menu_book Chapter 2

CHAPTER II PART I OF FOUR FIFTY MILES TO FREEDOM BY MORRIS ANDREW BRACKENREAD JOHNSTON AND KENNETH DARLESTON YEARSLEY THIS LIBRIVOX RECORDING IS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN CHAPTER II PART I FIRST PLANS FOR ESCAPE With the departure of the party for Gedos, the camp at Changri did what little they could to render the long bare barrack rooms somewhat more endurable as winter quarters.

Each room was about eighty feet in length, and consisted of a central passage, bordered on either side by a row of ugly timber posts, supporting the roof Between the passage and row of lockers, which ran along the walls, were raised platforms affording about six feet of useful width Each platform was divided into two by a single partition half-way along the room Viewed from one end, the general effect resembled that of stables, to which use indeed all the lower rooms had been put previous to our arrival.

Each length of platform was allotted to a group of three or four officers, who were then at liberty to beautify their new homes, as ingenuity might suggest. Planks were hard to come by, so for the most part old valises, blankets and curtains were strung from post to post to screen the rooms from the passage, and thereby gain for the occupants a little privacy.

As the severity of winter increased, caulking floorboards became a profitable occupation, for an icy draught now swept up through the gaping cracks. By the time the financial difficulties to which we have referred were at an end, it was no longer possible to obtain in the bazaar

a sufficient quantity of firewood for anything except our kitchen stoves. It was not, however, until snow was lying deep upon the ground that Sammy Bay could be prevailed upon to let us cut down a few of the neighbouring willow trees, for which it need hardly be said we had to pay heavily. Apart from the exercise thus obtained, and it was good exercise carrying the wood into the barracks,

an odd visit or two to the bazaar and a few hours tobogganing, as a concession on Christmas Day, were the only occasions on which we saw the outside of our dwelling-place for three long months. Nor was there anything in the way of comfort within. The number of trees allotted to us was small, and the daily wood ration we allowed ourselves only sufficed to keep the stoves going in our rooms for a few hours each day. The fuel, moreover, being green, was difficult to keep alight, so that we spent many hours that winter blowing at the doors of stoves,

and the stoker on duty had to give the fire his undivided attention, if he wished to avoid the sarcastic comments of his chilled companions. It was a special treat reserved for Sundays to have our stoves burning for an hour in the afternoon For over a month the temperature remained night and day below freezing point And the thermometer on one occasion registered 36 degrees of frost An officer who used to fill up an old beer bottle with hot water to warm his feet when he got into bed

Found one morning that it had slipped away from his feet and had already begun to freeze Although still under the clothes But enough of the miseries of that winter In spite of such unfavourable conditions the camp was a cheerful one We were all good friends and united in our determination not to knuckle under to the Turk

Our senior officer Colonel A. Moore of the 66th Punjabis Was largely instrumental in making our lot an easier one This he did by fighting our many battles against an unreasonable and apathetic commandant and in all our schemes for escape he gave us his sound advice and ready support. Compared to his two predecessors, this Commandant, Sammy Bay, was a very difficult person from whom

to wangle anything. Although he could lay claim to no greater efficiency for his task of commanding a prisoner of war camp than they, he made himself very obnoxious to us by his policy of pure obstruction. If we applied for any sort of concession, however reasonable, he safeguarded himself by saying he would have to wire to Constantinople for orders, and of course no orders ever came. With the two commandants we had had in castamony, a threat by our own senior

officer to report any matter under discussion to the Turkish headquarters was enough to make him give in over any reasonable request without further ado. Sammy, however, would look the question up in his regulations. On one occasion we bombarded him from every quarter with demands to be allowed to go out tobogganing. Finally the answer came back. The regulations do not mention the word toboggan, therefore I cannot allow you to do so. Even the Turk then, though he uses sand

instead of blotting paper, has his office red tape. The average Turkish officer is an ignoramus, and the following story of Sami Bey will serve to show that he was no exception to the rule. At the time that the German gun Big Bertha was bombarding Paris at long range he was very proud to produce a picture of it in a German paper It was one of those semi-bird's-eyes views

showing Paris in the left-hand bottom corner and along the top the Straits of Dover and the English Channel The gun was about half-way down the right-hand edge and the curved trajectory of the shell was shown by a dotted line from the moment it left the muzzle to the moment when it entered Paris

To a British officer to whom he was showing the picture, Sammy explained at great length how the shell passed through St. Quentin, Cambrai, Duy, up to one of the channel ports, and then down again via Amiens, until it finally arrived at its destination in Paris and exploded. This Turkish brigadier general believed this to be a solemn fact, and this ignorant British hearer was polite enough not to undeceive him. Ours claimed to have been the first party formed with a view to escape But it was not long before there were several others And it became evident that some plan would have to be devised

By which a large number might hope to make their way out of the barracks fairly simultaneously Since these had been designed for Turkish soldiers Every window was already barred But we were in addition a camp of suspects Who had refused to give their parole

So at night, in addition to sentries being posted at every corner Visiting patrols went round the building at frequent intervals Three or four fellows, of course, might cut the bars of a window and slip through But hardly five or six parties At this moment an old magazine came into our hands containing an article

Which described how thirty or forty federal officers Had escaped from a confederate prison by means of a tunnel This was at once recognised as the ideal solution of our problem If only we could find a suitable outlet and the means of disposing of the earth. While the general plan was still under discussion,

we were reinforced by the arrival of three officers from Gedos. They had refused to give their parole in spite of the Turks' threat that they would be moved to Chungri if they did not change their minds. Here, then, they arrived one cold December morning, looking very racy in their Czech overcoats, supplied to them by a Dutch legation. These coats were doubtless the last word in Constantinople fashions, and in the shop windows had probably been marked

très civilisé, for it is the highest ambition of the Turk to be considered civilised. Nothing hurts its feelings more than to be the object of ridicule on account of any lack of up-to-dateness, as the following story will serve to illustrate. While we were at Castamoni, a chimney in one of the houses occupied by the prisons of war caught fire, and with a great flourish of trumpets the town fire brigade was called out to extinguish

the conflagration. Let not the reader however picture to himself even the most obsolete of horse to fire engines. In this town with a pre-war population of something like 25,000 souls, and with houses almost entirely built of timber, dependence in the event of a fire was placed on what can best be described as a diminutive tank carried on a stretcher and provided with a small pump worked by a lever seesaw fashion. The tank was kept filled by buckets, replenished at the

nearest spring. The sight of two men in shabby uniform solemnly oscillating the lever by the handle at either end, and of the feeble trickle of water which resulted at the nozzle of the hose, was too much for the sense of humour of the British officers who happened to be present at the time. At this moment the Commandant, then one Twific Bey, appeared on the scene. Horrified at such ill-timed levity on the part of the onlookers, he seized upon a Major standing by,

and had him escorted to his room, there to be confined till Twific's anger should abate. To the Turk, this tank was the latest thing in fire engines. To carry the story to its happy ending we may add that after three days of confinement the Major addressed a letter to H.E. Enver Pasha through the Commandant which ran somewhat as follows. Sir, I have the honour to report that, owing to the close confinement which I have been kept, my health has now entirely

broken down. I therefore request that, with a view to providing some slight possibility of recovery, I may be allowed to go to England on one month's sick leave, and that as far as the port of embarkation I may be accompanied by Poster, footnote, soldier, end of footnote, Ginger, as he alone in all Turkey really understands my temperament. I have the honour to be, sir, your most obedient prisoner of war, X. Whether this letter ever reached His Excellency we shall

probably never know. From our knowledge of the Turks' total lack of humour, however, we should say that it is more than probable that Twefik Bay solemnly forwarded it on through the proper channel. That no answer was received proves nothing, for it is a matter of years to get a reply to an application like this from the authorities at Constantinople, and the letter was only written three years ago. At least it had this good effect, that the major was released from

confinement forthwith. But we must return to our real subject. Amongst the three officers from Gedos was one Tweedledum, so named from a certain rotundity of figure, which even the scanty provisions said to be obtainable there had failed to reduce. From his lips we first heard of the wonderful capabilities of the Handley Page passenger aeroplane. Such machines, he said, could carry fifteen to sixteen passengers, and three of them had recently flown from England

to Mudros, with only one intermediate landing in Italy. A pilot of one of them had been a prisoner with him at Gedos. A few evenings later Nobby had a great brainwave. Fetching a piers annual, he turned up the maps of Europe and Asia Minor, and after a few hurried measurements, unfolded to his stable companions, Purse and Looney, what afterwards was known as the aeroplane scheme. These three had, with much expense and trouble, managed to collect enough

planks for a real wooden partition to their room, and it was behind this screen that this and many another devilish plot was hatched. Briefly, Nobby's idea was for a flight of five or six handly pages, to be sent from Cyprus, swoop down on Chungri, and pick up the whole camp, both officers and men, and Sami too. We should of course have to take over the barracks from our guards, but this should be easily effected by a coup de main, and probably without having to

resort to bloodshed. At first the idea appeared a trifle fantastic, for after being cut off from the outside world for two whole years, it took time for us to assimilate the wonderful advance of aeronautical science which the scheme assumed, but given that Tweedledum's statement was correct, the scheme was feasible, and we soon took up the question seriously. Our representative of the RFC pronounced the surrounding fields practicable landing grounds, a committee confirmed the

possibility of taking over the barracks by surprise, and the whole scheme, illustrated by a small sketch of the vicinity was soon on its way home. We were fortunate in having a method of sending secret information without much risk of detection. The censorship of our letters, like most things in Turkey, was not very efficient. Looney's brother in England was the inventor of the secret means. The first code which he devised consisted merely of diminutive gaps between

pairs of letters in an apparently ordinary communication. That there was a message contained was indicated to the addressee by the writer, adding after his signature his address as Code in House, Thyslet Terrace, footnote, Code in this letter, end of footnote. The exact nature of the code then had to be discovered by guesswork. After two letters had been received, Nobby noticed the gaps, and the clue was discovered. By stringing

together all the letters preceding the gaps, one obtained the concealed message. The way thus opened, more effective means of communication could be developed. One of these was to send out messages written on a slip of paper, wrapped up in silver tissue, and then inserted in a full tube of toothpaste. As parcels, however, took anything from eight months to over a year to reach the camp, the value of the news contained was considerably diminished. Moreover, this method was not available

for sending news from Turkey to England. The final method was simple, yet perfectly effective, for smuggling news into a country such as Turkey. It consisted of pasting together two thin postcards, the gummed portion being confined to a border of about an inch in width around the edges. The central rectangle, so left un-gummed, was available for the secret message,

which was written very small on the two inner faces of the cards before they were stuck together. Further space for writing was obtainable by adding another slip of paper of the size of the rectangle, and including this within the cards when gumming them up. After being pressed the final postcard was trimmed so as to leave no sign of the join. The position of the rectangle containing the message was indicated on the address side

by at first two lines and later by the smallest possible dots at the corners. Well over a score of such cards must have passed from England into Turkey and more than half that number in the reverse direction without discovery ever being made by our captors. In the camp, to avoid the risk of being overheard talking about split postcards by one of the interpreters These cards were known as bananas

An apt name, as you had to skin them to get at the real fruit inside This explains the method by which it was possible to suggest the aeroplane scheme to the home authorities Unfortunately, it used to take at least four months to receive a reply to a letter For this reason, we could not afford to wait until a definite date was communicated to us so we ourselves named the first fifteen days of May as suitable for us,

and agreed from six to eight a.m. on each of these days to remain in a state of instant readiness to seize the barracks should an aeroplane appear. For the sake of secrecy, the details of the coup de main itself were left to be worked out by a small committee, and the report spread among the rest of the camp that the scheme had been dropped. The true state of affairs would not be divulged until a few days before the first of May. The committee's plan was this. There were at Changri 47 officers and 27 orderlies, a total force of 75 unarmed men, with which to take over the barracks. Our guard, all told, numbered 70 men.

At any one time during daylight there were seven Turkish sentries on duty, one outside each corner of the barracks, one inside the square which had an open staircase at each corner, one at the arched entrance in the centre of the north face, while the seventh stood guard over the commandant's office. This was a room in the upper storey over the archway and facing on to the square. On each side of the Commandant's office, therefore, were the barrack rooms inhabited by the British officers, and to go from one side to the other it was necessary to pass the sentrist standing at his post on the landing in between. From here a flight of steps gave on to the road through the main archway,

on the other side of this again, and facing the stairs, was the door of the ground-floor barrack room used by our guard. This room was similar to those in the upper story already described And we found out by looking through a hole made for the purposes in the floor of the room above And by casual visits when we wanted an escort for the bazaar That the rifles of the occupants were kept in a row of racks

On either side of the central passageway End of chapter 2, part 1