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
Pappas Effendi was a Roman Catholic chaplain, waiting at Psamatia (a
suburb of Constantinople) to be exchanged as a sick prisoner of war. He
and I were discussing how best I could be admitted to hospital, so as
to remain in the capital. As my injuries had healed, and I could
conjure up no physical disorder, I decided to claim, therefore, that as
a result of the aeroplane crash in Palestine I suffered from nervous
and mental troubles.
For the few British officers at Psamatia the accommodation was fair to
very fair; but for the soldiers of many nationalities in the same camp,
life must have been dreadful. Hundreds of them--Britishers, Indians,
Russians, Roumanians, and Serbs--were herded together into filthy,
crowded outhouses and sheds. They were allowed outside them only twice
a day, when they walked backward and forward, forward and backward
across the yard, by way of exercise. Most of them had done nothing else
for months. Their daily rations were the usual loaf of bread and basin
of unnourishing soup.
For the Britishers and Indians conditions were not so bad, because they
received occasional food parcels from home, and a small monthly
remittance from the Red Cross. The Russians, Roumanians, and Serbs had
neither money nor parcels. Some died of weakness, some sold half their
clothing to buy food, and in consequence died of cold during the bitter
winters. The Tommies were also better off in that they were supplied
with clothes and boots by the Dutch Legation, which administered the
Red Cross funds. Prisoners of other nationalities walked about gaunt
and in tatters. The British gave them whatever food and tobacco could
be spared on parcel-days, but even so they could often be seen
scrambling for a thrown-away stump of cigarette, or for bits of bread
or biscuit. Many seemed almost bestial in their hopeless misery. Only
the Serbs, stoic as always maintained a reserved dignity and scorned to
beg.
Two or three times a week we were allowed into Stamboul, in parties of
two or three, each with a guard. On such days the usual rendezvous for
lunch was a little restaurant near the bridge across the Golden Horn.
To pass over the bridge across the Golden Horn was forbidden; for Pera,
the European quarter, was pro-Ally almost to a man, and a British
prisoner might find many helpers there. Even in the preëminently
Turkish Stamboul one often happened upon sympathizers. There was, for
example, a young Armenian who, whenever he could, talked politics to us
on the little suburban railway between Stamboul and Psamatia, and told
us the latest false report of an imminent peace.
"_Nous sommes tous des Anglophiles acharnés_," he assured F. and me.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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