Eastern Nights - and Flights: A Record of Oriental Adventure.Bott, Alan
History
Eastern Nights - and Flights: A Record of Oriental Adventure.
Bott, Alan
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, English; World War, 1914-1918 -- Prisoners and prisons, Turkish
Others of the Bolsheviki were idealists of a more exterminative type.
Once, when White was playing cards with some firemen in the engine
room, the talk swung to the Russian Revolution. A lean man, who until
then had been too busy drinking to speak, began to describe the mutiny
in the Baltic Fleet, of which he had been a sailor. In his intensity he
seemed to live again through the horrors of it, as with gloating
gesture he described how unpopular officers had been thrown into the
sea with weights tied to their feet.
"That was bad, very bad," protested White in his halting Russian. "If
you are in power and somebody has done wrong, he should be given a fair
trial and, if convicted, put in prison. But to kill men merely because
you dislike them is very wrong."
"Well said!" commented Bolshevik Bill the Greaser.
"No; well meant if you like," amended the lean fireman, as he patted
White on the back; "but the Meester does not understand us. We would
never do such a thing to English officers. We had them as instructors
and found them true friends of their men. Our officers were very
different. They hit us and ignored us and treated us like animals. We
shall never be permanently free until they are all dead. We must
destroy their class. Russia----"
His voice had been growing louder and more raucous. Suddenly it
softened as he turned to White and said: "Meester, you know your
business and we know ours. Have a fig." And the game of cards
continued.
Yet, among the whole shipload of rogues, the only man who victimized us
was Titoff, the chief engineer. When we first came aboard he demanded
twelve dollars a day for food which, being stolen from the ship's
supplies, cost him nothing. At the instigation of the second and third
engineers we reduced the payment to six dollars a day. He blustered,
but gave way and tried to make up the difference by cheating us over
tobacco, cigarettes, newspapers, and other articles bought on shore. He
paid twenty-five dollars for a revolver, and tried to sell it to us for
thirty-five, as being the cost price.
We had left at Psamatia a store of clothes and tinned food, which was
to have been smuggled on board by the Russian aviator Vladimir
Wilkowsky. As the days passed and nothing arrived we suspected
Wilkowsky of having either failed or fooled us. Then, at a party in
Titoff's cabin one evening, I saw inside a cupboard some tins of
biscuits and cocoa, of the kinds that were sent to aviator prisoners in
Turkey by the British Flying Services Fund. Titoff could not--and in
any case certainly would not--have bought them in Constantinople; for
English cocoa and biscuits, if obtainable at all in the shops of Pera,
fetched extortionate prices.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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