Four-Fifty Miles to FreedomJohnston, Maurice Andrew Brackenreed
History
Four-Fifty Miles to Freedom
Johnston, Maurice Andrew Brackenreed
Prisoner-of-war escapes; World War, 1914-1918 -- Prisoners and prisons, Turkish
Our sensations on finding ourselves once more between sheets in a
spring-bed are more easily imagined than described. Late next morning,
after a bathe in the sea and when many snapshots of the party had been
taken, we were driven off in a motor-lorry, by Captain G---- of the
A.S.C., to Famagusta, the port of Cyprus on the eastern coast. It was
an eighty-mile drive, and what with stopping at Nikosia for lunch and
at Larnaka for tea, we did not reach Famagusta and the mess of the
Royal Scots, who had kindly offered us a home, till 9 P.M.
All the recollections of our four-days' stay in Cyprus are of the
pleasantest description, as were those also of our voyage to Egypt in
two French trawlers. As much cannot be said of the fortnight we spent
in Port Saïd, where we passed the first night sleeping on the sand
in a transit camp and most of the rest in hospital: nor of our ten
days in a troop-train crossing Italy and France. During this time we
learnt--what perhaps we needed to be taught--that we were after all the
least important people in the world. But to tell of these adventures
in detail would be to fill another book. Suffice it to say that we
were sustained by a few comic episodes. On one occasion, in Italy,
we spent five minutes talking Italian, based on slender memories of
school-day Latin, to men in another troop-train, before we discovered
that they were Frenchmen. On another, in France, we remember opening
a conversation in French with our engine-driver, who proved to be an
American.
At length, on the 16th October 1918, five of our party reached England
together, preceded by Cochrane, who had managed to arrange for a seat
in a "Rapide" across Europe, and followed by the Old Man and Nobby, who
had had to remain in hospital in Egypt for another fortnight.
Soon after arrival in England, each of us had the very great honour of
being individually received by His Majesty the King. His kindly welcome
and sympathetic interest in what we had gone through will ever remain a
most happy recollection.
Finally, we arranged a dinner for all our party, the date fixed being
11th November. This, as it turned out, was Armistice Night, and with
that night of happy memories and a glimpse of the eight companions once
again united, we will draw the tale of our adventures to a close.
FOOTNOTE:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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