Part 36

"The Bey!" The thick whisper reaches the priest and the woman, flung over the shoulder of the Turk as he stands at attention in the doorway: "Hamid Bey Mutasarrif comes, bringing a Mushir of the Almanis to inspect the prisoners...." He adds, under his hurried breath: "Allah and the Prophet of Allah be with me, Hasan Ali--and deliver me from smitings this unpropitious day!"

The guard have turned out. They raggedly present arms, and Hasan Ali, and such others of his fellows as are on duty in the courtyard--or posted at the portals of the mud Barrack-buildings--shoulder their Sniders or more modern Remingtons with the smartness engendered of fear; as a squat, sandy officer of Turkish gendarmerie--topped with the ugly khaki compromise between the turban and the helmet--patented by Envey Bey in 1912--and adorned as to the epaulettes with the two stars, and as to the cuffs with the four longitudinal gold lace bands and the three diagonal gold bars of a Turkish Lieutenant General--walks with a tall, brick-faced--very much decorated German Staff officer, in amongst the stenches of the crowded prison-yard.

Several persons succeed these. Two German Staff officers of inferior rank to the first, evidently his _aide_, and a secretary, come swaggering and chatting behind their Chief. A bearded Turkish Surgeon Major, fat and apoplectic, in black gauze spectacles, waddles after--with a nondescript Greek person, evidently of the interpreter-class. And a half-company of Turkish mounted gendarmerie troop after, rather stragglingly. The big bushy-bearded, red-fezzed men, uniformed in old-time dark blue Hussar tunics, with orange and black facings, braided pantaloons and long shiny thigh-boots, are all well-armed with Winchester repeating-rifles, and carry big German Service revolvers in holsters at their belts.

There is a dull shuffling sound, mingled with thuds and stifled swearing, as the Turkish guards, with assiduous kicks, and blows of the rifle-butt, assist sitting or lying War prisoners to assume a perpendicular position; and herd their charges into rank right and left, leaving a central avenue down which the Bey and the visitors may pass. Holding his breath in an agony of suspense as he peers into the crowded courtyard over the broad shoulder of the soldier blocking the passage, the priest scans the faces that he knows for signs of coming storm. As the squat, pale-eyed, bow-legged Asiatic, uniformed in greenish khaki-drill, wearing with clownish awkwardness the wide-thighed riding-breeches, the belts, pouches, and gauntlets of russet leather, and the polished riding boots with silver spurs, that set off the tall soldierly figures of the Germans, steps with them across the threshold of the prison courtyard it seems to every prisoner that the very sunshine fails of its warmth, and the faint hot breeze blows cold....

The Bey looks about him with a pale oblique slyness, his cigarette elaborately poised between his thick gloved fingers, and says, speaking in Turkish, (which language the priest, held for months in durance vile at Constantinople and at Smyrna, has relieved the tedium of prison-life by studying, and fairly understands):

"Good-morning, my children!"

"Good-morning, O Bey! ... May Allah favour your Excellency," lustily chorus the _postas_. But at the sound of the hated voice the faces of the prisoners have darkened threateningly, and the silence that falls on the tainted enclosure is heavy as a pall.

"Your Excellency wished to inspect the British men before seeing the British officers. These guests of our Empire"--Hamid's leering smile and the glitter in his pale flat eyes show the Bey's enjoyment of his own sarcasm, and the stiff faces of the German general and his _aides-de-camp_ and secretary exhibit a faint grin as he continues: "--these guests of our Empire are not at work to-day.... It is a holiday for them. They sit and chat and eat fruit," (his sharp glance has lighted on the scattered nutshells and orange-peel), "and smoke tobacco about the well in their courtyard. Your Excellency sees!--a capital well! ... Praise be to Allah for the blessing of pure water! Show the well to his Excellency.... Make room, O you there! ..."

A gap being made in the ragged ranks by _postas_ with the rifle-butt, the brick-faced German general stalks to the low parapet of the sky-reflecting eye of clear water, and pronounces it in Turkish of the Prussian brand, to be an exceedingly good well. The Bey, pretending to look at it too, enriches the water with his chewed cigarette-end; and spits in it slyly behind the back of the German general--to the chuckling delight of his immediate following--and the more controlled amusement of the German _aide-de-camp_ and secretary. As for the Greek interpreter and the fat be-goggled Surgeon Major, whose pharmacopæia is limited to Epsom Salts, pills of a rending nature, sulphur and iodine; who knows no disinfectant beyond chloride of lime, and never heard of sterilisation; whose surgical equipment is limited to a saw or two, some needles, a scalpel--all beyond words unclean!--lint made by Turkish ladies in secluded harems; sticking-plaster of the most adhesive kind, splints and First Aid bandages, these two parasites fairly wallow in enjoyment.

The dirty bit of buffoonery is such a success that Hamid Bey is about to repeat it, when a heavy blow upon some dense, non-reverberating surface arrests him in the act. He starts, and looks round for the offender. So do the German officers, though their hard eyes are expressionless, and their sunburned faces as blank as brown tiles. So do the parasites, so do the military police of the Bey's escort, and the _postas_ of the guard. Then as the dull, pounding blow is repeated on the sill of a second-floor window of the mud wing facing the entrance-gates of the courtyard, every eye rolls up to there expectantly and men hold their breath.

Crash! ... The weapon falls again.... It is the leg of a wooden stool, gripped in a fist that is strong and hairy ... and a face--unmistakably a madman's now!--appears at the window above. And in the hush that falls upon the parched courtyard, a crazy voice begins to sing--the leg of the stool coming down with a terrific crash at the end of every line:

"Say, ye Deid that hae gane before us! (Mithers too, that conceived an' bore us, Prayin' at hame an' greetin' for us--) _What for the Hound wi' the jaws that tore us?-- What for the Turkish Hound?_

What for the beast that killed Tom Warren? Nichols, Greenbough, Smith and Beeching, Austin, Frenchard, Lark and Mansur-- _Hear ye no their voices answer-- 'Hell to the Turkish Hound!'_"

The storm has broken with a vengeance. But even the white-faced priest, peering over the unsteady shoulder of the scared Turkish soldier, is carried away by the tingling excitement of the thing. Knowing that the gates of Terror are burst open--and that Vengeance shall issue forth....

Upon the wild, discoloured face with the glaring eyes, all other eyes are glued expectantly, as through the rictus of a dreadful laugh that is stamped upon it by Insanity, it sings to the wild droning tune--to the accompaniment of the wooden club upon the crumbling window-sill--its rhymeless hymn of hate. Faces nearly as ghastly as the singer's appear at and crowd the windows of the Barracks. And in time to the crazy chant; the crazy buildings, the mud-walled and paved courtyard begin to shake with the measured stamping of the prisoners naked feet:

"What for the Man that made of Arthur, Thomas, Chauncey, Dee, O'Brien; Brown and Somers, Davys, Brenon, Custance, Trevor, Ricketts, Blanchard; Foltringham, Bellayse and Bidmead; Jones and Kirby, Evans, Foljambe-- _Meat for a Turkish Hound?_"

The place is thick with dust now; men's lungs are choked and oppressed by it.... They stamp--nothing can stop them stamping in time to the blows of the stool-leg on the window-sill of the room where lies the shapeless body of the comrade whom the _asâyisi_ have beaten into pulp.

"What for the deil that killed Ted Ullathorne--"

* * * * * * *

The wild song breaks off here, as the madman ducks below the level of the window-sill--and a cry of rage goes up from a hundred throats as he rises again, with the disfigured body in his arms, its head lolling helplessly beneath his own.... Then--a German Army revolver cracks--and with blood pouring over the face that is still laughing dreadfully, Govan, with his awful burden, reels back into the room....

III

The voice of a German officer breaks in, giving a sharp order in Prussian-flavoured Turkish. There is a rush of _zabtiehs_ and _postas_ to the door of the building where the madman is.... As they jostle in the filthy entry, the boots of those who have got in first, thunder on its crazy stairs; and savage shouts and the tumult of a desperate struggle break out in the sordid room where Govan--bleeding from a bullet-wound in the head--but equal to a dozen men in the strength of his insanity--stands over the disfigured corpse laid out upon a dirty sack.

In the mud courtyard below, as Hamid Bey, with the German officers; his following and escort of police are retreating discreetly backwards to the vantage of the courtyard gate--a prisoner with a savage curse, dashes a handful of muddy orange-peel full in the livid face of Hamid. The Bey, smothered with filth and choking with rage, jerks his revolver from its holster, and promptly scatters the offender's brains.

Were the Bey unaccompanied, a volley from the Winchesters of his escort would silence for all time the rioters about him. But the German commander has previously informed him that on the morrow the War prisoners under his jurisdiction at Shechem will be deported for purposes of exchange....

Wild shouts, and British cheers break out.... Old War-slogans are heard again.... There is a furious rush of naked feet, but the Military Police and the _postas_ of the guard beat back the unarmed mutineers with rifle-butts, and drive them back on either side, clubbing and kicking them. But less because of this the tumult is quelled than because a tall, ragged man with long tawny hair and beard has rushed from the archway of one of the Barrack buildings; and bringing, in this desperate hour, the authority of the priest to reinforce the influence of the friend and helper, exhorts, implores, commands the maddened prisoners to submit to the brutal authority they have no power to resist.

They are not cowed, but they obey. The clenched hands drop whatever missiles they have chanced to seize on,--their owners, in a storm of kicks, curses and blows with the rifle-butt, are herded back into the Barracks by their guards.

Barney, the jester, for once at a loss for a gag, huddles on a sack half-filled with straw on one of the wooden platforms,--six feet wide and two above the floor--a couple of which, running parallel, longitudinally divide each room. Divided into sections by upright planks, each section of platform accommodates or discommodes six War Prisoners. Perhaps Barney's room, and others on the upper floors are a thought less vile in flavour than these on the lower storeys. He smokes his last remaining fag, then whistles a dreary ragtime, staring through the barred window in front of him at the unbarred window of a room that is over the courtyard gate....

It is the window of the Commandant's office: the bare, seldom-used room where, on Sundays, as a signal favour,--the priest has been allowed to celebrate Mass and hold a Bible-class, and on rare occasions an impromptu smoking-concert has been given. It is full of Turkish _postas_ in khaki, and the braided blue of the Osmanli gendarmerie. It is at first not possible to get a glimpse of what is going on inside, but in obedience to some order the window is cleared of the bodies blocking it.... Now it can be made out that the officers are Hamid Bey and the German general, seated with the secretary and _aide_ at a table, before which--with two troopers of Mounted Police behind him, stands a tall, pale, emaciated man with long red-gold hair and beard.

The man seems to be answering a series of interrogations. He asserts, he denies emphatically, he pleads, but he does not cringe. Driven to silent frenzy by the difficulty of seeing, and the doubtfulness of the trend of the events that are taking place in the room over the gateway, Barney looks at his neighbour, the Sergeant of the R.F.C.

"Sergeant!"

"Eh?"

The Flight Sergeant's broad hands are sheltering his eyes as he lies on his stomach on the platform. The little folding binoculars that magnify by 20 are solving for their owner the problem of the Commandant's Room.

"D'yer pipe wot's goin' on? In the office over the gytew'y? Where 'Amid, blarst 'im! an' the two German orficers is settin' at the table and the Father standin' up in front? ..."

"Ay. They're playin' a scene out o' the Old Testament!" says the Flight Sergeant, with a sarcastic twitch of a muscle in his thin cheek.

"Wod'jer call it? ..." Barney breathes hard....

"The Scapegoat!"

"The 'ow much? ..."

"The Scapegoat. The beast the ancient Jews burdened with the sins of the congregation--and drove into the Wilderness every year. Only--the Padre's the Scapegoat--in this case."

"'Oo? ... Not Father Forbis?"

"Father Forbis right enough! 'Left--turn. Quick--march. Party--shon!'" mimics the Sergeant, as the high fair head and stern aquiline profile of the priest, with a _zabtieh's_ fezzed head before, and another behind him,--passes across the field of vision limited by the frame of the window, and by the opening of a door an angle of light is thrown on the whitewashed office wall. "Now the _sira-châwush_ is ordering out the Prison Guard escort.... It's all over.... They're taking him away! ..."

"Dismissed after interrygation.... That's all.... Cheero! In a minnit 'e'll come back through the yard-gyte an' go to 'is quarters as gay as a bloomin' bird...."

Barney defends his opinion with desperate optimism. But his heart is sinking leadenly and a lump is in his throat.

"All serene! Have it your own way. You'll see which is right of us!" The Sergeant cautiously raises himself up. "Do you hear the escort's looted British boots trampin' down the stairs? Now they'll either turn in here or march out at the Main Entrance. And if they do that, there'll be no Mass for the Catholics on Sunday morning--and no Prayers for the rest of us when Mass is through. And no one to get us the allowance from the Consul. And a dog's death for the sick, ay! and a dog's burial. There! ... Do you hear? ... That's the outside gate shutting..."

"Yus. O my Gawd! Shall we ever see 'im agyne?"

The inner gate of the Barrack courtyard has not opened. The sentries posted right and left of it maintain their position unmoved. But the groaning of rusty bolts in stone grooves, and the sound of the ponderous outer gate of the Main Entrance opening and slamming, falls, heavy as a clod of churchyard clay, on the hearts of many men.

For their priest, their helper, their counsellor and friend has gone from his place among them, and the blank he leaves is beyond mere words to express. And even worse than the sense of loss is the cruel uncertainty. Wondering, conjecturing, they lie on their verminous benches as the long hot Palestine day creeps to the sunset hour. The prayer-call from the mosques heralds no supper. Prisoners who resent massacre and villainous usage must, in the opinion of the Bey, have been too lavishly fed. The soldiers of the guard divide the beans in oil; and Barney Mossam, tightening his belt, is more than ever certain that Virtue, outside the walls of the T.R. Drury Lane--is not a game that pays....

The breeze freshens, the great bats come out to steal fruit, and the lesser ones to hunt moths and mosquitoes. Night suddenly unfolds her wings--and down comes the Dark. The jackals howl on the confines of the town, and the pariah dogs bay hideously. The Turkish equivalent for Lights Out! is sounded by the prison _boruzan_. Silver clear, the trumpets and bugles of the German-Turkish garrison challenge the echoes of Ebal and Gerizim. The radiant Hosts of Heaven come forth, and the moon, in her last quarter, hangs over the Hills of Gilead.

Sleep has come to the prisoners. The mud walls shake with their snoring. Only a few are wakeful. The Flight Sergeant is one of these. Towards the middle of the night a 'plane goes over Shechem:

"A raiding or reconnoitring hydro from some carrier in the Mediterranean? No! There's no rattling from the floats. It is a land machine...."

The airman leaves the crowded bench, and steals to the window. In the white effulgence of the moon all objects stand out clear. The German look-out with the telescope on the minaret of the Great Mosque of el Kebir.... The hooded searchlight with its dozing and waking guardians, on the balcony lower down.... A little figure moving on the ragged shoulder of Ebal.... A child? ... No! a woman--scrambling up from limestone terrace to terrace.... He forgets her, for, with the deep, vibrating song that he remembers--into the field of his vision swims The Two-Faced Nightingale....

At about a thousand feet up, she circles smoothly above Shechem. The search-ray from the balcony of the Great Mosque slashes at her viciously. Its fellow from the flank of Gerizim, leaps out, but sinks down again. Her pilot fires an orange light--and the scimitars of radiance from the Mosque and the Mount return to their scabbards; no strings of green rockets explore for the range of her--and no shells from the anti-aircraft guns in the Square of the Khan scream up at her winged shape....

As the biplane hovers against the jewel-bright blue of the Eastern night, the little Zeiss glasses tell their owner that her pilot has a native observer. A big Arab in a striped mantle, and headcloth bound by a rope.... Now her pilot fires a second orange light, drops his weighted despatch-bag, banks and climbs, launching at a dizzy height into a descent of sweeping spirals.... Evidently he is going to land somewhere in the neighbourhood of Shechem....

There is silence as the engine is cut out.... The big 'plane dives out of sight behind the shoulder of Ebal, where the lowest tiers of greyish-yellow limestone terraces are merged in the sandy, rolling plain....

The Flight Sergeant holds his breath and waits, his eyes glued to the binoculars. In a wonderfully short space of time the aëroplane, a powerful tractor biplane of D.H.6 type, climbs into his field of vision,--rises in wide, masterly spirals, banks, turns and flies away Westwards,--leaving the Flight Sergeant wondering with his chin upon the window-sill....

For the Two-Faced Nightingale has shed her observer, the big man in the striped Arab _abâyi_ and roped _kuffiyeh_. Puzzled, the Flight Sergeant creeps noiselessly back to his place on the wooden platform, and lies awake, chewing the cud of mystery, for the rest of the long miserable night.

IV

Dawn brings surprise to him, and the other War prisoners of the Barracks. After the distribution of the morning half-brick of gritty black bread, they are given a second ration, and told to get ready, as they are all going away.

To this end they are presently mustered in the courtyard, carrying their various packs and bundles. Sick and well, unwashed, haggard, unshorn; on naked feet, or feet that are bandaged with the remnants of puttees. Some in tattered khaki tunics, others in cast-off German or Turkish jackets; many bareheaded, others covered with German military caps or broken sun-helmets,--as sorry a collection of scarecrows as Turco-German neglect and brutality can make of two hundred and twenty brave men.... A Turkish bimbashi of infantry, attended by a châwush, gravely pretends to inspect the French and British prisoners. In the name of his Empire he bids them farewell. Some try to raise a feeble cheer when both sets of big wooden gates are thrown open,--and they see a string of some half-dozen German motor-lorries waiting in the sunny road. Sick and well, they are marched forth under guard and packed into these vehicles,--those unable to stand being carried out by _postas_. Then, followed by some weeping wives, the Arabs, Jews and Armenians, chained neck to neck in double file,--are led away--a disconsolate procession, bound for no man knows where....

Even as they leave the foul place of their captivity, the Barracks is filled from wall to wall by an entering battalion of Turkish Reservist Rifles, part of a Brigade hastily summoned by Von Kressenstein from the Caucasus, to be launched on the journey to Mespot, and now brought down here. Swarthy, hairy men, armed with the old long Martini, some covered with the fez, others with the drill _enverieh_, some shod with sandals and leggings, others with German Army boots.

Thus, the Railway-line from Shechem not being available--it was extensively damaged a little while back by British bombing aircraft--and on the repair of it many of these War prisoners have bitterly toiled!--they are bumped over villainously bad roads to railhead at Nakr--en route for the fierce red city of Aleppo, where as they are now aware and Heaven knows how they have got the knowledge!--the sick and disabled are to be picked out for Exchange to England, _via_ Smyrna--and the able-bodied (such as they are!) sent north to Belemkh, a station in the Taurus Mountains, headquarters for gangs of War prisoners working on the rails....

The villainous road that buckjumps through the tumbled Palestine landscape is crowded with Turkish Field, Horse, and Mountain Artillery, conjured back from Mesopotamia by Von Kressenstein, and rushing forward to the defence of Junction Station South. Battery after battery rolls by in the blinding dust; guns and waggons pulled, and riders carried by tough Anatolian horses, bitterly ill-used and evidently poorly fed. But not the roll of iron-shod wheels and the clatter of iron-shod hoofs, nor the roar of human voices talking in many Oriental dialects, nor the curses and jeers and viler things that are hurled at the prisoners in the jolting lorries, can shut out the savage, irregular thudding of Turkish Krupp 75 mms., Turkish Mountain Artillery, and machine-guns; and the steady, dogged slogging of British Royal Garrison Artillery motor-howitzers; British Field Artillery eighteen-pounders; and the clat-clat-clatter of Lewis machine-guns, waging bitter battle in the west and south....

At Nakr, where there is to be a delay of several hours, owing to the detrainment of forces from Mespot, they find a composite train of second and third-class compartments full of Turkish War Prisoner guards and their commanders, and horse-trucks, packed with British officers, waiting under steam for a German Staff Deputy Director of War Prisoners,--and a Controller of Transport,--who are going to Aleppo and thence to Smyrna to arrange the conditions of their exchange. The British officers are the recent captives of the stone-prison and the wired enclosure at Shechem. Very sunburnt are they:--very haggard, weary, thirsty, shabby and ill-shaven, and burdened with tattered valises and heterogeneous odds and ends of personal property, but bright of eye, elastic of bearing--full of the indomitable spirit that from the days of Agincourt and long before them--has been the birthright of their warlike race.

Crowding like schoolboys at the half-doors of the padlocked and guarded horse-trucks, they shout cheery greetings, salutations and scraps of information to the rank-and-file, clustered like swarming bees on the grilling stretch of platform beside the iron track....

"Hear the guns, W. and S.? Putting the wind up Djemal, aren't we?"

"Halloa! Mossam of B---- Company, my late Platoon! I've not seen you since I launched you with a note to the O.C. the water-camels at Rashid.... Have you got hold of a new song, or are you still denying relationship with Potsdam?"