Eastern Nights - and Flights Part 6

"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."

CHAPTER IV

DAMASCUS--AND THE SECOND FAILURE

Nazareth and Damascus are wonderful names; and apart from historical values each, with the country around it, stands for exceptional beauty.

A journey from Nazareth to Damascus, therefore, "gives of the most finest pleasure"; as the Greek guard of a Turkish train a.s.sured us in his "most finest" English. But if you wish to see Syria at its best, travel otherwise than as a prisoner, sitting in a dirty cattle-truck and surrounded by Turkish guards, whose natural odour gives by no means of the most finest pleasure.

Such were the conditions under which we--four Australian officers and myself--came to Damascus. All the way from Nazareth we were guarded closely as a secret meeting of the Peace Conference. Only three weeks earlier Major Evans had escaped from Afuleh and walked forty miles before he was recaptured; so that in our case more than ordinary precautions were taken.

We drove down the steep hill from Nazareth in three rickety carts. Each of the first two contained a pair of prisoners and a pair of guards, with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets; but H., whose giant height and strength the Turks respected, had a cart and two guards all to himself.

At Afuleh we sat until nightfall in a mud hut, with the local population gazing and chattering through the open door, as if we had been strange animals.

We welcomed the change to a covered cattle-truck on the railway, away from prying Turks and Arabs. In this truck, with coats serving as pillows, we lay on the filthy floor throughout the night, while the train jolted eastward over the badly kept track. Whenever I looked at the half-open shutter I met the alert eyes of a guard, whose business it was to prevent us from jumping into the darkness.

The next day we pa.s.sed in playing poker, in looking at the wild hills of Samaria, and, by juggling with the few French words he could understand, in trying to tell the Arab officer in charge of us how contented were the Arab population in those parts of Palestine, Arabia, and Mesopotamia occupied by the British.

This man, like most of the Syrian Arabs, showed himself well-disposed to prisoners. He presented us with bread and hard-boiled eggs, bought with his own money, and refused to take payment. As always, no food had been provided by the military authorities.

So we jogged on, with many a halt, across the Jordan and round and up the winding tracks in the hill country beyond it. We stopped for an hour at Deraa, where a Turkish doctor with pleasant manners and a dirty hypodermic needle visited the truck. Having a.s.sured us that cholera was very prevalent in the British army, he proceeded to inoculate us, so that we might have no chance of taking the disease to Damascus. As a matter of fact, the British army in Palestine was entirely free from cholera, while Damascus, as we afterward learned, was full of it.

Fortunately, nothing worse than sore chests resulted from the use of his rusty, unsterilized needle.

Then, just before sunset, we rounded a bend at the bottom of a hill and came upon Damascus; and forgetful of captivity and cattle-trucks and guards and their attendant smells, I held my breath for the beauty of it. Away to the north stretched a belt of grainland vivid in browns and greens. Beyond was a wooded area reaching to the lower slopes of the mountain range that extends from Lebanon to Damascus. Down the lower slopes of one of the most easterly mountains flow the sources of Pharpar and Abana, the twin rivers. The streams twist downward until they lose themselves in a detached part of the old town, perched several hundred feet above the rest of the city.

Farther below is Damascus itself--a maze of flat buildings, squat mosques, and minaret spires, all in gray-white, as if sprinkled with the powder of time, and now smudged with faint rose by the sinking sunlight. Eastward and southeastward stretches the great desert that leads to the sites of Babylon and Nineveh, to Bagdad, to Persia, to the beginnings of human history.

In Damascus, as I knew from intelligence officers of the Palestine army, were many friends of the British. Nearly all the population, in fact, were secretly anti-Turk and anti-German. Could we make use of these sentiments in planning an escape? What experiences and adventures awaited us in this oldest standing city of the world, that was famous in the days of Abraham, very famous in the days of Haroun-al-Raschid, and still famous in the days of Woodrow Wilson?

The first few of these experiences were by no means pleasant.

Surrounded by the gleaming bayonets and eyes of the guards, who were clearly anxious lest we should disappear in the fading light, we were hustled from the railway to the police station, and locked in a tiny room for four hours.

Finally, just before midnight, the police led us to Baranki Barracks, a large building used as a prison for military criminals. Tired, hungry, and disconsolate, we fell asleep on the bare bedsteads of the room a.s.signed to us.

But not for long. It must have been about two hours later when I awoke, tingling all over and vaguely uncomfortable. To my surprise I saw that C. was standing by his bed, and, by the light of my candle, was stabbing at it. M. sat up suddenly, scratched himself, and swore softly in a series of magnificent Australian oaths. R., who had not undressed, still slumbered.

_Ouch!_ More sharp stingings came from my legs and arms. Bugs, and swarms of them!

In the prison at Nazareth I had lived with scores of the little red brutes so common in the Near East; but here there were hundreds. They were crawling down the wall, falling on the floor, and biting every bit of flesh left exposed. I lit a candle and found dozens on my bed.

Lying on the floor having proved to be as impossible as lying on the bed, I went to the window and looked into the night, thinking of the one matter that interested me in those days--escape. Across the road was a large camp bordered on the left by a meadow and on the right by one of the seven streams of Damascus. Straight ahead, weirdly colossal in the moonlight, were two great mountains. Beyond them, I knew, the great desert stretched through hundreds of miles to Mesopotamia. I was aware just how far the British Mesopotamian army had arrived on the way from Bagdad to Mosul; but even if we were lucky enough to find a guide who could smuggle us into an eastward-moving caravan it would be almost impossible to make a detour around the Turkish army; and in any case we should be dependent on the help of Kurds or Mesopotamian Arabs, who are much less estimable than the Arabs of Syria and Arabia. No, that plan was not feasible.

I considered the suggestion of C.--that we should make our way to the coast, hiding in the daytime and walking only at nights, and then, arrived at Acre or Tyre, or some such seaport, commandeer a sailing-boat and make for Cyprus or Jaffa. For this plan, also, the difficulties would be many and serious. Such few boats as were still serviceable would be well guarded. Even if we managed to steal one of them, it would have to be towed into deep water by swimmers, which was scarcely practicable in the darkness. In any case, a walk to the coast from Damascus must cover many nights. A guide would be essential, as otherwise we could buy no bread on the journey, since none of us spoke Arabic. And a guide would cost a deal of money, of which we had little.

My scheme of getting into touch with the secret caravans, by means of which Arabs and Armenians were slipping southward from Damascus to Akaba, still seemed the best. But here, again, money would be needed, besides a reliable intermediary. Money we might obtain by smuggling a letter to the Spanish consul, who had taken charge of British interests in Damascus. As for an intermediary, we should have to trust the G.o.ds to give us one from among the guards.

Whatever we did would have to be done quickly, for we should not be long in Damascus. By the time I had reached this conclusion I was tired enough to fall asleep despite the bugs.

The morning toilet included a ceremony that every prisoner in Turkey found it necessary to perform after travelling on the railway--a careful hunt for lice in our clothes. The search was productive, and led to talk of the plague of typhus which was being spread all over Turkey by these vermin.

For the rest of the morning nothing happened, except a short visit from the commandant. By now, having eaten nothing for twenty-four hours, we were irritable with hunger. I made known this fact to the commandant, who promised that we should feed at midday.

With him came a little interpreter, with bent shoulders, a greasy face, and an absurdly long nose. Here, I thought, is a possible intermediary; and I asked him to return later. During the afternoon he entered softly and announced:

"I am George, interpreter of English. I am friend of English, honest to G.o.d."

George was a native of Beyrout, part Syrian, part Greek, part Jew, and wholly scoundrel. Were I writing fiction I should call him a Syro-Phoenician, which is an impressive term but means nothing; but as George really happened, I can only describe him as a Levantine mongrel.

Some time or other in his chequered life he spent three months in America, where he learned to say "Honest to G.o.d" quite well, and to speak a queer jargon of Anglo-American quite badly. By reason of this accomplishment he became interpreter of English at Baranki Barracks.

However, since he spoke French much better than he tried to speak English, conversation with him was possible. He had the Levantine habit of using "_mon cher_" in every alternate sentence when speaking French; and this he applied to his English by saying "my dear" on the least provocation.

M., who could not speak French, asked him to smuggle a letter to the Spanish consul.

"My dear," he replied, "I take it with lots of happiness. My officer shall not know the letter, I guess."

The Spanish consul replied by return, and next day we were each presented with twenty Turkish pounds--about sixty dollars at the then rate of exchange. This rather annoyed the Turkish commandant, who had himself given us seven Turkish pounds each, being our first month's pay as captive officers.

With four hundred dollars between us we were now in a much better position to prepare a scheme of escape. I decided to plumb the depths of George's "I am a friend of English, honest to G.o.d." We should have to take him with us, if possible, for if we left him behind he would be suspected and the Turks might frighten him into betraying us.

An opportunity came that same evening. George had been telling of the starvation in Damascus, of the deaths from dest.i.tution all over Syria, of the hangings without trial, of the general discontent, of the terrible conditions of his own imprisonment for sixty days, because he had been suspected of spying for the King of the Hedjaz.