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
No statement was too far-fetched to be believed in the bazaars and
cafés. When the British aeroplanes renewed their bomb-raids on
Constantinople, in the autumn of 1918, Yeats-Brown dropped hints that
the attacks were not the work of the British, but were a display of
German frightfulness, to show what would happen if Turkey's loyalty to
Germany wavered. After an interval of weeks this beautiful lie was
whispered back to him by a Greek, with well-imagined circumstances and
details to make it the more plausible.
Captain Yeats-Brown and Captain Sir Robert Paul lived through the most
extravagant adventures before the Turkish armistice found them still in
disguised liberty. They first escaped with the help of Miss Whittaker,
"the Edith Cavell of Constantinople." It was owing to her that, already
before leaving the prison at Psamatia, they were well supplied with
money and could look forward to a hiding-place. As prisoners, they had
kept in touch with her by means of letters, five-minute meetings
outside the British Church, and short conversations in the park, under
the complacent eyes of a bribed guard.
One night they slipped through the window of their room in the
prison-house, and having climbed along a narrow ledge, let themselves
into the street with a rope. Wearing fezzes and with their faces
stained brown, they walked to Theodore's house. Afterward they moved to
the room prepared for them in Pera.
A few days later Paul, dressed as an Arab, left Constantinople with two
Greeks. The party of three crossed the Sea of Marmora in a
sailing-boat, landed on the northern coast, and began tramping toward
the Gulf of Enos, where a boat awaited them.
Unfortunately for Paul the description of him, which the Ministry of
War circulated, mentioned that he had a prominent stoop. A stranger
with this peculiarity was found asleep in the church of a Greek
village; and by arresting him the local gendarme earned (but probably
never received) the reward offered for the British officer's capture.
Paul was brought back to the capital and dungeoned in the Ministry of
War Prison.
Yeats-Brown, meanwhile, had been stalking about the streets of
Constantinople as Mlle. Josephine Albert, in female clothes lent by
Miss Whittaker. He was now at a loose end, for Paul and the Greeks were
to have been the advance guard of a larger party, including Yeats-Brown
and several civilians who wished to leave Turkey.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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