The senior Turkish doctor failed to understand my simple nature, and turning to his colleague, he said, “I think he is mad.” The colleague duly responded “Peki”; the British officer, who understood Turkish and acted as interpreter told Startin, and that best of men said I had been very queer for some time back. He was perfectly right. We were all as queer as queer could be. The good fellow took the first chance of reassuring me, but it was no good. I used to get people on whom I could rely, privately in corners (bystanders were buttonholed and prayed with, as the _War Cry_ used to print), and ask them as man to man whether I was really mad. They all said no. But it was no good. I thought that, even if not mad, I must at least have very shaken nerves, and continued to think so until, months after, at Alexandria, a kind-hearted pilot took me up in an aeroplane, and stunted me scientifically, loops and double loops, spinning nose dives, and side slips, and other glories of the air. Never having been within half a mile of an aeroplane before, this convinced me that my nerves were still fairly sound; for I came down half drunken with the splendour of it all, ate a hearty meal, and went through it all again the same afternoon. It was like drinking champagne on top of a mountain; and for the first time since being a prisoner I was glad not to have lived a century earlier. But once I was a certified lunatic, and have never been uncertified since. After the medical board came a few dreadful weeks. Every day brought forth a new rumour. We heard that the Germans had refused safe-conduct to the repatriation ship, and it was true. We heard that the medical board at Broussa, which had passed some of the generals there, had been squashed, and that a new board had rejected them; and it was true. We heard that the sickest men of all, who had been sent to Constantinople for exchange some time back--an old R.C. padre with a bad heart, a youngster with nearly every disability a man may have and live, and others--had been rejected. And that was true, too, for they came back to us again. It was a perfectly awful time, and won’t bear writing about. At last, on the 9th of September, we received orders to leave for Smyrna by the evening train.