor and sitting in the cafés with Kulman, I often heard the same sentiments expressed.
Yet the miserable, exploited populace seemed powerless to impress its wishes on the Government. It was too disunited and too listless for action. A total lack of national consciousness made Constantinople a capital without a country. The population was a haphazard jumble of races, an olla podrida of peoples that nothing, not even hunger and tyranny, could mould into a coherent whole. ”

“ Most of us who were at close grips with the Great War will remember the habit of speculation about life on the far side of the front. Somewhere beyond the frontier of trenches, we realized, were our opposite numbers—infantrymen, gunners, aviators, staff officers, mess orderlies, generals, captains, lance-corporals—each according to character, rank, and duties, and to the position he occupied by reason of ability, courage, initiative, old age, self-advertisement, or wire-pulling. ”

“ From time to time a stall-keeper slips away for a glass of árak in the near-by café, while a wife or a friend guards his barrow.
Between eleven o'clock and midnight most of the traders run out of stock. They pack up their kit, and before leaving bargain with each other for an exchange of surplus foodstuffs for personal use—two loaves for a dish of vegetables, a can of milk for three slices of meat. The streets empty, the cries cease, the gendarmes disappear with their baksheesh; and we retire to join the little things that hop and crawl in our bed. ”

“ When a recently captured prisoner first accepted the fact that escape from Afion-kara-Hissar was impossible, and when the monotony of captivity had permeated him, he would as a rule pass through a period of melancholia and the deepest depression. A black rock—huge, gaunt, and forbidding—overshadowed the little town from its height of 2,000 feet of almost sheer precipice. For hours at a time one would stare at its bare blackness, and at the crumbling ruins of the fortress, built by the Seljak Turks, which topped the rock ”

“ Beyond them, I knew, the great desert stretched through hundreds of miles to Mesopotamia. I was aware just how far the British Mesopotamian army had arrived on the way from Bagdad to Mosul; but even if we were lucky enough to find a guide who could smuggle us into an eastward-moving caravan it would be almost impossible to make a détour around the Turkish army; and in any case we should be dependent on the help of Kurds or Mesopotamian Arabs, who are much less estimable than the Arabs of Syria and Arabia. ”

“ All Mediterranean peoples move slowly in the streets; but the Constantinopolitans of 1918, I noticed, seemed to get nowhere; they crawled about aimlessly, or leaned against the walls and doorways in fatalistic inaction, waiting for something to happen.
In any case, the least attempt at organized protest was likely to lead to sudden disappearances. The dungeons of Stamboul jail were crammed with Greek, Armenian, and Turkish suspects; the infamous "Hall of Justice," in the Ministry of War, echoed the cries of prisoners whose interrogators extracted "information" by means of the bastinado. ”

“ I pointed out that as my machine was a single-seater, his story must be impossible. The police officer promised to forward these protests to military headquarters; but as for him, his orders were that the Arab and I were to remain together. In any case, he added, I was probably being punished for having tried to escape.
Remain together we did, in a superlatively filthy cell. I would rather live in an American jail than in most of the poorer dwellings of the Turkish provinces, where donkeys and dogs and hens and men and women and children herd together in mud huts. ”

“ Bagdad is a city with a romantic name, some fine Arabian architecture, and an impressive western gate whence the Damascus-bound caravans move dustily across the desert; a city fallen from greatness to the date and grain trade, minor bazaars, and the steamer and dhow traffic of the broad-bosomed Tigris; a city redolent of all that Haroun-al-Raschid was and modern Mesopotamia's opportunist sheikhs emphatically are not; a city with a prosperous future, thanks to the British engineers who have irrigated the Tigris-Euphrates basin into the way it should go. ”

“ The middle classes—professional men, merchants, traders, and speculators—knew they were living on the edge of a volcano, and tried to drown the knowledge in reckless revelry. Each evening parties costing thousands of roubles were given in the restaurants. Wine and vodka, as aids to forgetfulness of the fear that hovered over every feast, were well worth their sixty roubles a bottle.
Their orgy of speculation in inflated prices and their mock merriment left the bourgeoisie neither time nor energy to take action against the horrors that threatened them. ”