Phokea was a beautiful little Greek town when war broke out; it has vineyards and olive groves behind it, and it looks out on the bluest of bays. It had once been inhabited by Greek subjects of the Turks, but now it lay bare and empty, with hollow windows staring at the sea. There was an old Englishman on board, a civilian who had been many years in Smyrna, and him I asked why it lay thus desolate. “When the Turks declared a Jihad,” he said, “a holy war, soldiers and a rabble came to Phokea, and crucified the Greek men upon olive trees; the women they raped and then cut their hands and feet off. What happened to the children I do not know.” There our last sun set on Turkey, and we steamed away to the South. FOOTNOTES: [1] The complete figures, according to information received up to 25th October:-- BRITISH PRISONERS OF WAR IN TURKEY. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- |Believed |Repatriated,| | | Still |captured.|Escaped, or | Died. |Untraced.|prisoners. | | Released. | | | ------------------+---------+------------+-------+---------+---------- Officers-- | | | | | British | 472 | 43 | 14 | None | 415 Indian | 231 | 7 | 7 | None | 217 |---------+------------+-------+---------+---------- Total officers | 703 | 50 | 21 | None | 632 | | | | | Other ranks-- | | | | | British | 4,932 | 279 | 1,840 | 449 | 2,364 Indian | 10,948 | 1,177 | 1,429 | 1,773 | 6,569 |---------+------------+-------+---------+---------- Total other ranks | 15,880 | 1,456 | 3,269 | 2,222 | 8,933 | | | | | Total all ranks | 16,583 | 1,506 | 3,290 | 2,222 | 9,565 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [2] A fellow prisoner, who was kind enough to read through the MS. of this book for me, contributes the following note:-- “To do our difficulties justice I think you ought to say that besides the loss of value of paper against gold, the rise of prices reduced the purchasing power of the £Tq to _one-twentieth_ of what it was in the summer of 1915. This is strictly true. I have a list of the prices of ordinary commodities up to Spring, 1918. Actually the purchasing value of £20 from England was between twenty and twenty-four shillings in the winter 1917-18 as compared to the early Autumn, 1915.”--A.D.P. _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_ POEMS IN CAPTIVITY Crown 8vo. +7s. 6d.+ net.