by Max Hennessy
‘Looks tough,’ Kelly observed.
‘More’n you can say for the town,’ Rumbelo said. ‘That only smells strong.’
The old fort, which also contained a few French and Russians, was cold enough for the sentries to snuggle into their boxes out of the wind that came out of the desert of mountain and rock, and food seemed to consist of little else but a wholewheat mush called porridge for breakfast with a lunch of wheat ‘pillao’ and duff. The rooms were comfortless and, to depress them further, there was the uncertainty of their future, because the Young Turk government was unreliable and erratic and might just as easily murder them as treat them with kindness.
Beginning that night, for their entertainment a band consisting of a big drum, a piccolo and three brass instruments serenaded them every evening in the square outside their quarters. It was purgatory because they were far from expert and after a fortnight of it, since the repertoire consisted of only five tunes, they always knew when the brass would be short of wind, the piccolo would play false notes and the big drum would come in late.
Driven almost to distraction, Kelly decided to retaliate. The Russian prisoners could sing magnificently and, led by an officer of the reserve who was said to be the tenor of the Moscow Opera, their haunting songs could always be guaranteed to silence everyone. Pitting themselves against the band, with everyone else joining in to lend weight, the soloist sang the lament then, gathering speed, the tune broke into a gallop, faster and faster until the Russians seemed to be flinging their tortured souls into a furnace where joy, sorrow and despair could be utterly consumed until, after a final frenzied chorus, they became silent. The band had crept away. They never returned.
At the end of the week they were taken to the bath-house in the company of a lot of Turkish soldiers but on return to their quarters, they realised the few belongings they’d collected had been searched and when Kelly objected they were simply moved to another room. They were bundled out, protesting, and razors, insect powder, toothbrushes and private letters were removed. Then the commandant appeared, wearing a uniform surtout of pearl grey and a hat that was a caricature of the one worn by Enver Pasha. His moustache hid a weak, cruel mouth and his expressionless face was pale because, like many wealthy Turks, he never took exercise. A pair of deep-set lustrous eyes brooded on them.
‘Your men are to be put into the dungeons,’ he announced. ‘Turkish officers in Egypt are being ill-treated and I have been ordered by my government to make retaliation.’
‘That’s damn silly,’ Kelly snorted.
‘I have no alternative.’
‘All right,’ Kelly said impulsively. ‘I’ll go in their place.’
Rumbelo tried to protest but Kelly shut him up.
‘You’re better outside,’ he said. ‘I need someone to keep an eye on things.’
The dungeon seemed completely dark but then he saw there was a bed and a small table, and high up in the wall a tiny hole as a window, through which he could feel the cold air. The floor was swimming in water. The day was drawing on and when Rumbelo brought his food it consisted of bread, water and three small potatoes soaked in oil. Hunger overcoming disgust, he started to eat, but the oil was stale and sour and the water was brackish.
‘This is a bloody fine kettle of fish, Rumbelo,’ he observed, trying to smile.
Rumbelo scowled. ‘The lads is narked, sir.’
‘Tell ’em not to do anything to jeopardise their own comfort. They haven’t got so bloody much.’
The mattress was so full of bedbugs Kelly had to sleep with the ends of his trousers tucked inside his socks as they swarmed all over him.
‘I’ve killed as many as I can,’ he told Rumbelo as he brought his food next morning, ‘but they’re remarkably quick movers. I’ve taken to sleeping on the floor.’
‘It’s wet, sir.’
‘Yes, but there aren’t any bedbugs there.’
The following evening a lamp was provided but was soon taken away and not returned and the floor remained wet. For twenty-four hours a day the wind blew through the single small window, making the place like an ice box so that at night he had to shiver in his greatcoat and blanket. He had started on the self-imposed torment with an attitude of nobility and high-minded duty, thinking it a sacrifice he could endure for a little while. It was the sort of thing he felt officers did for their men – at least they did in the Boys’ Own Papers of his youth – and he’d decided it would do him no harm. A fortnight later, with his clothes permanently damp and the diet consisting almost entirely of bread and water and half-cooked potatoes and grain in a tepid broth, he was so bored he’d have welcomed a book of multiplication tables as light reading matter and he was no longer sure that he hadn’t been a damn fool.
The commandant was suitably apologetic. ‘It is nothing personal, you understand. You should consider it in the light of an honour that you are suffering for the sins of your government.’
‘St Kelly Maguire,’ Kelly announced to Rumbelo when he appeared. ‘Martyr for Mr Asquith.’ He felt a little light-headed and faintly hysterical and he put it down to the strain of solitary confinement. ‘How are the chaps?’
‘They’re fine, sir. Thanks to you. But they’re still narked.’
‘Tell ’em not to worry. It can’t last much longer.’
But the next night, he felt awful and went to sleep with dreams of Mr Asquith and Sir Edward Grey weeping over his fate, but proud of the honour he was doing them by representing them in Turkey. Then the dream changed to Enver Pasha and Talaat Bey laughing at him and he woke shivering in a cold sweat.
‘You’re ill,’ Rumbelo said accusingly when he appeared with his food next morning.
‘No. Nothing at all.’
But the following night was a nightmare and when his food came he didn’t even bother to get up.
‘There was a rat in here last night,’ he said, ‘I heard it eating my bread.’
That night, he thought he was dying and the next morning, Rumbelo didn’t argue but picked him up in his strong arms and elbowed his way past the startled sentry and into the corridor.
Leaning against Rumbelo’s big chest, Kelly smiled. ‘I didn’t know you cared, Rumbelo,’ he said.
Dimly he became conscious of Rumbelo arguing at the top of his voice with an officer and then being carried along another corridor to a lighter room where there was glass in the window. There was a bed and sheets and even a doctor in white. Ignoring the Turkish attendants, Rumbelo stripped off his clothes and put him into the bed and dragged the blankets up to his neck.
‘Thanks, Mum,’ Kelly whispered.
There was a blank of several days before he was aware of Rumbelo again, ludicrous in his scraps of Turkish clothing, sitting stern-faced and at attention alongside the bed.
‘What happened, Rumbelo?’ he demanded.
‘You was took ill, sir.’
‘What was it? Typhus?’
‘You ’ad pneumonia.’
‘Did I, by God?’
‘Your mum would never ’ave forgive me if I’d let the bastards get away with it, sir. Nor no more would Biddy. You was always her favourite. I’d never have been able to face her. The doc says you’re all right now, though.’
Rumbelo looked at Kelly. He had never known his parents and could barely remember his brother, and somehow Kelly’s family, linked to him by Biddy, had taken their places in his processes of thought, while Kelly had supplied the need he felt for someone to admire. He was under no delusions that he would get special treatment if he let him down but it didn’t alter the fact that he had a very special place in Rumbelo’s heart.
‘I made bloody sure you were all right,’ he went on. ‘I slept here and dared ’em to chuck me out. They didn’t try.’
‘Good old Nanny! You probably saved my life.’
With g
ood food and warmth, Kelly soon recovered. Within a week he was sitting up and within another week was back in his old quarters. He was never sent back to the cell.
The Turks continued to be a strange mixture of chivalry and brutality, one moment treating them with kindness and consideration, the next buffeting them with the butts of their rifles. They were an odd confection of the ancient east and the modern west, one of the officers, a young man called Bakhash Bey, who seemed to be part of the old Turkish nobility, stopping occasionally to discuss music or the latest shows in London with Kelly, while his servant, a wrinkled Anatolian peasant, went in for the dubious habit of rubbing curds and whey into his hair when he had a headache.
After a while, a few more prisoners arrived – some of them Australians captured at the Dardanelles. They were soured by their ill-fortune, disliked the British and were inclined to take orders from no one. Rumbelo, who had organised a trading concession with a large splay-footed sentry he called Cinderella, brought in news of the treatment they were suffering at the hands of the guards.
‘The buggers kicked one of ’em to death,’ he said. ‘They had swords and knobkerries and were boasting how they smashed our chaps in the trenches.’
Soon afterwards a few Arabs, who’d been caught helping the British, were brought in and, since their room was immediately underneath, once a week, on an evening they came to dread, they could hear the screams of men being tortured.
‘If I ever get out of here,’ Rumbelo growled. ‘I’ll kill one of these bastards. I swear I will.’
The days went by slowly then unexpectedly they were moved away, leaving in carts by road through fields of tall corn and poppies and stopping at a caravanserai en route for the night.
The serai was built round a courtyard and they were all crammed into one dilapidated room. But, as soon as the Turkish sentry had locked the door and vanished, Kelly discovered that the window could be taken out, lock, stock and barrel, and they all climbed through and dived among the drovers making their evening obeisances to Allah, hiding their faces and praying Mussulman-fashion, their heads to the floor.
A boot crunched in the gravel by Kelly’s ear. ‘Çhok fena, Monsieur Maguire,’ an officer’s voice said. ‘When a Mussulman prays, he has his head towards Mecca. You and some of your friends have yours towards Piccadilly Circus.’
They climbed to their feet disgustedly and were marched back to their quarters. The following morning, the carts reappeared and they continued their journey.
Shakan, where they finally stopped, was as comfortless as Afion Kara Hissar, but instead of being in the mountains it was on the plains south of Smyrna. It lay on the edge of myrtle-scented gullies and was permanently swept by cold winds that brought clouds of gritty dust.
‘I’m going to get out of this bloody place somehow, Rumbelo,’ Kelly said. Rotting for the rest of the war under Turkish sentries who would make a goat faint from their smell, and trying to wangle a little comfort from café-jees with faces like mouldy hams didn’t seem to present much of a future.
Rumbelo was more cautious. ‘Wait your chance, sir,’ he advised. ‘Don’t do nothing rash. It’ll come.’
Autumn arrived and then winter and they celebrated Christmas in comfortless fashion with a little illegal alcohol brought in by Rumbelo’s latest trading partner, a fat Jewish interpreter who seemed to be followed permanently by a squad of camp guards on the look-out for attempts to escape. Rumbelo called them Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs and somehow managed to bribe them into supplying a few extras.
That night patriotism was at fever heat. A French voice began to sing The Marsellaise and, on the instant, every man present took up the song, so that the sound spread like a flame, echoing and re-echoing through every corner of the dusty building. Afterwards three Russians sang Bozhe Tsarya Khrani then the few British sailors, clad in scraps of Turkish uniform, sang their own national anthem, faintly ashamed that they knew only the chorus.
Early in January, the Jewish interpreter arrived to announce that the Dardanelles campaign had ended in failure and that the British had evacuated the peninsula, and soon afterwards, to add to their gloom, they learned that the Allied war effort had suffered yet another set-back with a British-Indian army besieged at Kut on the Euphrates, after making a lunatic attempt to reach Baghdad.
‘Who wants Dad’s Bags, anyway?’ Rumbelo growled. ‘It’s full of bloody Turks.’
They had begun to suspect that they were going to sit out the war in their dusty, gritty camp when the British contingent was sent for by the camp commandant. With the Australians the party had now risen to thirty-five.
‘We have to clear the camp,’ the commandant announced. ‘Kut is expected to surrender very soon and then this place will be needed for the enormous number of men who will fall into our hands. You are to be sent to Syria.’
They were all making searches in their minds to decide just where Syria was placed for escape when the commandant spoke again.
‘There are Arab insurgents in Syria,’ he said. ‘And they have acquired explosives and persist in wrecking the line between Damascus and the Suez Canal. You will therefore be split up and placed in the first carriages of trains and the information passed on to the Arabs.’
Kelly protested forcefully, using every argument about Geneva Conventions and the International Red Cross he could think of, but the commandant shook his head. ‘I have my orders,’ he insisted.
‘It’s against all the usages of war!’
The commandant smiled. ‘But it is also a very good idea, is it not?’ he said.
Three days later Kelly’s party were marched into a cold, gritty halt in the middle of the plain and pushed into a carriage. It was French-built with a corridor running down the centre. The guards, led by a young Turk called Mazhar Osman Effendi, were looking very uneasy and didn’t appear to relish the job they’d been given. There was a great deal of confusion as the sailors climbed in one side of the carriage and out of the other for sheer devilment, and then, pushed back, crossed over and descended once more where they’d climbed in. The Turks began to shout and Kelly stared coldly at the Turkish officer.
‘Why is it Orientals always lose their heads when starting a journey?’ he demanded.
As the Turk deposited his luggage on the seat next to Kelly, Rumbelo leaned over. ‘Just in case you’re interested, sir,’ he pointed out, ‘he carries his pistol inside his jacket over his left ’ip.’
How long they were in the train they didn’t know because they lost all count of time. They slept sitting up on the hard seats or stretched in the alleyway between. At every stop they were surrounded by the Turkish soldiers while Osman Effendi disappeared for a meal. Stewed fat mutton and coffee appeared twice a day and once they were allowed to take a bath under the tank which was used for filling the engine.
They reached Aleppo through the mountains of Central Anatolia and at Damascus were joined by another small group of prisoners as hungry and dirty as they were themselves. As the train drew up, they were shoved inside and once more Osman took his seat alongside Kelly, clearly considering himself a martyr to Turkey’s war effort.
The journey was an agonising nightmare of dust, heat and boredom. There was a complete lack of comfort and nothing to see but dead brown hills with occasional clumps of palms shading the low black tents of nomad Arabs. Deraa, Amman and Ma’an passed, ugly stations crowded with Turkish troops, veiled women and Turkish civilians in fezzes and strange old-fashioned Western suits. The stops in between were mere halts round huddles of buildings where the wind swept through like a scorching blast. At Shahm, they were taken off the train and pushed into an empty stone building with a sand floor where cattle had been housed.
The building was loud with the sound of flies, and later they made out the scratching of rats. All night they could hear the clatter and roar of steam from nearby trains and as they bo
arded the northbound train next day, Kelly could see a desperate look in the eyes of the ragged men.
A few Turkish women who climbed into the rear end of their carriage displayed great interest in them, peering round the curtain which screened their end of the compartment. They had all noticed that, while the older Turkish women skulked behind thick veils that completely hid their faces, the younger and prettier women wore thin ones through which their features could be seen and that they were always finding excuses to pull them aside. Apart from the kohl they persisted in putting round their eyes, many of them looked surprisingly delectable after being locked away from female company for so long.
The night was as bad as all the others, hot, dusty and uncomfortable. A hamman-jee offered baths in a van down the train to everyone but the prisoners. Someone passed round a chattee full of water and a few biscuits for breakfast and they were just gnawing at the great doorstops as the train, its whistle screaming, rocked round a bend, throwing out clouds of smoke from its wood fuel.
Rumbelo was staring out of the window, his eyes narrow and calculating. ‘If we could jump out here,’ he pointed out, ‘we could be among them rocks before you could say Jack Robinson. How about it, sir?’
But before Kelly could reply, there was a terrific roar behind them and a spouting column of black dust and smoke a hundred feet high. Out of it came shattering crashes and loud, metallic, clanking noises as steel was torn up, and lumps of iron and plate fell off the train into the scrub alongside the track. They saw the wheel of a wagon thud down into the dust out of the sky and bowl alongside the track like a hoop, then the carriage lurched to a stop and they were all thrown from their seats. Finding himself on top of Osman, Kelly immediately punched him in the throat. The Turk’s eyes widened and his mouth opened to make a gagging sound. Hitting him again in the face, Kelly fished under his jacket for his pistol. As he dragged it free, he saw one of the Turkish soldiers further down the compartment struggling to his feet with his rifle, and promptly shot him in the chest.
