It was Jean Willi who first gave me an outline of Turkey's spiritual history during the war. The sudden savage onslaught of the Turks against their Christian subjects; the horrible character of the Armenian massacres; the murder of prominent Syrians, the deportation of Ottoman Greeks; the gradual starvation of the rotten old empire, whereby scores of thousands died of hunger, while the Germans were sending trainload after trainload of foodstuffs from the country; the ruthless execution of all who stood in the way of Enver and Talaat; the amazing bribery and speculation; the hundreds of thousands of deserters, and the scores of thousands of brigands--all this was described in such vivid detail by Jean Willi that I scarcely believed he could be relating fact. Two-thirds of the population, he said, were pro-Entente--not only the Christians and Arabs, but the very Turks themselves--although none dared oppose the violence of the Young Turk party. As for himself, although he had never been to England, this Jew without a country claimed to have a frantic love of the English which he could not explain, like the love of a man for a mistress whom he very greatly respects--his own words. One day there arrived four Australian aviators who had been captured in the Jordan Valley. R., the pilot of a Bristol Fighter, had landed behind the Turkish lines after his petrol tank was hit. H. had tried very pluckily to pick him up. H. made a splendid landing and--with R. and R.'s observer seated on the lower planes, one on each side of the pilot's cockpit, attempted to take his two-seater into the air with a load of four men. He might well have succeeded if R. had not jerked his body backward, to avoid a hot blast from the exhaust outlet; with the result that the equilibrium was upset, and the craft swung round and hit a pile of stones. The four officers burned their machines before they were captured. The Australians and I were taken for interrogation to German Headquarters. We had agreed that our best plan would be to claim complete ignorance of everything, and the invariable answer of C., the first to enter the private office of the intelligence officer--one Leutnant Santel--was "I don't know." When H., the second on the list, adopted the same tactics, Santel tried bluff. "_So!_" he said, softly, as if speaking to himself. "How happy am I that it is I and not another who makes the interrogation. Most people would order bad treatment for prisoners who refuse a correct reply. Even I may have to do this. If the Pasha says to me: 'What have you learned from these prisoners?' and I reply: 'They say they know nothing,' he will be very angry and order severe measures." "_Uh-huh_"--from H. "Ah, sorry, I forgot you, my friend," said Santel with a start.... "Your aeroplanes are useful in communicating with the Bedouins east of the Jordan, are they not?" "I don't know." "But I do know." "Why ask me then?"--the reply obvious.