CHAPTER III

NAZARETH--AND THE CHRISTIAN CHARITY OF A JEW

"The Englishman!" he repeated, gripping my arm harder than ever. Then, after a puzzled pause: "Where have you been?"

"For a walk. I was upset by the air raid. My head has been very bad since the smash, and sometimes I don't know what I'm doing. But I'm better now, and I give my word of honour that I will stay quietly in bed. Only say nothing to the Turks."

This Austrian had always seemed a good fellow; and now, on hearing the word "_Ehrenwort_"--word of honour--he dropped his attitude of anxiety and suspicion, and became his usual friendly self. A wounded Turk came into the passage to see what was happening, but the orderly sent him away. He withdrew with a look of surprise at my disordered appearance.

"Good," replied the Austrian. "I shall say nothing to the Turks. But when the corporal comes I shall have to tell him, and he will tell the _Herr Doktor_. But I shall ask the corporal not to mention it to the others."

He led me back to the ward, and there noticed, for the first time, how a rolled-up blanket underneath the discoloured quilt made my bed seem as if it were occupied by a man.

"_Na, Na_," he said as he straightened the blanket. "This doesn't look as if you only went for a walk. Well, I have your word of honour that you will keep quiet, and the _Herr Doktor_ must decide what is to be done."

Tired out, and so despairing as to care nothing of what might happen, I fell asleep. In the heat of mid-morning I was awakened by the corporal, who told me to come with him to the doctor's room. As I limped painfully along the corridor I was still tired and but half awake, so that while I remembered an unpleasant failure I could not define exactly what had happened.

"_Herr Hauptmann_" said the corporal with a grin, "your injured leg was not improved by the night walk"--and only then did I remember fully the bitter happenings of a few hours earlier.

Charming and decorative as ever, the blue-uniformed, much-medalled doctor rose from his chair, and shook hands with exaggerated ceremony. The priest stood, silent and bowed coldly, as if to imply that my misdeeds were exactly what one would expect from a friend of Másaryk.

"Night walks," said the doctor, "are bad for people with injured legs and faces. As your medical adviser, I should advise you to remain in bed for the future."

"I hope I shall be permitted to follow your advice, _Herr Doktor_."

"That being so, perhaps you will tell us exactly where you went, and why you did it."

Well knowing that with so many indications of an attempted escape anything but frankness would be futile, I admitted having tried to return to the British Army.

"_So!_ And now, what do you expect?"

"If I may presume on your kindness, I ask that I may stay here until sent away in the normal course of events. I hope you will let me remain in hospital on the understanding that I give my word of honour to be good so long as I am in Tul-Keran."

"That will be difficult. I myself have no objection, and the word of honour is guarantee enough. But if the news of your escapade got beyond the hospital I should have to make a full report."

The doctor learned from the corporal that, apart from the four of us present, the one person who knew the story was the night orderly, who could be trusted to keep quiet. After a low-voiced discussion with the priest he gave instructions that nobody else must be told. He then promised not to make a report, unless the news leaked out and his hand were forced thereby. I thanked him and withdrew.

But the story did leak out. Either the orderly told it, or the Turkish patient who had seen me in the passage, after my return, formed his own conclusions and communicated them to other people. At any rate, several Turks came into the ward and discussed (according to the Syrian's whispered translations) my adventure of the early morning. One man even went so far as to say that I had gone out and signalled to the British aeroplanes.

The Syrian was greatly concerned about whether anybody knew he had been privy to the attempt; but I was able to reassure him.

Evidently the story became so widely known that the hospital authorities had to make their report. Late in the afternoon I was told to dress and collect my belongings, as the Turks were taking me from the hospital. Having obeyed, I was handed over to an escort of two Turkish soldiers with drawn bayonets.

"Adieu," said the Syrian. "I shall pray for you, and for happier times."

The doctor shook hands ceremoniously when I left; and the priest--affable once more--gave me a heavy stick to help support my thigh, saying that he hoped we should meet as friends after the war.

Bareheaded in the searing sun (for my friends had forgotten to include a hat in my kit) I was led through a gaping crowd to the railroad station.

There my guards joined forces with another Turk who had in his charge the dirtiest Arab I have ever seen. His sole dress was a pair of tattered trousers and a faded overcoat from the left side of which a filthy arm protruded, naked. His headdress, a much-torn strip of dingy rag, seemed to have lain for a long time in some stagnant pool. Clots of dirt dotted his face, his feet, and the lower part of his legs, which were bare. His moustache and straggling beard were powdered with sand and gravel; and on looking closely at his middle, where the trousers tops gave place to uncovered flesh, I saw two lice on the inner surface of the rough cloth.

The Arab and I looked at each other curiously, after the manner of fellow-prisoners seeing each other for the first time. Then an interrogation, interrupted by our arrival, was continued. This consisted of a Turkish officer shouting menaces at the Arab, who replied, whenever he was given a chance, with cringing explanations and pleading gestures.

Presently a German interpreter, who spoke Arabic well, joined the group. He also threatened the Arab, and I saw him place thumb and finger on his wind-pipe, as if to suggest strangling.

This badgering of the poor brute continued, until finally the Arab opened his hands and said something in a resigned tone; whereat a thrill of excitement passed through the gathering. The Turkish officer, before leaving us, wrote several lines on some official papers carried by the Arab's guard.

The Unteroffizier then turned his attention to me, and finding that I could speak German, talked of many things, from Hindenburg's advance in France to his own home in the former German colony at Jaffa.

"You have a pleasant companion," he said, nodding toward the Arab.

I asked who the pleasant companion might be and heard in reply a strange tale. The Arab, it appeared, had been found wandering in the rear of the Turkish trenches. The garment he wore was found to be a relic of what was once an overcoat of Turkish military pattern; so that he was arrested as a deserter, and possibly a spy. He told a rambling tale of how he had been a soldier in an Egyptian battalion fighting for the British, but, after being tortured by his officers, had escaped across the lines.

Even the Turks could not be convinced that British officers tortured their men; and the Arab having shown himself to be a liar, they were more than ever convinced that he was also a spy.

The Turkish officer, in the conversation I overheard, had threatened to hang him unless he confessed to being a spy. Finally the Arab (who, in my opinion, was not a spy, whatever he might be), terror-stricken at the threat that he could only save himself from hanging by a "confession," let himself be badgered into a declaration--true or false--that he was a spy. So they hanged him, as I learned afterward, at Damascus.

For several hours we remained on the platform, where the Arab and I were rival attractions for general curiosity. Then, late in the evening, we were hustled into a truck, marked in German: "12 horses or 40 men." As a matter of fact, more than fifty Turkish soldiers must have crowded into the truck before the train started.

Our party kept together in one of the corners, where we found just room enough to sit down without being trampled upon. I placed the kit bag between myself and the Arab, as a barrier against lice; although, for that matter, most of the Turkish soldiers were verminous.

That night I performed the first of many nightmare journeys on Turkish railways. Although each side of the truck was open for about three feet the atmosphere was intensely stuffy, so that it was difficult to breathe when seated on the floor. The crowd of Turks spat all over the place, and exuded dozens of different smells. The train jolted unevenly, with many a bump and halt, up the badly kept track. Sleep was impossible; and by the time I was hauled on to the platform at Afuleh, nine hours later, I was heavy-eyed and faint with wakefulness, weakness, and disgust.

Afuleh is but a few miles from Nazareth (then the Turco-German General Headquarters on the Palestine front); and to Nazareth we trudged. 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 Platzkommandant--a swollen balloon of a man--asked a question, and the Arab's reply drew all eyes in my direction. Having understood only a few words of the Arabic I wondered how I could be concerned in the charge of spying.

The Platzkommandant glared at me, and after examining my papers, spoke with somebody on the telephone. Then, although not a word had been spoken to me, we were both led outside and through some narrow streets to a stone building. Not until we were inside it did I hear, from a police officer who spoke a little French, why I was there.

Having noticed that rather more consideration was given to me than to him, and thinking he might obtain better treatment by hanging on to my coat-tails, the Arab had elaborated his story by saying that I brought him from the British Army in my aeroplane. Evidently the Platzkommandant, without giving me the chance to deny this fantastic tale, had telephoned to Turkish General Headquarters which had ordered that the spy and I, as accomplices in crime, should be kept together. And here we were, inside what I learned was the civil criminal jail.

I protested with vehemence and ridicule against belief in the Arab's absurd statement. 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. As for most Turkish jails, I would rather live in an American pigsty.

Even after my experience on the train from Tul-Keran I was surprised by the first sight of that cell. The walls were neither stone nor wooden, but of hard earth, with holes and cracks all over the surface. The various kinds of dirt that crusted the stone floor, which must have been left uncleaned for years, had mingled and intermingled until they became a thin layer of slime, which gave forth a dank odour. The room was partly underground, although the small, iron-barred window, on a level with the floor of the yard and two feet below the stone ceiling, let in a certain amount of light. Through it crawled all sorts of insects. Hundreds of vermin were to be seen moving in and out of the fissures in the walls.

Unadulterated bravery, without any trace of suppressed or subconscious fear, does not exist; wherefore, if a man who fought in the war tells you that he never felt the least bit afraid, call him a liar of the goriest. But my experience has convinced me that ordinary bravery--the sort of bravery which is self-control in the face of danger--is one of the most ordinary of qualities, possessed by most people of every race, sex, and age. But endurance is another matter. To all but the lion-hearted there comes the point at which the will to endure breaks down under abnormal strain.

Being far from lion-hearted, this now happened to me. When the gendarme banged and bolted the door I became morally dead, and past caring about surroundings or events. Physical weakness, mental agony, a terrible dizziness that resulted from having been bareheaded in the Palestine sun, the succession of privations and revolting surroundings--all these combined to break my spirit.

I grabbed the shrinking Arab, who evidently had not reckoned on being left alone with me, and flung him across the cell. I then sat down in the nearest corner, and, physically and mentally sick, remained inert for many hours.

The next three days I remember as a semi-conscious nightmare. Yet a dreadful nightmare is easier to bear than a dreadful reality, because the horror of it is confined to subconsciousness, and does not touch the surface brain. I sat through hours of inertia, without comprehension, energy, or a sense of my surroundings; so that I cared little for the dirt, the stench, and the general beastliness of the cell, because I scarcely realized them.

Three times I tried to pass the door, so as to protest to the police officer; but each time I was pushed back by the guard, who made frequent use of the words that every prisoner in Turkey knew so well--"_yok_" and "_yassak_" ("not," and "forbidden"). I gave up the attempt, and relapsed into a state of moral lethargy.

The changes from night to day, from stuffy heat to damp cold, passed unnoticed, and I cared not whether I lived or died. I felt no hunger and very little thirst. This was fortunate, for hunger could not have been satisfied.

Each morning the guards gave each of us a small loaf of bad bread in which pieces of straw, string, and wood were plentiful. A carafe was filled with bad water once a day. In the evening a basin of thin soup, with mysterious chunks floating on the surface of it, was placed between us. Without being influenced by its unsavouriness, I felt not the least desire for the greasy liquid, the small loaf of bread being quite enough food for the day in my then state of unreal detachment from bodily needs and sensations.

As for the Arab, as soon as the basin was brought he squatted on his haunches, dug his hands into the soup, and having grabbed some floating morsel, stuffed it into his mouth. Afterward he lapped up the liquid itself, after the manner of a dog.

On the morning of the third day we were led from the jail to be interrogated at Turkish Headquarters. Although my ferocious headache still remained, the change from the dimness and closeness of the cell to the bright sunlight of the street revived me, and I sniffed the fresh air in gulps.

I was passing through Nazareth, watched with evident sympathy by the sad-faced crowd, when I saw an officer of the German Flying Corps. He looked at my pilot's badge and stopped, whereupon I broke away from the guards and approached him. In violent language I protested against the outrageous treatment, and asked the German as a fellow-aviator and a fellow-European, to see that the Turks moved me from the criminal jail.

The aviator happened to be a friend of Oberleutnant Wolff, who fired the shot that brought me down near Shechem; and, having already heard the details of my capture, he recognized at once the absurdity of the Arab's story that I had brought him across the lines to spy for the British. He himself was furious at my bad treatment, for apart from their air combats the relations between German and British aviators in Palestine were of the best. He promised to go straight to German Air Headquarters and enlist its influence for me.

I left the German and was led by the guards to Turkish Headquarters. For two hours we waited in a corridor; and then, before I had been interviewed, there arrived my friend the German pilot with two staff officers, a monocled major and a lieutenant. I shook hands--and was offered apologies for the brutalities I had suffered. It would all be right now, said the major, as the trio disappeared through the doorway of an office.

They returned with a Turkish colonel, who likewise shook hands and apologized. Finally, escorted by a different guard, I was sent away without having been questioned. The last I saw of the Arab was as he staggered and cringed under a box on the ear delivered by the colonel.

Once again I was led before the Turkish Platzkommandant. Evidently his knuckles had been telephonically rapped as a result of my treatment, for he scowled wickedly as he took my papers and ordered a room to be prepared for me in the barracks.

At first this room seemed a paradise after the slimy cell; but after a few days of utter loneliness its tiny dimensions--ten feet long by six feet wide--seemed to be closing in to crush me. The furniture was a bed with one greasy blanket and a rickety little table on which stood an earthenware jar.

Next morning I was again taken to Turkish Headquarters for interrogation. The Intelligence Officer who questioned me was very far from intelligent in his methods. He began by saying outright that since I had been moved to better quarters he expected me to show gratitude by giving information. I replied that instead of showing gratitude, I ought to receive compensation. He hinted that it was in his power to move me back to the criminal jail.

"Do as you like," I replied. "But since it is obvious that you are highly civilized, you will do nothing of the kind." Whereupon he smiled fatuously, and proceeded to ask leading questions, speaking in French.

"Is the report true that General Allenby has left Palestine for France?"

"I really don't know. Possibly. Possibly not."

"Have you seen General Allenby lately?"

"No. But I have a friend who once saw him driving along a road in France. But that was two years ago."

"Are the British preparing an attack near the coast?"

"Possibly. Possibly not. I really don't know."

These illuminating replies were noted down, word for word, by the Intelligence Officer. His desire for details about myself was inexhaustible. I did my best to satisfy it by telling him that I was aged eighteen; had been an aviator for five years and a soldier for six; had come from England on a ship named the _Hogwash_; had been flying the type of aeroplane known as the Jabberwock; had belonged to No. 1 Training Squadron, the best fighting squadron in Palestine; and thought the war would continue for fifteen and a half years longer.

Having presented the Turk with this medley of misinformation, and watched him transfer it to his notebook, I grew tired of invention and protested a lack of knowledge in reply to every question.

That chat and backchat with the wooden-headed Intelligence Officer was my only conversation, except a few whispered words, with a fellow-human for nearly a week. The Platzkommandant took his revenge for my complaints in two ways--by feeding me very badly, and by inflicting solitary confinement upon me.

Solitary confinement makes a man utterly wretched. Left all alone, and with nothing to distract his mind, a prisoner can only think and think and think--and all his thoughts are morbid.

I had six matches in my pocket and with these I invented all sorts of games and puzzles. But after a few hours my brain, refusing to concentrate on them, drifted back to the sea of bitter despair. At night-time the great difficulty was to keep my mind, not from drifting, but from _racing_.

After four days of solitary confinement I was fast losing all sense of balance and normality. At times I regretted not being back in the criminal jail with the repulsive Arab for company.

The few words I managed to exchange with the Christian woman who tidied my room each morning were an unspeakable joy. This woman--ragged, bootless, and gaunt--would whisper fierce questions in broken French as she threw water on the dusty floor, or stabbed with a hairpin some of the bed-bugs, while a guard watched through the open door to see that we did not conspire.

"Why come not English? We hungry. Pigs of Turks!"

And I had to whisper back that the English would come and drive the pigs of Turks out of Nazareth.

When she had taken her stooping back and her patchwork clothes out of the room, I would probably not have the chance to speak with anybody, even in a whisper, for the next twenty-four hours.

Apart from the furniture I had nothing to look at but a green hillside, seen through the tiny window. For hours at a time I paced the few feet across the room and back again, then sat on the bed and looked through the little window at what little I could see of Nazareth.

Several times I noticed men, women, and boys walking in a huddled group, with guards around them. Some had their hands shackled, some had a chain linking one arm and one leg, others were chained by the arm to the next person. They moved aimlessly over the hillside, presumably for exercise, while Turkish soldiers pushed or beat any who struggled or straggled.

On my sixth morning in the barracks I was visited by the Platzkommandant's aide-de-camp, just after such a party had disappeared from view. I asked if these shackled and browbeaten prisoners were Christians.

"My dear sir," said the aide-de-camp, with all the blandness of the educated Turk when telling a lie, "we never put chains on anybody, and our Christian criminals are as well treated as Mohammedan criminals. You must be mistaken in what you think you have seen."

After this conversation I never again saw these groups of civilian captives at Nazareth; and I began to think that the strain of solitary confinement had focussed my sick brain on sights that my eyes never met. Possibly, however, the aide-de-camp had taken care that the chained prisoners should be taken for exercise on the far side of the hill.

Next day the same officer paid me another visit, as he was learning French and wanted practice. When he was in my room I noticed from the window a strange procession. A few banners were carried at the head of it, then came some Turkish soldiers, and finally a mass of men and women shambling along with bowed heads. Somewhere a band was blowing out the horrible whining discord that the Turks call music. Nothing more melancholy and unenthusiastic than the people's attitude could be imagined.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Two days ago the Turks gained a great victory over the British in the Jordan valley, between Es-Salt and Amman. The Governor has organized this procession to celebrate it. The population is showing its joy."

I looked at the sad-faced rabble below, and remarked that they looked more like mourners at a funeral than celebrators of joy. The aide-de-camp had spoken, however, without the least suggestion of irony.

Next day he left Nazareth for Tul-Keran. He paid me a farewell visit, and, to my great joy, gave me "an English book," which he had bought in the bazaar. The "English book" proved to be a copy of a magazine for children, dated 1906. It was even more consciously educative in its exposition of elementary principles, and more condescendingly inept in its milk-and-water stories, than the general run of such publications. Yet in my state of solitary confinement I revelled in every word. That magazine for children gave me as much pleasure as have the finest books in the world under normal conditions.

My mind stopped racing and wandering and retrospecting while I learned all about wireless telegraphy, in twenty lines; how Joshua smote the Canaanites hip and thigh (with an illustration of the walls of Jericho falling rhythmically before the Israelite trumpeters); How to make lemonade and seed cake; How not to make trouble among one's schoolfellows; The birth and life of jelly-fish; and How to Set a Good Example, being an instalment of the History of Little Peter, the Boy who Feared God, Kept His Hands Clean, and Was Always Cheerful and Respectful and Fond of Chopping Wood for His Mother.

The magazine also showed how to make hats, sailing-boats, houses, and whatnots out of a plain sheet of paper--all of which I practised assiduously through a night of bug-biting sleeplessness.

Best and worst of all was the five-page summary, in schoolmistress English, of "The Newcomes." This had nothing in it but colourless statement of incident; and the sentiment of the book was churned into a welter of flabbiness. As a final insult "_adsum_" was misspelt "_adsem_" in the subjoined monstrosity with which the unliterary procureur completed his (or more probably her) prostitution of Thackeray's almost-masterpiece:

When the roll call of the pensioners was made the dying Colonel, hearing his name, lifted his poor old head and said: "_adsem_" Then he fell back dead. "_Adsem_" is a Latin word signifying that a person is present.

Yet the protest and anger inspired by this outrage were useful in taking my mind from its lonely bitterness; and I read the child's magazine version of "The Newcomes" many times over, until its power to irritate was expended.

After a few more days my confinement became less solitary. The German major whom I had already seen visited me, with the Turkish Platzkommandant, and asked if I had any more complaints to make. I looked at the Platzkommandant, and said that the food was not only bad, but scarcely sufficient to keep a man alive. The fat Turk scowled his wickedest, but made no comment. The German major expressed regret, and promised that meals should be sent from the General Staff's mess.

Evidently the German Staff in Palestine made a careful study of its own comfort. For the rest of my stay in Nazareth I fed better than I could have done, under war-time conditions, in any London hotel. Meat, fish, vegetables, every kind of fruit, butter, sugar, pastries, good coffee and wine, all were sent in profusion--to the great disgust of the Turkish officers, who were fed rather worse than the German privates.

This diet was a very welcome change from bad bread and water varied by thin soup. Sickness made me far from hungry, however, so that I found it impossible to eat many of the meals. The corporal of the guard, the sentry outside my door, and several of their friends would hang around in the corridor until the tray was taken from my room, then stuff their hands in the dishes and snatch at pieces of meat or vegetable.

For me the food from the German mess was chiefly welcome in that it brought me a good friend--the dragoman who came with it. He was a Jew, originally from Salonika, with a long, tongue-twisting name impossible to remember, so that I called him Jean Willi, French being our conversational medium. He was well-to-do, had been an official of the Ottoman Bank in Constantinople, and spoke seven languages. For the first two years of war he kept out of the army by means of _baksheesh_. Finally he was taken for service because he offended an influential officer; but his knowledge of languages, together with bribes placed in the right quarters, procured for him the safe appointment of a dragoman to the German Headquarters at Nazareth.

Three times a day--with breakfast, lunch, and dinner--Jean Willi visited me. He tried to come oftener, but the Turks would not admit him.

Everything I wanted he would move heaven and earth to get. He "obtained" a German soldier's cap for me, on discovering that I had no hat. He persuaded the German barber to bring the lunch one day, so that he might cut my hair. A comb, a tooth-brush, soap, books, and a dozen other things were brought by Jean Willi; and, having learned that my ready cash amounted to three and a half dollars, he pretended that the articles were sent by the German officers. Afterward I discovered this to have been a benevolent untruth.

The wayside fallings of a roving life have brought me several Very Good Samaritans, but none other who did as much for me, under great difficulties, as Jean Willi. Before meeting him I was altogether broken in spirit; and with hopelessness filling my mind I had actually begun to fear for my reason. He understood all this and, to the limit of his powers, did his best to remedy it, well knowing that such action would bring him the enmity and suspicions of Turkish officers. His friendly conversation and his invariable kindness were splendid tonics, taken three times a day, at each visit.

When he was away my mind was prevented from slipping back into the stagnation of despair by the books he smuggled into my room. The first of these was a German war novel--"_Der Eiserne Mann_"--procured from a Boche soldier. It purported to show how loyal were the Alsatians to the German Fatherland. It was untrue, stupidly sentimental, and often farcical; but, after all, so were most of the war novels published in England at that time.

Then, in some dark recess of the house where he was billeted, he found a copy of "_Les liaisons dangereuses_"--an altogether extraordinary book to be salvaged from a little house in Nazareth. This was my first introduction to Barbéry d'Auréville; and joy and interest in his magnificent characterization completed the rescue of my mind from the slough of despondency.

It was Jean Willi who first gave me an outline of Turkey's spiritual history during the war. The sudden savage onslaught of the Turks against their Christian subjects; the horrible character of the Armenian massacres; the murder of prominent Syrians, the deportation of Ottoman Greeks; the gradual starvation of the rotten old empire, whereby scores of thousands died of hunger, while the Germans were sending trainload after trainload of foodstuffs from the country; the ruthless execution of all who stood in the way of Enver and Talaat; the amazing bribery and speculation; the hundreds of thousands of deserters, and the scores of thousands of brigands--all this was described in such vivid detail by Jean Willi that I scarcely believed he could be relating fact.

Two-thirds of the population, he said, were pro-Entente--not only the Christians and Arabs, but the very Turks themselves--although none dared oppose the violence of the Young Turk party. As for himself, although he had never been to England, this Jew without a country claimed to have a frantic love of the English which he could not explain, like the love of a man for a mistress whom he very greatly respects--his own words.

One day there arrived four Australian aviators who had been captured in the Jordan Valley. R., the pilot of a Bristol Fighter, had landed behind the Turkish lines after his petrol tank was hit. H. had tried very pluckily to pick him up. H. made a splendid landing and--with R. and R.'s observer seated on the lower planes, one on each side of the pilot's cockpit, attempted to take his two-seater into the air with a load of four men. He might well have succeeded if R. had not jerked his body backward, to avoid a hot blast from the exhaust outlet; with the result that the equilibrium was upset, and the craft swung round and hit a pile of stones. The four officers burned their machines before they were captured.

The Australians and I were taken for interrogation to German Headquarters. We had agreed that our best plan would be to claim complete ignorance of everything, and the invariable answer of C., the first to enter the private office of the intelligence officer--one Leutnant Santel--was "I don't know." When H., the second on the list, adopted the same tactics, Santel tried bluff.

"_So!_" he said, softly, as if speaking to himself. "How happy am I that it is I and not another who makes the interrogation. Most people would order bad treatment for prisoners who refuse a correct reply. Even I may have to do this. If the Pasha says to me: 'What have you learned from these prisoners?' and I reply: 'They say they know nothing,' he will be very angry and order severe measures."

"_Uh-huh_"--from H.

"Ah, sorry, I forgot you, my friend," said Santel with a start.... "Your aeroplanes are useful in communicating with the Bedouins east of the Jordan, are they not?"

"I don't know."

"But I do know."

"Why ask me then?"--the reply obvious.

"You don't know! You don't know! _So!_ Please leave the room."

H. returned to us; and none of the remaining was questioned that day.

Leutnant Santel adopted a more subtle method next morning. With Oberleutnant von Heimburg ("brother of the famous submarine commander," as Santel introduced him), staff officer of the German Flying Corps at Palestine Headquarters, he came to the barracks and invited C., R., and me to Haifa for the day, on condition that we gave parole until the return.

We accepted and agreed, but while getting ready I remembered how, before my capture, it had been my duty to extract information from a German pilot while entertaining him; and I warned the others not to be drawn into friendly talk about aeroplanes and operations.

It was as we expected. While we were driving to Afuleh aerodrome for lunch in the Flying Corps mess, Von Heimburg and Santel refrained from mention of the war, but at table they performed the usual trick of showing photographs of British aerodromes and pilots, in the vain hope that on recognizing them we would say something useful.

Next we travelled along a narrow-gauge line to Haifa in a swaying truck, the motive power of which was a tractor propellor, driven by a 160 H.P. Mercedes aero-engine. Once again, over tea at the Mount Carmel Hotel in Haifa, the Germans led the talk to Palestine operations and aeroplanes; and once again we led it back to shoes and ships and sealing-wax and cabbages and kings.

When Santel betrayed a desire for knowledge of the habits and exploits of Colonel Lawrence (who was performing such magnificent work as political officer with the Arab army of the King of the Hedjaz) H. said he had never heard of him, but that in Australia he knew a fellow named Lawrence, who--who----

Santel interrupted and did not try to conceal his annoyance. Then he began talking about Miss Gertrude Bell, an Englishwoman who had done brilliant political work among the Mesopotamian Arabs. This time we were able to say with truth that we knew nothing of the matter; although Santel continued to discuss and libel the lady, whom the Germans were going to shoot, he said.

Von Heimburg then praised the British Air Service, with many a pause that invited comment from us. The pauses remained empty, and we managed to exclude the war by pretending to compare painstakingly and assiduously the respective merits of English and Australian girls.

After tea, while bathing in the Mediterranean with the Germans, we saw a strange sight along the sea-front. A line of not less than thirty fishing-craft were left stranded on the beach, with great holes knocked in their sides, so that they might not be floated. This drastic prevention of the use of small vessels, according to Santel, was because many Greek and Syrian fishermen had spied for the British or deserted to Cyprus.

"The same thing has happened over there," he added, pointing across the bay toward Acre, "and at other places, too--Tyre, Sidon, Beyrout, and every port on the coast-line of Asia Minor."

We noticed, however, that three boats were out at sea, presumably fishing for the tables of officers and officials.

"If we could get back here some night," whispered C. as we dressed, "we might collar one of those three boats, tow it out to sea by swimming, and sail to Jaffa." This revived my hopes of escape for the first time since the fiasco at Tul-Keran.

"Thank you a thousand times," I said when Von Heimburg and Santel left us at Nazareth. "It has been a most enjoyable day."

They agreed, without showing enthusiasm.

"But not a very successful one for you, I'm afraid," I added.

They were quiet for a minute, and then both laughed.

"_So!_ You were prepared," said Santel. "Well, I shan't try again."

Neither Santel nor anybody else tried again to interrogate us at Nazareth; and two days later we were told to prepare for a journey to Damascus.

C. had been discussing the chances of escaping by boat; and when Jean Willi paid me a farewell visit I asked him if a journey from Damascus to the coast would be difficult.

"Very difficult indeed under the conditions of which you are thinking." Then, after a pause, "But I will tell you something interesting, since you will probably be kept in Damascus for about a fortnight. The Armenians run secret caravans from Damascus to Akaba."

"Thank you. That's very interesting, indeed." And it was; for Akaba, at the northeastern extremity of the Red Sea, was the base of the Arab army cooperating with the British.

Jean Willi would not listen to thanks, when he said good-bye. I gave him my London address, in the sincere hope of being able to pay back in part the good deeds I owed him.

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."