World War, 1914-1918 -- Prisoners and prisons, Turkish
The only person, besides Budd, who suffered actual penalty from this
raid, so far as I remember, was the celebrated French cook, late of the
Jockey Club. He had kept a diary, and in it had stupidly written the use
to which he thought the Turkish flag should be put by a French sailor.
It might be thought, after some of our treatment, that this was merely
tit-for-tat, six of one and half a dozen of the other. As a fact, it was
twelve dozen of one and very gross of the other. So the French cook went
to gaol, and we saw him in Afion no more.
In this gallery of portraits I think Porter is more than worthy of
mention. He was an orderly in No. 4 house, a slight, fair-haired young
fellow from the Isle of Wight. Before the war he had been a barber, and
he used to cut our hair and trim our beards: for many of us grew beards.
But his claim to fame was that he was the most wounded man in Afion. In
an attack on Gallipoli he had been shot through the body, and while
lying on the ground had been terribly wounded again by shrapnel. To
finish him off the Turks had cut his head open with a shovel, and
bayoneted him many times. He had in all twenty-one wounds. But he
resolutely refused to die, and when last I saw him was as merry as a
cricket, and able to play quite a good game of football. I sometimes
wonder how many wound-stripes he is entitled to, and whether he is
trying to grow fat enough to wear them all. He told me once that what he
disliked most was being stabbed in the stomach; and he certainly is an
authority to be respected.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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