Part 36

The man seems to be answering a series of interrogations. He asserts, he denies emphatically, he pleads, but he does not cringe. Driven to silent frenzy by the difficulty of seeing, and the doubtfulness of the trend of the events that are taking place in the room over the gateway, Barney looks at his neighbour, the Sergeant of the R.F.C.

"Sergeant!"

"Eh?"

The Flight Sergeant's broad hands are sheltering his eyes as he lies on his stomach on the platform. The little folding binoculars that magnify by 20 are solving for their owner the problem of the Commandant's Room.

"D'yer pipe wot's goin' on? In the office over the gytew'y? Where 'Amid, blarst 'im! an' the two German orficers is settin' at the table and the Father standin' up in front? ..."

"Ay. They're playin' a scene out o' the Old Testament!" says the Flight Sergeant, with a sarcastic twitch of a muscle in his thin cheek.

"Wod'jer call it? ..." Barney breathes hard....

"The Scapegoat!"

"The 'ow much? ..."

"The Scapegoat. The beast the ancient Jews burdened with the sins of the congregation--and drove into the Wilderness every year. Only--the Padre's the Scapegoat--in this case."

"'Oo? ... Not Father Forbis?"

"Father Forbis right enough! 'Left--turn. Quick--march. Party--shon!'" mimics the Sergeant, as the high fair head and stern aquiline profile of the priest, with a _zabtieh's_ fezzed head before, and another behind him,--passes across the field of vision limited by the frame of the window, and by the opening of a door an angle of light is thrown on the whitewashed office wall. "Now the _sira-châwush_ is ordering out the Prison Guard escort.... It's all over.... They're taking him away! ..."

"Dismissed after interrygation.... That's all.... Cheero! In a minnit 'e'll come back through the yard-gyte an' go to 'is quarters as gay as a bloomin' bird...."

Barney defends his opinion with desperate optimism. But his heart is sinking leadenly and a lump is in his throat.

"All serene! Have it your own way. You'll see which is right of us!" The Sergeant cautiously raises himself up. "Do you hear the escort's looted British boots trampin' down the stairs? Now they'll either turn in here or march out at the Main Entrance. And if they do that, there'll be no Mass for the Catholics on Sunday morning--and no Prayers for the rest of us when Mass is through. And no one to get us the allowance from the Consul. And a dog's death for the sick, ay! and a dog's burial. There! ... Do you hear? ... That's the outside gate shutting..."

"Yus. O my Gawd! Shall we ever see 'im agyne?"

The inner gate of the Barrack courtyard has not opened. The sentries posted right and left of it maintain their position unmoved. But the groaning of rusty bolts in stone grooves, and the sound of the ponderous outer gate of the Main Entrance opening and slamming, falls, heavy as a clod of churchyard clay, on the hearts of many men.

For their priest, their helper, their counsellor and friend has gone from his place among them, and the blank he leaves is beyond mere words to express. And even worse than the sense of loss is the cruel uncertainty. Wondering, conjecturing, they lie on their verminous benches as the long hot Palestine day creeps to the sunset hour. The prayer-call from the mosques heralds no supper. Prisoners who resent massacre and villainous usage must, in the opinion of the Bey, have been too lavishly fed. The soldiers of the guard divide the beans in oil; and Barney Mossam, tightening his belt, is more than ever certain that Virtue, outside the walls of the T.R. Drury Lane--is not a game that pays....

The breeze freshens, the great bats come out to steal fruit, and the lesser ones to hunt moths and mosquitoes. Night suddenly unfolds her wings--and down comes the Dark. The jackals howl on the confines of the town, and the pariah dogs bay hideously. The Turkish equivalent for Lights Out! is sounded by the prison _boruzan_. Silver clear, the trumpets and bugles of the German-Turkish garrison challenge the echoes of Ebal and Gerizim. The radiant Hosts of Heaven come forth, and the moon, in her last quarter, hangs over the Hills of Gilead.

Sleep has come to the prisoners. The mud walls shake with their snoring. Only a few are wakeful. The Flight Sergeant is one of these. Towards the middle of the night a 'plane goes over Shechem:

"A raiding or reconnoitring hydro from some carrier in the Mediterranean? No! There's no rattling from the floats. It is a land machine...."

The airman leaves the crowded bench, and steals to the window. In the white effulgence of the moon all objects stand out clear. The German look-out with the telescope on the minaret of the Great Mosque of el Kebir.... The hooded searchlight with its dozing and waking guardians, on the balcony lower down.... A little figure moving on the ragged shoulder of Ebal.... A child? ... No! a woman--scrambling up from limestone terrace to terrace.... He forgets her, for, with the deep, vibrating song that he remembers--into the field of his vision swims The Two-Faced Nightingale....

At about a thousand feet up, she circles smoothly above Shechem. The search-ray from the balcony of the Great Mosque slashes at her viciously. Its fellow from the flank of Gerizim, leaps out, but sinks down again. Her pilot fires an orange light--and the scimitars of radiance from the Mosque and the Mount return to their scabbards; no strings of green rockets explore for the range of her--and no shells from the anti-aircraft guns in the Square of the Khan scream up at her winged shape....

As the biplane hovers against the jewel-bright blue of the Eastern night, the little Zeiss glasses tell their owner that her pilot has a native observer. A big Arab in a striped mantle, and headcloth bound by a rope.... Now her pilot fires a second orange light, drops his weighted despatch-bag, banks and climbs, launching at a dizzy height into a descent of sweeping spirals.... Evidently he is going to land somewhere in the neighbourhood of Shechem....

There is silence as the engine is cut out.... The big 'plane dives out of sight behind the shoulder of Ebal, where the lowest tiers of greyish-yellow limestone terraces are merged in the sandy, rolling plain....

The Flight Sergeant holds his breath and waits, his eyes glued to the binoculars. In a wonderfully short space of time the aëroplane, a powerful tractor biplane of D.H.6 type, climbs into his field of vision,--rises in wide, masterly spirals, banks, turns and flies away Westwards,--leaving the Flight Sergeant wondering with his chin upon the window-sill....

For the Two-Faced Nightingale has shed her observer, the big man in the striped Arab _abâyi_ and roped _kuffiyeh_. Puzzled, the Flight Sergeant creeps noiselessly back to his place on the wooden platform, and lies awake, chewing the cud of mystery, for the rest of the long miserable night.

IV

Dawn brings surprise to him, and the other War prisoners of the Barracks. After the distribution of the morning half-brick of gritty black bread, they are given a second ration, and told to get ready, as they are all going away.

To this end they are presently mustered in the courtyard, carrying their various packs and bundles. Sick and well, unwashed, haggard, unshorn; on naked feet, or feet that are bandaged with the remnants of puttees. Some in tattered khaki tunics, others in cast-off German or Turkish jackets; many bareheaded, others covered with German military caps or broken sun-helmets,--as sorry a collection of scarecrows as Turco-German neglect and brutality can make of two hundred and twenty brave men.... A Turkish bimbashi of infantry, attended by a châwush, gravely pretends to inspect the French and British prisoners. In the name of his Empire he bids them farewell. Some try to raise a feeble cheer when both sets of big wooden gates are thrown open,--and they see a string of some half-dozen German motor-lorries waiting in the sunny road. Sick and well, they are marched forth under guard and packed into these vehicles,--those unable to stand being carried out by _postas_. Then, followed by some weeping wives, the Arabs, Jews and Armenians, chained neck to neck in double file,--are led away--a disconsolate procession, bound for no man knows where....

Even as they leave the foul place of their captivity, the Barracks is filled from wall to wall by an entering battalion of Turkish Reservist Rifles, part of a Brigade hastily summoned by Von Kressenstein from the Caucasus, to be launched on the journey to Mespot, and now brought down here. Swarthy, hairy men, armed with the old long Martini, some covered with the fez, others with the drill _enverieh_, some shod with sandals and leggings, others with German Army boots.

Thus, the Railway-line from Shechem not being available--it was extensively damaged a little while back by British bombing aircraft--and on the repair of it many of these War prisoners have bitterly toiled!--they are bumped over villainously bad roads to railhead at Nakr--en route for the fierce red city of Aleppo, where as they are now aware and Heaven knows how they have got the knowledge!--the sick and disabled are to be picked out for Exchange to England, _via_ Smyrna--and the able-bodied (such as they are!) sent north to Belemkh, a station in the Taurus Mountains, headquarters for gangs of War prisoners working on the rails....

The villainous road that buckjumps through the tumbled Palestine landscape is crowded with Turkish Field, Horse, and Mountain Artillery, conjured back from Mesopotamia by Von Kressenstein, and rushing forward to the defence of Junction Station South. Battery after battery rolls by in the blinding dust; guns and waggons pulled, and riders carried by tough Anatolian horses, bitterly ill-used and evidently poorly fed. But not the roll of iron-shod wheels and the clatter of iron-shod hoofs, nor the roar of human voices talking in many Oriental dialects, nor the curses and jeers and viler things that are hurled at the prisoners in the jolting lorries, can shut out the savage, irregular thudding of Turkish Krupp 75 mms., Turkish Mountain Artillery, and machine-guns; and the steady, dogged slogging of British Royal Garrison Artillery motor-howitzers; British Field Artillery eighteen-pounders; and the clat-clat-clatter of Lewis machine-guns, waging bitter battle in the west and south....

At Nakr, where there is to be a delay of several hours, owing to the detrainment of forces from Mespot, they find a composite train of second and third-class compartments full of Turkish War Prisoner guards and their commanders, and horse-trucks, packed with British officers, waiting under steam for a German Staff Deputy Director of War Prisoners,--and a Controller of Transport,--who are going to Aleppo and thence to Smyrna to arrange the conditions of their exchange. The British officers are the recent captives of the stone-prison and the wired enclosure at Shechem. Very sunburnt are they:--very haggard, weary, thirsty, shabby and ill-shaven, and burdened with tattered valises and heterogeneous odds and ends of personal property, but bright of eye, elastic of bearing--full of the indomitable spirit that from the days of Agincourt and long before them--has been the birthright of their warlike race.

Crowding like schoolboys at the half-doors of the padlocked and guarded horse-trucks, they shout cheery greetings, salutations and scraps of information to the rank-and-file, clustered like swarming bees on the grilling stretch of platform beside the iron track....

"Hear the guns, W. and S.? Putting the wind up Djemal, aren't we?"

"Halloa! Mossam of B---- Company, my late Platoon! I've not seen you since I launched you with a note to the O.C. the water-camels at Rashid.... Have you got hold of a new song, or are you still denying relationship with Potsdam?"

"Aren't you Jollife, you chap with the Turkish fez and your eye in a sling? My Orderly in front of Gaza! What price that leg of roast goat with the skin and hair on? I'll bet you'd tuck into it quick enough now--if you got the chance!"

A graver, older officer leans out and calls to the soldiers:

"Can any of you men give us news of Father Forbis? We've been on the look-out for him since we heard we were to be moved."

"The Padre! ... Where's the Padre? ... What are you shaking your heads about? Damn you, you hairy brute! Why do you savage the man? ... What the hell has he done to you? ..."

Thus the ringing British voice, sharp and acrid with indignation. For Barney Mossam, screwing himself up to answer, has been clubbed by a _posta's_ rifle-butt full in the mouth. He spits out blood and broken teeth, and grins pitiably; and for his sake and his comrades', the officers address them no more. Now the Turkish Station-Master and the German R.T.O. who is his master, appear on the platform, as the Deputy Director of War Prisoners and the Controller of Imperial Transport and their escorts arrive on the scene in German Army motor-cars. They board the dirty first-class compartment specially reserved for them. Their orderlies and servants stow away their luggage, the signal falls--and the train--with a non-commissioned officer on the platform of the corridor-car conveying the German officials--armed with binoculars and sharply on the look-out for British bomb-carrying aircraft, jolts over the warped, unevenly-laid metals for El Fuda Junction and Deraa, the first stages of its journey North....

An Arab horseman, stationary beside the track with two mounted companions, controlling his fiery dapple-grey mare with a master-hand upon her jingling bridle--resplendent with the gold and silver jewellery lavished on horse-furniture by the wealthier Bedwân, gravely salutes with his long lance tufted with sable ostrich feathers, as the composite train jolts out of Nakr. And the Deputy Director of War Prisoners and the Controller of Imperial Transport, sitting opposite one another in their dusty first-class compartment, with tall tumblers of Munich beer, (iced, in this land of dust and drouth) on a table fitted between them ... smoking the fat cigars of Hamburg and discussing German Military Supremacy and German World-politics--gravely finger the brims of their sun-helmets in recognition of the salute....

"_Wer ist es!_ Who now, is that Arab? ..." asks the Controller, whose bulging, light-grey eyes are sharp-sighted behind their tinted glasses. "A personage of some consequence, by the gold embroidery on his _burnus_ judging; the gold twist in his head-rope, the gold-hilted sword in his waist-cloth--and the also-with-precious-metal-enriched trappings of his Blauschimmel mare."

"He," the Deputy Director replies, "is one of the lesser Emirs of the Irregular Cavalry of the King of the Hedjaz, who--as the Herr General Controller knows,--secretly under British leadership--upon the City of Mecca seized in June and annexed Akaba in July."

"And is now wrecking trains on the Hedjaz Rail, containing German Ottoman forces, under the very noses of our Allied patrols,--blowing Turkish Railway-bridges with charges of nitro-glycerine sky-high--and in the North and East our rearguards harassing. _Donnerwetter!_ Why is this rogue of an Arab not in fetters? What makes he, hanging about trains containing military officials of the Fatherland?"

"Because, Herr General, the Emir Fadl Anga and his followers are of those who the solid worth and philanthropic aims of Germany recognise, and scorn the windy emptiness and rapacious greed of England, the Great Swashbuckler.... They what we Germans have done for the Turkish Army also see--and are convinced that under similar auspices, Arabia, hand in hand with Egypt and India, might become a powerful and war-capable State. Emir Fadl Anga estimates the number of his party--headed by a nephew of the Mecca Sherif--as very considerable. 'They are many,' he in his Oriental hyperbole, says, 'as the stars of Heaven, or the Desert sands!' Also, information has by him been supplied, which, had the difference between German and Arabic clock-time at our Shechem Headquarters been better understood--might have resulted in a _Handstreich_ very gratifying to Imperial Majesty at Berlin. The officer guilty of this so gross ignorance was brought to a drumhead Court Martial and degraded, the Herr General will be pleased to hear! However, the Emir's intentions were agreed to be excellent, and he has now brought us a basket of carrier-pigeons from his Chief, the nephew of the Sherif--and the Emir is to convey back with him of these birds a similar basket, trained at the Nazareth Headquarters of the Herr General-in-Chief, Liman von Sanders--as soon as the pigeon-master-Sergeant with them arrives.... Also, this is good beer! What does the Herr General say to another bottle?"

"_Ja, ja_. _Mit Vergnügen_. It is hellishly hot! ..."

The Emir Fadl Anga, ingenious purveyor of genuine but post-dated intelligence--salutes gravely, and wheels his dapple-grey about as the composite train bumps out of Nakr. A muscle in his lean, dark cheek jerks, and his thin lips under the Arab beard smile scornfully--as his glance falls on the rank-and-file of the War Prisoners--clustered on the platform beside the iron way....

They are hot, faint and weary under the bite of the sun, amidst this jumble of naked hills, on whose chalk and limestone knees they have driven elaborate systems of trenches for the enemy, under the lash of the loaded hide-whips. But Barney Mossam, with a split top-lip and a scarlet gap where several front teeth are missing, is making a gallant effort to buck the others. In the middle of a spirited rendering of "I HAVEN'T seen the Kaiser for a VERY long time. He's the leader of a German Band, an' he AIN'T no cousin of mine!"--breaks in the fierce interruption of an Arab voice, bitterly abusive:

"You--O you! Sons of _farrâshes_ prostitute concubines!--silence that brother of howling apes!"

Thrusting his lance-butt in the embroidered leathern bucket, Fadl Anga leans low from his saddle--appears to pick up something, no doubt a pebble--rises erect, and hurls the missile savagely into the brown of the crowd of men. It hits Barney, who picks it up, and white teeth flash in the black beards of the other mounted Arabs, and a laugh goes up from the Turkish guards, who are smoking and chatting and eating water-melons, as the supposed emissary of the traitorous nephew of the Sherif of Mecca touches his mare with the sharp edge of the broad copper stirrup--and with a ringing shout of _"Allah ho Akbar!_" gallops down the rocky road towards Shechem, followed by his two companions, and leaving Barney Mossam gaping--with an embroidered Arab purse--heavy with Turkish silver coins, clutched in his hand....

Long before the composite train went jolting out of Nakr the keen grey eyes under the _kuffiyeh_ of Fadl Anga--eyes less miserable now that by day and night sharp danger gives a spice to life, so empty void of Katharine--have assured their owner, Edward Yaill,--that Julian Forbis is not with the officers in the cattle-trucks any more than he is with the men clustered like swarming bees upon the grilling platform, beside the iron track.

V

The weather changes before dawn. Soggy clouds roll inland from the sea, hide the sky of Eastern azure, blot out the shining faces of the stars and invest the pale beauty of the Queen Planet of Night with the flowing sable veil of a recent War Widow. It has come on to rain--a slashing downpour of Palestinian intensity, under which the wadis speedily become shallow cataracts of khaki water--the trenches slashed in the terraced Judæan Hills, and manned by Turks, Germans, or British Crusaders--mere troughs of sandy or chalky mud.

Sangars ramparted with boulders may offer some practical assurance against shell-splinters or bullets, but against rain like this they offer no security. Bivouacs built of stones, and roofed with ground-sheets may in some degree keep out the rain, but they freely admit the cold. A Scotch mist, clammy, freezing and blinding in its damp opaqueness blankets the Hills of Ephraim, and broods over the Maritime Plain, as on the edge of one of the limestone terraces that fringe the robe of Mount Ebal,--a big, brawny Arab sits--nursing a badly-ricked ankle, and swearing in the fruitiest vernacular of his adopted land.

It is lucky for the Arab in the brown camel-hair shirt, striped _abâyi_ and roped white linen head-cloth, that he has no audience but the scorpions and lizards sheltering from the slashing downpour under the grey-white boulders--as he rocks himself and nurses his ricked ankle--and curses his luck. Presently, as the Scotch mist lifts, and the plain is irradiated by the watery moonlight, he sets his teeth for an effort and crawls to where a bundle tied in native cloth, and a long, metal-tipped Arab walking-staff lie on the chalky, puddled plain where they fell when he dropped them from the machine at the beginning of the volplane, and screwed himself as the plain rushed up, to wait the throttling down of the engine--the long, smooth final glide--the flattening out following the pilot's raising of the lever--and the slight jarring impact of the thick-tyred wheels with the ground....

"_Now_ jump!" the sharp, strident voice of the Egyptian called when the expected shock seemed imminent, and John Hazel set his teeth and jumped promptly. Aware even before he crashed to ground that the word had been given too soon. Even as he sprawled on the chalky plain, with all the wind knocked out of his body--the machine just missed landing on top of him. How he rolled out of the way of the thick squat wheels, and the steel framework of the under-carriage of the biplane, a powerful and heavy machine of D.H.6 type--he does not know now....

Sick, faint and shaken, he picked himself up, but not before Essenian, lithe as an acrobat, freed himself from the safety-belt, jumped out, adjusted the controls, and swung the big propeller. As the engine started he leaped back to his seat, looked round at Hazel, shouted "Good-bye!" and opening the throttle, raced over the plain, and rushed up into the air as though pursued by a fusillade of machine-gun bullets.

"Damn and blast the Egyptian beast!" John snarls, and, as the ricked joint rapidly swells to cricket-ball size, swears again, and thinks as he rubs it, "Might have guessed he was out for some treachery or other. Though how could I?--until he signalled to the enemy over Shechem by firing the Verey light, and gave away the whole show by dropping a message-bag! Making me swear before the start by all we Hazels hold most holy, never by word or sign to let out anything I might see him do. Consequently I'm his confederate--tarred with the same brush. And now I know he murdered Captain Usborn! It was his own revolver-bullet I showed him at the Club. If ever I get out of here I stand some chance of getting shot myself for being back at the Front on the quiet when I'm supposed to be on leave in Alex. But anyhow I hope I'll see Essenian Pasha get his dose of British lead before I do. Unless I get a chance to settle him myself. Wouldn't I let the beggar have it! Right in the neck--where Winnie wore the beads. But what a flier! Holy Smoke! what an A1. flier! Unless he's a devil, which I trend to believe!--there's not a man his match."