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
The Maritza restaurant, near Stamboul station, still flourishes; but
Theodore is no longer there. With the money gained by acting as
conspirator-in-chief for British prisoners, he talks of coming to
London and opening a small restaurant of his own. If this happens, he
can count on regular customers from among those who saw him, with his
bent shoulders and blue-glassed spectacles, flicking a secret letter on
to the tablecloth, under cover of a menu-card.
Those of us who schemed, escaped, hoped, feared, wore disguises and
whiskers, assumed illnesses and insanities, suffered, and amused
ourselves generally are dispersed over five continents. Fulton and
Stone are still in Constantinople, but as responsible officials instead
of under-dogs of war. White is a quiet-living manufacturer in
Melbourne. Hill and Jones, the madmen of Yózgad, Haidar Pasha, and
Gumuch Souyou have gone their demobilized ways in sanity and content,
one to Sydney, the other to Glasgow. Paul is in Syria, Colonel Newcombe
in Egypt. Yeats-Brown, ex-Mlle. Josephine Albert, is in London, with an
eyeglass which he kept intact through three years of adventurous
captivity, from the day when he was taken prisoner near Bagdad to the
day when, from the verandah of his hiding-place opposite the deserted
British Embassy in Constantinople, he looked along the Grande Rue de
Pera and learned, from the fluttering Allied flags, that the Turkish
armistice had been signed. Last and least, I am now in civilian
blessedness and America.
Often I have left the satisfying solidity of London, the restful beauty
of a Thames backwater, the comforting hospitality of New York, the
wealth-conscious heartiness of Chicago, to hear the chanted summons to
prayer from the minaret that faced my prison in Damascus, watched the
intrigues that coloured Constantinople during the twilight of the
Turkish Empire, discuss Bolshevism and the price of revolvers with
Vladimir Franzovitch, as he sits on a camp bed in his tiny room at
Odessa.
And Time, the greatest of romantics, has nearly persuaded me to
disregard memory and believe that I enjoyed it all.
THE END
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N.Y.
End of Project Gutenberg's Eastern Nights - and Flights, by Alan Bott
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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