Читать книгу Eastern Nights - and Flights: A Record of Oriental Adventure - Alan Bott - Страница 4

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PAIN, PURGATORY, AND A PLAN

As my senses became clearer the feeling of oppression in my chest grew more and more acute, and I had to struggle desperately for breath.

Yet I failed to realize that I was directly concerned in the Arabs' intentions and actions, and looked at the motley group from the detached point of view of a film spectator. They were an unkempt group, with ragged robes and dirty headdresses and straggling beards and unfriendly eyes—the sort of nomads who, during the lawless days of war would, and did, cheerfully kill travellers for the sake of a pair of boots, a dress, or a rifle. They had between them a strange variety of arms—guns of every size and shape, belts of close-packed ammunition, revolvers and bone-handled pistols, and curved knives.

And the foremost Arab continued to advance, while fingering the drawn blade of his knife. He was only a few yards distant when another and older man stopped him with a shout. The man with the shining blade answered heatedly. A general argument followed, in which most of his companions took part.

At that time my knowledge of Arabic was of the slightest, and in any case I was not in a condition to grasp the meaning of their words. Yet instinct and deductions from their pantomime made me certain that they were debating a rather debatable point, namely—whether somebody should be killed and stripped, or merely stripped, or whether it would be more worth while to hand him over alive to the Turks, in return for baksheesh.

And again I did not regard myself as interested in the deliberations, nor was I the least bit afraid, being still under the spell of cinematographic detachment. When the Arabs' argument was settled beyond question by the sudden appearance, on a near-by slope, of a detachment of Turkish soldiers, I regarded the scene much as if it had portrayed a film sheriff, with comic sheepskin-booted posse, riding to rescue the kidnapped maiden from the brigands.

The dozen Arabs stood sullenly aside as four mounted officers arrived, followed by a body of running soldiers.

"Anglais?" said a young officer as he dismounted.

And the mental effort of asking myself if I were English brought back most of my senses and understanding, and I discovered that I was intensely uncomfortable. The struggle for breath was almost insupportable, a searing pain permeated my right thigh, my head felt as if it were disintegrating. I tried to move, but an implacable weight held firmly everything but my head, one arm, and one leg. "Anglais?" repeated the young officer. I tried to speak, but failed, and could only nod, miserably.

The soldiers got to work behind me; and first the weight on my chest, then that on my thigh, lifted. Two officers helped me to rise, and one of them felt my face.

"Not so bad. I am a doctor. I will bandage it," he said, in French.

I searched to find what was not so bad, and discovered that all this while I had been seeing through the right eye only, for the left was screwed up tightly, with a swollen forehead overhanging it. When the doctor let go my arm to fetch some dressing from his horse, I collapsed, because one thigh would not perform its work.

I fell among pieces of the most completely wrecked aeroplane I have ever seen. After hitting the rock the machine had evidently crashed to starboard, so that I was thrown sideways over the top plane. The starboard wings were matchwood, the struts on the port side had snapped, and the fuselage was twisted into a wide curve, a corner of the rock having cut through one longeron and bent another. None of the main parts—planes, fuselage, centre-section, rudder, or elevator—was whole, and all were intermingled with bits of wire, splinters of wood, and tattered fabric. As for the engine, it had fallen clean out, and was partly buried in earth. It was the engine that had weighed so painfully on my right thigh, while the forward end of the fuselage pinned down my chest.

I thought of burning these remains by throwing a lighted match among them suddenly, but refrained, firstly because I had no match, and secondly, because there was nothing worth the burning. The soldiers had already taken the instruments from the dashboard; and one of them, I noticed, had broken off the joystick for a souvenir.

The doctor bound up my face and helped me to mount a mule, and we left the Arabs to their scowls of disappointment at being cheated out of loot. All this while I had been exceptionally well treated by the officers in Turkish uniform. Not one had spoken roughly, nothing was taken from me, and even my pockets were not searched. Could it be that the Turks treated their prisoners well instead of badly? Even on the British side of the lines we heard stories of how Turkish soldiers had killed British wounded, how Turkish officers had threatened newly taken prisoners with death if they did not give up all they possessed, and how everybody's money and most people's boots were stolen immediately they were captured; although we did not hear anything like the damnable truth of the Turks' atrocities. The mystery soon explained itself.

"Est-ce-que les Anglais viendront bientôt?" said the young officer who had first spoken.

"Qui sait?"

"Moi, je l'espère bien, parce que je suis Arménien. Nous sommes tous des Anglais ou des Arabes."

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. But he would not dare pretend to show too much friendliness, because some of the men acted as spies for the Turks.

The camp sprawled in a hollow between two hills without any semblance of order. The men were squatting at their evening meal, in little parties, each man dipping his fingers into the large bowl in the centre of his group. The Arab commandant, a fat man with a good-humoured face, was in front of his tent, awaiting our arrival.

He looked at me with grave curiosity on learning that I was English, and, through an interpreter, greeted me ceremoniously. He was sorry indeed, he said, for my misfortune, and he hoped my hurts were not serious. He had little enough hospitality to offer, but it would be a privilege to make me as comfortable as possible. Would I honour the officers by joining them at dinner?

Over a meal of soup, bread, rice, and raisins, I was asked guardedly about my views on the duration of the war, the conditions of life in that part of Palestine occupied by the British, and, above all, if the British would advance soon. Every one seemed to take it for granted that the British could advance when and where they liked. I explained that the Arabs, Syrians, and Jews were very contented and on good terms with our troops; that bread, fish, and meat were cheap and plentiful; that local inhabitants were well paid for everything they sold to the British armies; that the population was overjoyed at being freed from the Turks.

Several eyes gleamed, and most of the company looked thoughtful; but no comments were passed. Those present looked at each other with side-glances, as if distrustful and afraid to speak.

But afterward, when we went outside the tent to drink our coffee by moonlight, the commandant took me aside and unburdened himself while pretending to watch the Jewish doctor rebandage my face. Was it true, he asked (the Jew acting as interpreter), that the British intended to give Arabia and part of Syria to the Arabs?

"Most certainly," I replied.

Was it true that the British were friendly to the Arabs, and gave their Arab prisoners all sorts of privileges not given to the Turkish prisoners?

"Most certainly."

The good-humoured face of the commandant grew hard as he began talking of the Turks' misdeeds. They had massacred many of the Syrian and Arab notables. They had starved to death scores of thousands. They had commandeered all the crops. They had thrown many hundreds into prison, and left them there without trial. The whole of the population hated the Turks, and were only waiting for a British victory to rise up and kill the grasping officials. When the British advanced they would receive such a welcome as conquerors had never before received in Syria.

With that he began to tell me how, after he had been taken for service from his native town of Homs, the Turks told him that if he deserted their lives would be forfeit. By merely talking to me he would be suspect. Would I be kind enough to give him my word of honour not to try to escape while in his charge? If, however, I were sent to Damascus and thought of escaping from there, I might obtain help from an Arab whose address he would give me.

As I could not walk five yards, and still felt deadly sick, I gave the parole readily enough.

The young Armenian helped me across to his tent, and put me to bed. He then wrapped himself in a blanket and lay on the floor, facing the entrance; for, he said, if I were left to sleep alone the men would creep into the tent, to steal my clothes and boots.

At about two o'clock in the morning, after a few hours of fitful sleep, I was awakened and asked to dress. A German staff officer, said the Armenian, had ridden over to see that I was sent away, fearing that the Arabs and Armenians might help me to escape.

Outside, in the moonlight, I found a young, eye-glassed lieutenant—correct, aloof, and immaculate. In atrocious French he asked if I were badly shaken, and if I thought I could ride for three hours. I did not think I could ride for three hours. He was sorry, but I really must ride for three hours. Why, then, had he troubled to ask my opinion if I could ride for three hours? He made no reply, but I heard him giving instructions to the Sanitätsunteroffizier, who had come with him, to have me put on a mule and to ride behind, while a guide led the way to Army Group Headquarters.

A shambling, decrepit mule was commandeered; and, with many a groan, I was helped on to its back. The Sanitätsunteroffizier mounted his pony, drew his revolver, and cocked it with an ostentatious click. An Arab guide took hold of my mule's reins. I said goodbye to the Arab and Armenian officers, and we moved off down a straggling track. The commandant had had no chance to give me the address of his friend in Damascus.

About fifty yards ahead I saw what looked like a Bedouin, galloping across a stretch of grass and disappearing behind a mound. And then, from the camp behind us, came a startled and furious shout: "Mein Pferd! Teufel! Wo ist mein Pferd?" The Sanitätsunteroffizier motioned our guide to turn round, and we retraced our path. The young staff officer—no longer correct, aloof, and immaculate, and with eye-glass dangling unheeded in front of his tunic—was in a loud-voiced rage. He had told "one of these brutes," said he to the Sanitätsunteroffizier, to hold his horse, and he now found that both the horse and the brute had disappeared.

I remembered the Bedouin whom I had seen riding across the patch of grass, and was infinitely amused. It appeared that the man who held the horse had already deserted twice and been recaptured. For his third attempt, who could blame him for taking as companion a German officer's horse, since Allah had sent such a wonderful gift?

And the young German raged and cursed and shouted verbal contempt for all these Asiatic "cattle," among whom it was his misfortune to live. Finally, after promising the commandant all sorts of penalties, he said he would take the best horse from the Arab officers' stable.

The Sanitätsunteroffizier and I again walked our mules along the narrow track. It was a ride that will live always vividly in my memory. The guide dragged my mule up impossible slopes, pulled it over slippery rocks that ended in an almost vertical drop of several feet, and beat it unmercifully on the several occasions when it fell forward on to its knees. Each small jolt sent an exquisite pain through my contused thigh, and my head felt as if it were being beaten by hammers. Everything seemed unreal. The piles of heaped-up stones, so common in this country of nomad Arabs, looked like monstrous gargoyles in the half-light of the moon.

After about an hour I became light-headed again, forgot I was a prisoner, forgot I was on muleback, and almost forgot that I existed. I lost consciousness of everything but the light of the moon, which appeared as a great white hanging sheet, from the other side of which sounded, far away and unnatural, the voice of the Unteroffizier, like the trickling of hidden water. Finally I fainted, and must have fallen from the mule, for when I recovered consciousness my head and arms were sore, and the German was arranging my bandages.

Refreshed by a short drink of water, I was once more pushed on to the mule's back, and continued the purgatorial journey over the rocky hillside. It was four hours after we had started when the Unteroffizier announced that a village in a small valley some quarter of a mile ahead was Arsun, the site of Group Headquarters.

I was taken to the officers' mess, where I found the eye-glassed young officer relating to two early risers—a colonel and a major—how the dirty pig-dog of an Arab had stolen his best horse. The colonel received me kindly enough; but a major, to whom I took an instant dislike, looked at my torn clothes and swollen face and laughed.

The colonel gave me wine, and offered his sympathy. He fought, he said, side by side with the British in the Boxer War, and he had the greatest regard for the English infantryman. Finding that I had flown in the battle of the Somme, he launched into reminiscences of that epic struggle, and told me how desperately hard put were the Germans not to let their retreat degenerate into a rout. Now, however (this was the period of Hindenburg's whirlwind advance toward Amiens), things were better. He believed that Hindenburg, having bled the French white, would bring about a German peace by the coming autumn. I remarked that the French were by no means bled white, and, moreover, that there were plenty of Englishmen and Americans in the world. Here the major interposed with a sneer—

"American! All through the war the Allies have clutched at straws and men of straw. First it was the Russians, then the blockade, then the British, and now that all these three have failed it is the Americans! I know the Americans well. They are all talk, bluff, and self-interest. They will make not the least difference to German invincibility."

And he began a long, boastful account of how he had outwitted the Americans and the English. In August, 1914, he said, he was on special duty in Japan. He slipped across to America, and for a time worked in the United States with Boy-Ed and Von Papen. Afterward, with Dutch papers, he shipped to Holland. When the boat was held up by a British cruiser, he convinced the stupid examining officer that he was a Dutchman.

The major proceeded to draw offensive comparisons between the Germans and the English. The German nation was magnificently organized, whereas the British leaders could scarcely be more stupid. But it was not only a question of organization. From every point of view the German was superior to the Englishman. He was braver, more intelligent, more obedient, and had a higher sense of honour. When it was a question of equal conditions the German invariably beat the Englishman. He turned to the colonel, and, speaking in German, pointed out as a proof of his contentions that I myself had been shot down by a German. Also speaking in German, which appeared to surprise the major, I mentioned that I had been fighting with not one but four German machines after a German pilot had run away over twenty miles of his own territory, that the German aviators on the Palestine front invariably fled from the British unless in greatly superior force, that the proportion of machines shot down in Palestine was about five Germans to one British, and, moreover, that when a German officer had the misfortune to be captured he was treated as a gentleman, and was not made a target for uncivil taunts.

The major rang the bell, and ordered me to be taken to a tent by the cookhouse.

Once more I lay down. This time I was allowed to sleep until awakened by the myriads of flies that swarmed round the cookhouse while lunch was being prepared. I hung about the tent, miserably and dejectedly, for two hours. Then a lieutenant arrived and announced that the major would be graciously pleased to accept an apology for my lack of respect.

If, I replied, the major would express his regrets for having spoken offensively of the English, I would be delighted to exchange apologies with him. The lieutenant and I treated each other to punctilious salutes, and he withdrew; and that was the last I heard of the ill-mannered major.

In the afternoon, after receiving some bread and coffee, I was sent away on ponyback, with a German cavalryman as escort. This trooper was friendly and garrulous. He pronounced himself a Social Democrat and an Internationalist. He was a good German, he claimed, and had fought for Germany since 1914; but he had neither hatred nor contempt for Germany's enemies. It was the Ministers, the politicians, the professors, the journalists, and the general staffs who had manufactured hatred. The German civilians and non-combatant troops were blinded by racial feeling; but, according to my Social Democrat guard, not so the fighting man. He liked and respected many of his officers, especially the colonel whom I had met; but after the war the proletariat would see that they, and the class they represented, discarded their arrogance and ascendancy. And, either ignorant or unmindful of Germany's crimes, this half-baked idealist looked forward with confidence to a wonderful peace that would send him back to his trade of printing, and would bring about an immediate heart-to-heart reconciliation of Germany and the rest of the world.

With such debating-society talk I was distracted from the dull ache in my thigh and the spasmodic pains that came with every jolt from the pony. The heat was intense on my uncovered head, and the flies collected in their hundreds each time we halted to allow a party of ragged Arabs, mounted on camels or donkeys, to pass round some bend of the track ahead of us.

The country was fairly level, however, and it was not long before we reached my next stage—a field hospital corresponding approximately to the British casualty clearing station. There my face and thigh were dressed, and for the first time since capture I could indulge in the glorious luxury of a wash. The doctor in charge complained that the hospital had been machine gunned by a British aeroplane, but he seemed surprised when I told him that the red crescent painted on the side of the building could not be seen by an aviator. He agreed to mark a large red crescent on the ground.

My destination, it appeared, was the Austrian hospital at Tul-Keran, whither I was forwarded by motor-ambulance, with several wounded Turks. It proved to be a dirty, insanitary building, such as the British would scarcely have used as a billet; but at all events it provided a much-needed place of rest.

Most ex-prisoners will agree that the interval when they were first left alone for any length of time was a first-class substitute for purgatory. All at once the realization of being cut off and under most galling restraint becomes vivid and intense. The thought of irrevocable separation from one's fighting companions, and of what they must now be doing, leaves one utterly miserable and dejected.

Fifteen miles to the south our Nieuports would be waiting for the next tip-and-run call to flight. It would, perhaps, be the turn of Daddy and the Babe, who were waiting around the hangars, while the rest trooped across to tea in the orange grove. Soon all of them would be driving along the wired-over, sandy road to the coast. And here was I, herded with unclean Turks in a crowded, unclean room, while the hot sun streamed through the window and made one glad to get protection from it by hiding under an unclean blanket.

Only fifteen miles to the south. And the coast was fifteen miles to the west. The coast? Why, a friend of mine, after he was forced to land in the sea, had effected a marvellous escape by hiding among the sand-dunes during the daytime, and during the night alternately swimming, walking, and rolling through the shallow water on the fringe of the sands, until he had passed the Turkish trench-line. Only fifteen miles; and from aërial observation I knew that the country between Tul-Keran and the sea was more or less flat.

I resolved that when my leg allowed me to walk, I would somehow leave the hospital early one night, try to reach the shore before dawn, hide during the following day, and then run or swim to the British out-posts.