World War, 1914-1918 -- Prisoners and prisons, Turkish
The noise the two hundred of us made in sleeping was remarkable.
Probably our nerves were rather queer. The church was never silent
through the night. Some cried out continually in their slumbers, others
went through a pantomime of eating. Some moaned, others chuckled. One
sleeper gave a hideous laugh at intervals. One could hear it deep down
in his throat, and mark it gradually bubbling to his lips until he grew
vocal like some horrible hyena. But it is small wonder that the
prisoners in the church were restless. The marvel is that they slept at
all. Nearly all of us had lived through trying moments, and had felt the
hand of Providence, whose power makes one tremble. We knew the shivers
of retrospection. One officer, for instance, wounded in an attack on
Gallipoli, had been dragged as a supposed corpse to the Turkish trenches
and there built into the parapet. But he was none the worse now for his
amazing experiences, except that he suffered slightly from deafness, as
his neck had formed the base of a loophole. Then there was a man, left
as dead after an attack, who recovered consciousness but not the use of
his limbs, and lay helpless in the path of the Turkish retreat. For an
hour the passers-by prodded him with bayonets, so that he now has
twenty-seven wounds and a large gap in his body where there should be
solid flesh. From the very brink of the valley of the shadow this boy of
nineteen had returned to life. Again, there was a young Frenchman, who
lay four days and nights between the lines, dying of the twin tortures
of thirst and a stomach wound; but by a miracle he survived, and now at
night, sometimes, when will lost its grip on consciousness, he would
live those ninety-six hours again. Then there were the submarine crews,
out of the jaws of the worst death conceivable. One crew had lived for a
whole day struggling in a net at the bottom of the Dardanelles while the
air became foul and hope waned, and the submarine "sweated," and depth
charges exploded so close to them that on one occasion the shock knocked
a teapot off a table! Hemmed in and helpless, the clammy agony of that
suspense might well haunt their sleeping hours.
But on the whole our psychology was normal. Only, at nights, if one lay
awake, did one realise the stress and stark horror through which the
sleepers had lived. Out of four hundred officers "missing" at the
Dardanelles, only some forty were surviving at Afion-kara-hissar. This
fact speaks for itself.
By day we wandered about, so far as the congestion permitted, making
friends and exchanging experiences. To us, lately from Mesopotamia, the
then unknown story of Gallipoli stirred our blood as it will stir the
blood of later men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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