EASTERN NIGHTS—AND FLIGHTS (continued 5)

When the Balkan Railway was cut and daily reports of German retreats in France continued to arrive, even the Young Turk politicians began to desert the rotten ship of state. The opposition groups—the Liberal, the Navy, and the Khoja parties—raised their heads and began to intrigue for a complete surrender to the Allies. Djambolat Bey, the Minister of the Interior, resigned. Rahmi Bey, the powerful Vali of Smyrna, who throughout the war had shown every consideration to the Entente subjects in his vilayet, came to Constantinople with the avowed intention of working an immediate peace. Talaat was for bargain and compromise. Only Enver Pasha and his personal followers remained faithful to their German friends. The Sultan's chance had come.

Colonel Newcombe decided on an audacious plan of action. He wrote a convincing memorandum, which suggested that if Turkey now sued for a separate peace she would obtain better terms than if she waited until Germany was thoroughly beaten. This memorandum, originally the draft of a proposed proclamation to the Turkish army, was taken by Miss Whittaker to a Committee politician of her acquaintance. Eventually one copy of it was given to Fethi Bey, the new Minister of the Interior, and another passed through the hands of the Sultan's dentist to the Sultan himself.

A week earlier—on September the twenty-ninth—the Young Turk Cabinet had met to consider the Bulgarian demand for an armistice; and the Grand Vizier, who arrived from Germany by the last Balkan express that passed through Sofia, offered his resignation. At the time nobody could form an alternative ministry so Talaat again took up the reins of power.

The Sultan and the Minister of the Interior received their copies of Colonel Newcombe's memorandum on October the fifth. During the intervening days it had become more and more plain that Germany was doomed to defeat. The Sultan and the Peace parties, therefore, only wanted a suitable bludgeon for a coup de grâce to the Ministry.

They found it in this purely unofficial communication from an escaped prisoner of war. Colonel Newcombe's memorandum was produced and discussed at a stormy council of the Committee of Union and Progress, which resulted in the definite resignation of Talaat and Enver. Tewfik Pasha, Izzet Pasha, and other Opposition leaders were called into consulation by the Sultan.

From being a hunted fugitive Colonel Newcombe suddenly found himself a person of consequence. As a special favour he was asked not to carry out his plans for escaping from Turkey, because the Ottoman Government believed he would be useful in arranging an armistice. He met the Vali of Smyrna at the Tokatlian Hotel, and there the British prisoner and the high Turkish official shook hands and discussed the changing international situation.

On October the sixteenth Colonel Newcombe, accompanied by Miss Whittaker, went by appointment to the house of a politician, where he met the new Minister of the Interior, the Vali of Smyrna, and other notabilities. Over the dinner table the mighty questions of peace and war were then debated by an escaped prisoner of war and a prominent Minister of the country in which he was technically still a captive.

Colonel Newcombe explained that though he worked for Allied and not Turkish interests, his friendly advice was that the Ottoman Government should sue immediately for a separate armistice; because whereas Germany wanted to keep a weak Turkey whom she could dominate, the Allies' principle of the rights of nationality forbade any idea of complete domination.

The Turks' attitude at this curious meeting was summed up in remarks made by the Minister of the Interior:

"We know we have lost our chance. There have been mistakes in the past. We are practically bankrupt. But we honestly hate the Germans, and, without kowtowing to the British, look to them to help us and to be our friends, as we want to be friends with them."

Colonel Newcombe and the Turkish officials thrashed out such questions as Turkey's financial bankruptcy, the opening of the Dardanelles, the capitulations, autonomy for Armenia and Arabia, and punishment for the Armenian massacres and for the maltreatment of British prisoners from Kut-el-Amara (whereby nearly 80 per cent. of the latter had died). Then, after dinner was over, the Minister of the Interior dictated in French a long telegram, which the British officer was to send to Mr. Lloyd George as soon as he should reach Allied territory.

Next day the Ministry tried to send him out of Turkey by aeroplane, but failed because all aircraft was in the hands of the Germans. It was agreed that he should receive special passports and proceed, via Smyrna, to either Chios or Mudros.

After the dinner party of the sixteenth events moved rapidly toward an armistice. The Vali of Smyrna caused a sensation two days later by stating openly, in the Journal d'Orient, that peace negotiations were in progress and that the Germans would have to go. Later in the day he again met Colonel Newcombe at the Tokatlian Hotel, and discussed the best means of approaching England for an armistice. By now the escaped colonel was going about Constantinople quite openly, although Yeats-Brown and Paul remained more or less in hiding.

Meanwhile, General Townshend, who was still a prisoner on Prinkipo Island, had also sent a memorandum to the Government. A Turkish armistice commission was formed, and he was asked by the Grand Vizier to accompany the delegates who were about to leave the country; which he did. It was arranged that Colonel Newcombe would follow in a few days' time.

On his last night in Constantinople Colonel Newcombe went by appointment to the terrace of the deserted British Embassy, and there met Captain Yeats-Brown, who had slipped past the police into the Embassy grounds. It was a meeting that neither of them will ever forget. Below was the Golden Horn, shimmering in the moonlight, and across its waters Stamboul showed up dimly, quiet and apparently asleep. But the watchers on the Embassy terrace knew that the city might stir from slumber at any moment; for the Phanar was bristling with machine guns, St. Sophia was an armed camp, and, more terrible than all, people were starving in the streets. The waning sickle moon that rode above Stamboul seemed the symbol of the Turks' waning dominion over Christian peoples. Very soon the Crescent would go down. Very soon the Union Jack would float from the Embassy's barren flagstaff. Very soon Pera would be decked with banners, and an Allied fleet would proclaim an end to the nightmare of famine and oppression.

Next day Colonel Newcombe, who had been handed civilian passports by the Minister of the Interior, travelled from Constantinople to Smyrna. Finally he left Turkey, as a special adviser, in the company of Raouf Bey, the new Minister of Marine. The party put to sea in a trawler, and were picked up by H.M.S. Liverpool. They were taken to Mudros, where the British Admiral Commander-in-Chief and General Townshend were already negotiating with the Turkish delegates.

Up to the very end the Young Turk leaders hoped to hold the real, if not the ostensible, control in Constantinople. Captain Yeats-Brown was told by a politician that "nobody but Talaat could possibly manage Turkey," and that "the English, if they come, would be well advised to deal with the Committee of Union and Progress, as there is no other real party in the country. They not only have all the money, but all the brains and energy as well." Which last statement was nearly true.

But when it came to saying that Talaat was one of the dominant brains of the century, and comparable as a statesman only to Lloyd George, the disguised British officer could not help smiling and suggesting: "Surely Talaat is not indispensable? If he goes, another ex-telegraphist may arise, as good as he!"

This the members of the Committee of Union and Progress regarded as near-blasphemy; but the fact that all the Young Turk leaders were self-made men, with little knowledge of the science and history of modern government, was one of the causes why Von Wangenheim, Von Bernstorff, and other emissaries of German Imperialism were able, for four years, to inspire a policy of Turkey for the Germans.

The sudden volte face of the Turkish press, the announcement of the armistice terms, the flight of the three chief criminals (Talaat, Enver, and Djemal Pashas), and the downfall of the swaggering Germans brought great joy to the miserable populace of Constantinople. They vented their feelings in delirious enthusiasm over some released prisoners who visited Pera, wearing their carefully hoarded khaki uniforms.

The curtain was down, the sordid tragedy of oppression and corruption was over. The new era opened in the mist of a November morning, with the long, low lines of an Allied fleet steaming very slowly past the Iles des Princes toward the Bosphorus.

CHAPTER XV

STOWAWAYS, INC.

Titoff was head of a syndicate of ship's officers which might have named itself "Stowaways, Incorporated." He was the schemer-in-chief; and the others, while disliking him heartily, were content to rely on his superior cunning. Besides ourselves the syndicate undertook to carry across the Black Sea a Greek, a Jewess (both of them wanted by the Turkish police), and four passportless prostitutes; all of whom, to the extent of some hundred dollars apiece, wished to leave Constantinople for Odessa.

Most of the crew, also, were smuggling men, women, or material across the Black Sea. The crew itself included four Russian soldiers, who had escaped from prison camps in Turkey, and were passing themselves off as seamen. The bo'sun's particular line of business was a woman thief who had with her a heavy purse and a trunk full of property, stolen from a merchant who had been her dear friend. Katrina, the kitchen girl who brought us our food, invested in a well-to-do Turkish deserter.

As for the non-human contraband, it was stowed in every corner of the vessel—cocaine, opium, raw leather, tobacco, cognac, and quinine. Prices were extravagant enough in Constantinople, but in Russia they were colossal. The difference in the price of drugs, for example, often amounted to hundreds per cent. The demand for cocaine as contraband was so great during the week before we actually sailed that by the end of it the chemists of Pera and Galata would sell none under 500 dollars a kilo; but in Odessa, we heard, one might dispose of it without difficulty for a thousand dollars a kilo. Even White and I became infected by the contraband craze and, with Kulman as partner, gambled successfully on a consignment of leather and so covered most of our escape expenses.

At dusk, when we left the wireless cabin and paced the shadowed portion of the deck for exercise, we often saw a rowing boat creeping toward whichever side of the Batoum happened not to face the shore. Somebody in it would exchange low whistlings with somebody on deck—the somebody often being Titoff. When the boat had been made fast to the bottom of the gangway, a figure, or two figures, would climb to the deck and disappear. Sometimes they brought and left a package; sometimes it was a visitor himself—or herself—who did not depart with the rowing boat.

Besides the mystery traffic from shore to ship there was also a certain amount from ship to shore. For this the steward—a Russian Jew—was responsible. A Turkish merchant had chartered the Batoum for the coming voyage, and since our many delays in sailing were the result of his haggling with government officials over the amount of baksheesh to be paid for permission to export, he undertook to feed the officers and crew for as long as they remained at Constantinople. Incidentally, he unknowingly fed White and myself, besides the other stowaways and the escaped Russian soldiers. The steward ordered more provisions than were needed; and a few hours after the delivery of each consignment a boatload would be sent back to the quay and carted to the bazaars. Titoff, who organized the sale, shared the proceeds with the steward.

Titoff's methods of graft took him into many dubious by-paths, notably those around the offices of a Greek coal dealer. After preliminary plottings, with Viktor as interpreter, he ordered a hundred tons. The coal dealer delivered ninety, the bill for a hundred was presented to the Turkish merchant, and Titoff and the Greek split the value of the missing ten tons. It was easy enough for the chief engineer to make good the deficit by burning ten tons more on paper than in the furnaces.

With all this illicit traffic in men and goods there were some restless half hours during the last few days of our stay in the Bosphorus. Trouble was caused by the bo'sun's woman-thief, whose presence among us the Pera police suspected. Five times they searched for her. The bo'sun detailed a man to watch the shore, and whenever a police launch appeared this look-out would blow a whistle. All the stowaways then scurried to their various hiding-places.

White and I, being the most dangerous cargo, were given the safest—and certainly the dirtiest—hiding-place of all. This was in the ballast-tanks, at the very bottom of the ship, underneath the propeller shaft. The entrance to them was through a narrow manhole, covered by a cast-iron lid, about twenty yards down a dark passage leading from the engine-room to the propeller.

The alarm having been given, Feodor, the second engineer, would lead us along the passage by the light of a taper, remove some boards, raise the lid, and help us to wriggle into the black cavity below. Our feet would be covered by six inches of bilge-water while we crouched down, so as to leave him room enough to replace the iron cover and re-lay the wooden boards that hid it. Then, one at a time and with our knees squelching in the water, we crawled from tank to tank.

Half-way along the line of tanks were two that contained small mattresses, which the second engineer had placed in position for us. After the first day they were sodden with the bilge-water; but at any rate it was better to sit on them than in the water itself. The limited space, however, made it impossible for us to be seated in any but a very cramped position, with hunched-up shoulders rubbing against the slime that coated the sides of each tank. Standing was impossible, and lying down meant leaning one's head on the wet mattress and soaking one's feet in the drain of bilge that swished backward and forward with every motion of the ship.

Complete blackness surrounded us. The air was dank and musty, so that matches sputtered only feebly when struck, and the light from a taper was hardly strong enough to chase the darkness from the half of each small tank.

When, after each search, the police returned to their launch we would hear the heavy boots of the second engineer tramping along the passage overhead. As we listened to the nerve-edging noise that accompanied the removal of the boards and the iron lid we crouched into the best-hidden corners of our respective tanks, not knowing whether a friend or a policeman was at the entrance. We scarcely breathed until there came, booming and echoing through the hollow compartments, the word "Signor!"—the second engineer's password denoting that all was clear, and that we might return to the engine-room.

The twenty-second of August was the final date fixed for the departure. By late afternoon of the twenty-first all the Turkish merchant's cargo, legitimate and otherwise, had been brought from the quay by lighters, and thence transferred by winches to the Batoum's hatches. The export officials had been squared, the ship's papers were passed and stamped, the bunkers were fully loaded with inferior coal. All on board, from the captain to the least-considered stowaway, were content, although nervous of what might happen during the next twenty-four hours.

At about five o'clock we received a welcome visit from Vladimir Wilkowsky, the Polish aviator who had acted as our intermediary from Psamatia. He bribed his guard to remain in Stamboul while he crossed the bridge to Galata, and hired the kaik that brought him to the Batoum. He himself intended to follow us across the Black Sea by escaping on the next steamer to leave Constantinople for Odessa. Meanwhile, we were especially glad to see him, for he brought from Mr. S. the fifteen hundred dollars for which we had waited so anxiously. In return we sent improvised cheques written on strips of foolscap paper.

We now had enough money to pay Titoff's exorbitant fee, and still leave funds to live in Odessa for some weeks. Two German revolvers, bought for us in the bazaar by Kulman, added to the feeling of security.

Wilkowsky claimed to have sent on board the food and clothing which we left at Psamatia, and he was able to confirm our suspicions that Titoff must have stolen it. For the present, however, we refrained from tackling the chief engineer, wishing to avoid a scandal before departure. We promised ourselves to deal with him adequately at Odessa.

That evening there were more than the usual number of mysterious visits from small boats. The full complement of stowaways was taken aboard, the last cases of contraband shipped. Until a late hour the engine-room resounded to the hammerings of Feodor and Josef, who were hiding a late consignment of cocaine. Our own investment in raw leather was in Kulman's cabin.

The firemen and greasers celebrated their farewell in the usual manner. By nine o'clock several were roaring drunk. One of them—the Bolshevik who had told of the drowning of Baltic fleet officers—staggered across the aft deck with a drawn knife in his hand, shouting that he wanted to finish off the third engineer, who had insulted him. He found Josef in the engine-room, but was cowed and disarmed when the engineer threatened him with a revolver. He let himself be led away, while verbally murdering all officers in general and Josef in particular.

At 6.30 in the morning Josef, the third engineer, roused us from our sleep on the floor of his cabin and invited us to the ballast-tanks; for as the police and customs officers would be on board most of the time until we weighed anchor, we must remain hidden until the Batoum left Turkish waters.

Since we expected to be hidden for about twelve hours, we took with us a loaf of bread, some dried sausage, and a bottle of water. After a last look, through the port-hole, at Seraglio Point and the domes of Stamboul, I passed below, hoping and expecting that when I next looked to the open air we should be clear of Turkey.

For a long while nothing happened to take our thoughts from the cramped space and the foul air of the tanks. We breakfasted sparingly, and allowed ourselves one cigarette apiece. More we dared not smoke, because of the effect on the oppressive atmosphere.

Then, at about ten o'clock, we heard from above a succession of three thuds, the signal to all stowaways in the region of the engine-room that the police were on board. We made ourselves as comfortable as possible, and took minute care to make no sound.

We waited in frantic impatience for the noises from the engine-room that would denote a getting-up of steam. At half-past eleven there began a continuous, rhythmic spurting, which we took to be the sound of the engines in action. Soon afterward a grinding and scraping from the deck convinced us that the anchor was being raised.

"Put it there, old man," said White, thrusting his hand through the hole that linked our respective tanks. "We're leaving Turkey at last!"

But not yet were we leaving Turkey. The noise from the engine-room was merely that of a pump preparing the pressure. After three-quarters of an hour it quieted as suddenly as it had begun, and we realized that the Batoum was still moored in the Bosphorus, between Seraglio Point and the Sultan's palace of Dolma Bagtche.

And then, soon after noon, came the real music for which we had waited so anxiously. The telegraph from the bridge tinkled, a fuller and more throaty rhythm came from the engine-room, loud grinding and rattling from the deck testified that the anchor had parted company with the bottom of the Bosphorus. A few minutes later we felt the ship swinging round, and a swishing and rushing of water told us that this time we really were away. In silence we shook hands again.

For long hours we remained in the slimy tanks, crouched on the sodden mattresses. But it was no longer purgatory. The swish-swish of the screw chased away all sensation of discomfort, and there remained only the realization that we had left Constantinople and soon would have left Turkey. My old habit of subconsciously fitting metre and rhymes to mechanical rhythm, to which I had succumbed many times when seated behind aeroplane motors, began to assert itself as we sat in the darkness and listened to the penetrating throb-throb from the engine-room above us. Incongruously enough the unbidden lines that continued to pass maddeningly through my mind, in time with the steady rise and fall of the piston, were those of a G. K. Chesterton ballad:

These words held sway for five hours of insistent, monotonous chugging. They were succeeded by an extract from the Prodigal Son:

By early evening, we had calculated, the Batoum should be leaving Turkish territorial waters and entering the Black Sea. Just before six there came the shock of a bitter disappointment. The captain's telegraph clanged, the engines subdued to dead slow, the vessel swung round into the tide and seemed to remain almost stationary for a quarter of an hour. We had expected a last search by the Turkish customs authorities at the outlet of the Bosphorus and surmised that this was the reason for the slackened speed. But a repetition of the whirring and clanking on deck, followed by a loud splash, showed that the anchor was in action again, and that something more important than a mere search was on hand. For two hours longer we remained in the blackness, unenlightened and very anxious. Then, after the usual removal of the boards and the lid, there floated through the tanks a low-voiced "Signor!"

Feodor, candle in hand, was waiting for us. He whispered a warning to make as little noise as possible, because two Turkish officials were on board. Having reconnoitred to make sure that the way to Josef's cabin was clear, he led us there. The delay, it appeared, was because the Turkish merchant had left some clearance papers at Constantinople. He had gone for the capital by automobile, and meanwhile two of the Customs Police would remain on the Batoum. The merchant was expected to return with the missing document next morning, when permission to leave would be given.

We slept in the cabin, and at dawn descended once more to the ship's bowels. We spent five more hours of purgatory in the ballast-tanks. The Batoum remained motionless during three of them, but the last two were enlivened by the swish-swish of displaced water as it passed the flanks of the vessel. Finally we heard for the last time the blessed signal "Signor!"

"Fineesh Turkey," said Feodor, as he smiled and helped us through the manhole. Gone was the Bosphorus, and in its place we saw the leaden waters of the Black Sea. From the port-hole of Josef's cabin we could distinguish many miles west of us the coastline of the country in which White had spent three years of the most dreadful captivity.

Feodor soon left us, for he had to bring other stowaways into the light of day. From every concealed cranny of the vessel men and women, almost as light-hearted as ourselves at deliverance from the Turks, were coming into the open.

One of the stowaways, a passportless woman whom the aged captain was taking with him to Odessa, did not rejoice for some time. As hiding-place for her the ancient had chosen a deep locker in his chart room on the bridge. There she had remained for the past two days.

Now Katrina, the kitchen wench, knew nothing of the captain's lady. That morning, not wishing to send him back to the bunkers, where he had spent the previous day, she thought of the locker as a temporary home for her own particular stowaway—a Turkish deserter with coal-blackened face, untrimmed beard, and decidedly odorous clothes. She dumped the Turk inside the locker, fastened the lid, and ran back to the kitchen.

The Turkish deserter landed with some violence on the captain's lady, and both received a bad fright as they clutched at each other in the darkness. Yet the lid could not be removed from the inside, and the shouts were unheard outside the little room. The air in the unventilated locker grew ever more stuffy and velvety as the two people continued to breathe it. Finally the woman fainted. The Turk, tired out after a long spell of cramped wakefulness in the bunkers and the kitchen, composed himself philosophically and went to sleep.

When the Batoum was beyond the Bosphorus and all danger of a search the captain opened the locker to release his friend. He inserted an arm, and jumped with fright when, instead of a female, he produced a coal-blackened man. The woman revived when taken into the fresh air, but I should imagine that never again will she become a stowaway.

Titoff, fearing that some informer among the passengers might notice us, still kept White and myself under cover all day, until we took our usual exercise on deck each evening. The other stowaways were mingling with legitimate passengers, whose bedding was spread over the hatches.

I remember in particular a vivid-looking, much-jewelled Jewess, who was minus money and passport. I found her exchanging violent words with two firemen, who were levying blackmail, using the Austrian port authorities at Odessa as bogey-men. When, with tears and protests, she had fulfilled their demands, two other ruffians from among the crew took their place and demanded money, or in default jewels.

All the stowaways, in fact, except ourselves, were blackmailed in this fashion. The woman thief was victimized less universally than the others because she was known to be the bo'sun's especial graft. As for us, we were under the protection of the ship's officers, and, more important still, we carried revolvers. In any case, Bolshevik Bill the Greaser was our good friend and a power among the crew.

On the second evening at sea the firemen stole a case of árak from the cargo, drank themselves amok, and told Josef they were far too busy over private concerns to trouble about stoking the furnaces. The private concerns were mostly women from among the stowaways and poorer passengers.

The fires sank lower and lower, the engine-power dwindled, the propeller revolved more and more slowly. Finally we came to almost a dead halt in the middle of the Black Sea. Throughout that night we crawled forward with a minimum number of revolutions; and even this small progress was only because the ship's officers took turns in the furnace-room to act as stokers. Next morning the sobered firemen graciously agreed to let bygones be bygones, and resumed work.

The rest of that nightmare voyage included only one incident worth recording. On the morning of the fourth day, when we should have been within sight of land, the horizon in every direction was blank. The Turkish merchant who had chartered the Batoum was impatient to reach Odessa, and asked the captain for our position. The ancient tugged at his white beard, and said he was not quite sure, but would take soundings. These revealed shallow water, showing, according to the chart, that the ship must be some distance off her course.

The dodderer was astonished, and called the first mate into consultation. Belaef's calculations with sextant and compass proved us to be heading several degrees too far east, so that the then line of sailing would have taken us nearer Sevastopol than Odessa. Thereupon the captain handed over the ship's direction to the first mate. We edged northward, and sighted Odessa at noon of the next day.

The city, with its pleasant terraces round the hills that slope to the foot of the wide-curved bay, and its half-Western, half-Byzantine towers and domes gleaming yellow-gold in the sunlight, looked inviting enough. But for us it represented a gamble in the unknown. Odessa was in enemy occupation, and might be more inhospitable even than Constantinople. On the other hand, we should no longer be on the police list of wanteds, as in Turkey, and it would be easier to pass muster among Russians than among dark-skinned Levantines.

On the whole, we were optimistic. From Odessa a man with friends and money might make his way to Siberia, where were some Allied detachments; and if, as the latest news indicated, Bulgaria was about to be emptied of Austro-German forces, Odessa would be a good jumping-off point for Sofia.

Meanwhile, our immediate concern was to get ashore without meeting the dock officials. Kulman and Josef promised to escort us, and thus lend the protection of their uniforms. We ourselves discarded seamen's clothes for the mufti worn when we escaped from the Turkish guards. White still had no lounge coat, and although it was a hot day of August had to put on his faded old overcoat. For the rest, the luggage we were bringing to Russia—each of us possessed a toothbrush, some cartridges, a revolver, a comb, and a razor, a spare shirt, a spare collar, and two handkerchiefs—could be wrapped in two sheets of newspaper.

Before we left there was a dramatic ceremony when we paid for our unauthorized passage, and incidentally got even with Michael Ivanovitch Titoff. He had reckoned on taking the money himself and dividing it as he pleased. We, knowing that Titoff could best be punished by hitting at his avarice, explained to Kulman, Josef, and Feodor that as they had done more for us than the chief engineer, we wanted them to receive a share corresponding to their risks and services, and proposed to hand all the money to them for distribution. From Titoff's share we would deduct the value of what he had stolen from us, and also whatever we thought excessive in his charges for food.

Each of the trio had his own grievances against Titoff, and all were delighted with the opportunity of making money at his expense. We prepared a balance sheet, and invited Titoff into Josef's cabin.

Josef, as Titoff's subordinate, had been scared of offending him. Four glasses of neat vodka, however, gave him courage, and when the chief engineer entered the cabin he was the most aggressive of us all.

"Michael Ivanovitch," he said, glaring at Titoff with bloodshot eyes, "we are no longer at Constantinople, and our friends here insist on a just distribution of their money. This"—handing him the balance sheet and a list of his own—"is how it will be divided."

The chief rogue glared his indignation as White handed a handful of banknotes to Josef, and voiced it when he received the balance sheet. He stood up and declaimed against the deductions, but soon subsided in face of the row of unfriendly faces, the grins, and the revolvers which White and I kept well in evidence.

"There is nothing more to be settled," said White. "Here we are among friends. Now leave us."

And Titoff went. At the door he turned and said to Josef with evil meaning in his voice: "I shall have business with you later." Josef laughed, and with a shaky hand poured himself out another glass of vodka.

The last we saw of Michael Ivanovitch Titoff was his yellow face leaning over the side of the ship when, with Kulman and Josef, we rowed toward the docks. They were taking us on shore before the customs officers boarded the Batoum. The other stowaways, who were mingling with the legitimate passengers on the deck, were to come later.

The harbour was chock-full of forlorn-looking craft, which had evidently lain idle for a long while. We dodged around and about several of them, so as not to give the appearance of coming from the Batoum, and then made for the nearest quay.

On it was an Austrian officer. When we were some fifty yards distant he looked at us through field-glasses, and proceeded to detail a group of soldiers to various points on the quay, evidently with the object of stopping and questioning us.

Kulman, who was at the tiller, gave an order to the sailor at the oars. We swung round a bend of the shore, and lost sight of the Austrians. Close ahead was another landing-stage. We moored beside it. Without waiting a second, but also without showing haste, we stepped from the boat and climbed the steps—Kulman and I first, and then Josef and White.

Two Austrian sentries and some Russian officials stood at the top of the steps. They looked hard at us, but, satisfied by the uniforms of Kulman and Josef, merely nodded a greeting as we passed toward the dock gates and comparative freedom.

CHAPTER XVI

A RUSSIAN INTERLUDE

Odessa, like the rest of the Ukraine, had exchanged Bolshevism for Austro-German domination and confiscation. Already, when we passed through the docks, it was easy to see who were the masters. Austrian customs officers controlled the quays; Austrian and German soldiers guarded the storehouses; Austrian sentries stood at the dock gates and sometimes demanded to see civilians' passports. Had we not been vouched for by the uniforms of the Batoum's third engineer and third mate, the sentries might well have stopped White and me.

Once outside the gates we hired a cab, and drove to an address given us by Mr. S.—that of the sister and the mother of a Russian professor at Robert College, Constantinople. Arrived there, we left Josef and Kulman, with very sincere expressions of goodwill.

The professor's sister received us cordially but calmly, as if it were an everyday event for two down-at-heel British officers to drop on her from the skies with a letter of introduction but without the least warning.

"Why, only three days ago," she related, "two officers of the Russian Imperial Army arrived here under like circumstances. They made their way from Petrograd, through the Soviet territory. They now occupy the room below ours."

Once again Providence seemed to have played into our hands; for when these ex-officers were asked how best we could live in the German-occupied city, they produced the two false passports by means of which they had travelled through Bolshevist Russia. They now lived in the Ukraine under their own names and with their own identity papers; and the false passports, no longer necessary to them, they handed to White and me.

Without passports we could scarcely have found lodging or rations, for every non-Ukrainian in Odessa had to register with the Austrian authorities. Tom White, therefore, became Serge Feodorovitch Davidoff, originally from Turkestan, and I became Evgeni Nestorovitch Genko, a Lett from Riga. This origin suited me very well; for the Letts, although former subjects of Imperial Russia, can mostly speak the German patois of the Baltic Provinces. My passport made me a young bachelor, but White's allotted him a missing wife named Anastasia, aged nineteen.

There were still in Odessa a few British subjects who had remained through the dreadful days of the Bolshevist occupation and the more peaceful Austro-German régime. It happened that the professor's sister knew one of them, a leather manufacturer named Hatton. In his house we found refuge until other arrangements could be made. Like most people in Odessa, he showed us every kindness in his power, as did his Russian wife and her relations. It was, however, unwise to remain for long with an Englishman, for he himself would have been imprisoned if the Austrians discovered that he was harbouring two British officers.

The professor's sister played providence yet again, and produced another invaluable friend—one Vladimir Franzovitch B., a hard-up lieutenant in the Ukrainian artillery. Vladimir Franzovitch lived in two small rooms. The larger one he shared with us, there being just room enough for three camp beds placed side by side and touching each other. The second room was occupied by his mistress.

Obviously the situation had its drawbacks. It also had its advantages, as the rooms were in one of the city's poorest quarters. The neighbours, therefore, included no enemy soldiers, for the Germans and Austrians had naturally spread themselves over the more comfortable districts.

The dvornik was an old sergeant of the Imperial Guard, with a bitter hatred of Bolshevism and all its works. The tale which Vladimir Franzovitch told of us—that we were English civilians escaped from Moscow—was in itself a guarantee that he would befriend us. He took our false passports to the food commissioners, and thus obtained bread and sugar rations for Serge Feodorovitch Davidoff and Evgeni Nestorovitch Genko.

Our principal interest was now in the news from Bulgaria, for on it hinged our future movements. We visited Hatton each day to obtain translations from the local press. These I supplemented from the two-day-old newspapers of Lemberg and Vienna, bought at the kiosk.

The Bulgarian armistice was an accomplished fact, but the German troops had been given a month to leave Bulgaria. Our problem was whether to remain in Odessa until the end of this month and then try to make for Bulgaria, or to leave for Siberia at once.

Wilkowsky all but tipped the scales in favour of Siberia. He arrived suddenly from Constantinople, having hidden on a steamer that weighed anchor a few days after the Batoum's departure. From being a penniless prisoner, without even the means of corresponding with his family, he was now prosperous and comfortable; for his father was a wealthy lawyer living in Odessa, and his uncle Minister of Justice in Skoropadsky's Ukrainian Cabinet.

Among his friends was the local commissary of General Denikin, whose volunteer army, composed of Kuban Cossacks and ex-officers of the Imperial Army, was preparing to advance against the Bolshevist forces in the Caucasus. Every few days the commissary sent a party of ex-officers, by way of Novorosisk, to the volunteer Army Headquarters at Ekaterinodar. General Denikin was hoping for aid from the Allies; so that the commissary was delighted at the chance of enlisting two British aviators. His offer was that we should fly with Denikin's army for a few weeks and help to organize the Flying Corps, after which we could proceed by aeroplane to some Allied detachment in Siberia.

The adventure seemed attractive, and we hesitated over it. But illness took the decision from our hands. I was laid low by yellow jaundice, and unable to travel with the next party that left for Novorosisk. Weakened as I was by various forms of hardship, several days passed before I recovered, under the kind-hearted ministrations of Elena Stepanovna, Hatton's Russian wife.

The aftermath of jaundice once brought us what we least desired—conspicuousness. In hot weather the Russians living around the Black Sea bathe from the beach in the altogether. There, men's bathing costumes attract almost as much attention as would a lack of them at Brighton or Atlantic City. Hatton, White, and I formed a bathing party soon after I felt better. Until we were crossing the beach below the public gardens none of us realized that the colour of my skin was still a warm yellow. The spectacle of a yellow man in all his nakedness drew many sightseers from the gardens, including Austrian soldiers. I dressed under cover of a rock, and lost no time in leaving the gardens.

No sooner was I free from jaundice than fate sent another setback. White and I succumbed to the plague of influenza which swept across Europe from west to east, and which in one week killed forty thousand inhabitants of Odessa. For three days we lay in Vladimir Franzovitch's little room, weak, feverish, miserable, and at times light-headed, while his mistress fed us with milk and heaped every kind of clothing over us for warmth.

Recovery was hastened by the best possible tonic—news that the way to Varna, on the Bulgarian coast, was open to us. Thanks were due to several good friends for this means to freedom. Hatton had introduced us to a cosmopolitan Britisher named Waite, who enlisted the help of Louis Demy, a Russian sea-captain. Demy spoke of us to Commodore Wolkenau, the Ukrainian officer who, under the Austrians, controlled the shipping at Odessa. Wolkenau, having been an officer of the Russian Imperial Navy, was a good friend of the British. Moreover, the daily bulletins made it apparent that the Allies were winning the war, so that he was glad of an opportunity to prove his sympathies by helping British officers. He arranged for our passage on a Red Cross ship which was to repatriate Russian prisoners from Austria, now waiting at Varna.

Meantime, there was an interval of ten days' waiting before the boat would sail. These we passed in moving about the city, in consorting with Ukrainian officers and officials introduced by Wilkowsky, and in collecting information likely to be of use to the British Intelligence Department.

Our usual companion was one Pat O'Flaherty, an Irishman on the staff of the Eastern Telegraph Company, who had stayed in Odessa during the Bolshevist and Austro-German occupations. Entering a café with O'Flaherty was like a blindfold draw in a sweepstake of identities. Always he met friends; but until the moment of introduction neither we nor he knew how or as what we were to be presented. To one man we were merchants from Nikolaieff; to another, motor-car agents from Moscow; to a third oil experts returned from Baku.

"Signor Califatti," said O'Flaherty on one occasion, presenting me to a wealthy Jewish speculator.

"When he was at Nijni Novgorod Fair," he continued in all seriousness, "Signor Califatti bought a beautiful fur overcoat. He now wants to sell it. Perhaps you would like to buy it."

The Jew offered a thousand roubles for the mythical overcoat, provided it conformed to the Irishman's declaration that it was of first-class astrakhan, in four skins; while White and I remained speechless with astonishment, embarrassment, and the desire to grin.

In those days the Bolsheviki of Odessa, after months of suppression by the German Military Command, were beginning to raise their heads again. There was much talk of a withdrawal of German and Austrian troops from the Ukraine, to reinforce the French and Italian fronts. The Bolsheviki were ready, if this happened, to rise up and capture the city.

The possession of arms by civilians was strictly forbidden, and any man found in the streets with a revolver was liable to be shot offhand by Austrian soldiers or Ukrainian gendarmes. But the Bolsheviki laughed at the many proclamations anent the handing over of firearms. They hid rifles, revolvers, and ammunition in cellars and attics, or buried them in the ground.

Many of our neighbours in the working-class quarter were Bolsheviki. Often they scowled at and threatened Vladimir Franzovitch, as he passed them in his uniform of a lieutenant of the Ukrainian artillery; and it was evident that when the Austrians withdrew our room would be rather more dangerous as a home than a powder factory threatened by fire.

The consul of Soviet Russia was preparing lists of men willing to serve in the corps of Red Guards that had been planned, and was spending hundreds of thousands of roubles in propaganda. An immediate rising was threatened; whereupon Austrian and Ukrainian military police surrounded the consulate, captured the lists, and arrested and imprisoned the consul and two hundred Bolsheviki who had given their names as prospective Red Guards. Sixty of them were shot.

Even that lesson failed to frighten the half-starved men who lurked in the poorer quarters. Often, in the evening, they haunted the streets in small gangs that held up passers-by and stripped them of their pocket-books and watches, and sometimes of their clothes.

The ugliest aspect of an ugly situation was that many soldiers of the Austrian forces, particularly the Magyars and the Poles, sympathized with the Bolsheviki, and were ready to join them, exchanging uniform for looted civilian suits if the troops were withdrawn. The sudden realization that Austria was beaten, coupled with hatred of Austrian Imperialism, went to their heads like new wine. They foresaw an era in which the working man and the private soldier would grab whatever they wanted. Bands of Hungarian privates proved their belief in this millennium by sacking the warehouses in the docks under cover of night.

Odessa was overfull of members of the bourgeoisie who had flocked to what they regarded as the last refuge against Bolshevism in European Russia. Refugees had swelled the population from six hundred thousand to a million and a half. The middle classes—professional men, merchants, traders, and speculators—knew they were living on the edge of a volcano, and tried to drown the knowledge in reckless revelry. Each evening parties costing thousands of roubles were given in the restaurants. Wine and vodka, as aids to forgetfulness of the fear that hovered over every feast, were well worth their sixty roubles a bottle.

Their orgy of speculation in inflated prices and their mock merriment left the bourgeoisie neither time nor energy to take action against the horrors that threatened them. In general they adopted a pose of fatalistic apathy, and tried hard to soothe themselves into the belief that the Allies would save them, since they would not save themselves. For the rest they laughed hysterically, speculated unceasingly, and talked charmingly and interminably.

The only serious preparation against a renewal of the Red Terror in Odessa was made by ex-officers, who banded themselves into a semi-official corps. But they possessed few arms and less ammunition. Even the official forces of the Ukraine could place only a dozen small-calibre guns round Odessa, and were obliged to be content with one rifle between two or three men. In any case, the loyalty of the private soldiers in the small Ukrainian army was a doubtful quantity, and unlikely to be proof against the temptations of rich loot and rapine.

Small arms were worth their weight in silver. Vladimir Franzovitch, discovering that White and I possessed German revolvers, implored us to sell them to him before we left. He offered thirty pounds apiece for them. In Constantinople we had bought them for eight pounds each, and in England they would have cost less than forty shillings.

Vladimir Franzovitch was weighed down by the most extreme pessimism over the future of Russia.

"We cannot be a nation again for a hundred years," he said. "The people are either revelling in brute-instinct, drunk with the strong wine of a spurious and half-understood idealism, or are dying in their thousands of starvation. Most of the strong men who might have helped to save the country have been killed, and the bourgeoisie folds its arms and awaits destruction in sheep-like inaction."

He saw but one hope—the Cossacks and officers who were rallying, through incredible hardships, to Denikin's army in the Caucasus; and Denikin could make no important move unless the Allies backed him with arms and munitions. Until this happened his small army would be but an oasis in the desert of hopelessness.

We were present at several gatherings of officers, in Vladimir Franzovitch's room. Over bread and salted fish, washed down by tea, they discussed the black past and the blacker future. From them we heard awful tales of massacres and looting during the Bolshevist domination over the Black Sea regions. Of these the most dreadful was that of the cruiser Almaz. There have been published many imaginative reports of Bolshevist massacres; but for horror these are equalled by many true stories that have never been fully told, and never will be until the veil of isolation is lifted and the seeker after truth is free to gather his information at first-hand.

I have every reason to believe the story of the Almaz. It was vouched for not only by Vladimir Franzovitch and other Russians whom we met in Odessa, but by Englishmen who were living in the city at the time, and are now back in England. Moreover, it is perpetuated in a local song similar to those of the French Revolution.

The Bolsheviki who first occupied Odessa, in the early spring of 1918, made their headquarters on the cruiser Almaz. Their first batch of arrests comprised about two hundred officers, with a few officials and other civilians. These were taken to the Almaz, and lined up on the deck. Each man in turn was asked: "Would you prefer a hot bath or a cold?" Those that chose a cold bath were thrown into the Black Sea, with weights tied to their feet. Those that said "hot" were stoked into the furnaces—alive.

Later, one Murravieff, believed to have been formerly a agent provocateur of the Tsarist secret police, came to Odessa as Bolsheviki commissary. He divided the city into four sections and the Red Guards into four parties, each of which was allotted its particular district for three days of licensed looting. The Saturnalia was due to begin in three days' time, when the first Austro-Hungarian detachment landed to restore order, in response to the Ukrainian Provisional Government's invitation. Many of the looters were rounded up and shot; but the Bolsheviki leaders, including Murravieff and several Jews, escaped with millions of roubles, commandeered from the bank reserves. Murravieff afterward had the decency to commit suicide, but his Jewish colleagues continued to flourish in Soviet Russia.

Odessa had a respite from Bolshevist domination until the tragedy of March, 1919. Then, after a period of occupation by an insufficient Franco-Greek force, the city was evacuated in the face of an army of Soviet troops. Credible eye-witnesses report the massacre of three thousand people within a few days of Odessa's recapture by the Bolsheviks.

For all I know to the contrary, Lenin—despite the proved and damning evidence of past connections with the German Kaiser's penetration agents and the Russian Tsar's police agents—may be an intellectual idealist who considers all means justifiable in establishing a form of communism that may eventually better the world. But I do know with certainty that Bolshevism, as practised locally in Russia by unthinking hordes who are not and do not pretend to be intellectual idealists, means universal injustice, flagrant robbery, senseless, butchery, and a tyranny at least equal to that of Ivan the Terrible or any Oriental despot. All the writings of biased minority mongers who have confined their investigations to consorting with Soviet officials at Moscow and Petrograd, all the blinkered sympathy of labour agitators who devote their lives to fostering a diabolic discontent, all the chirruping of the mentally perverted women and men who, at a safe distance of thousands of miles from actuality, have adopted theoretical Bolshevism as the latest fashion in parlour enthusiasms, cannot condone the fact.

Money and life were the only cheap commodities in Odessa. Paper roubles of every denomination—Imperial notes, Kerensky notes, Ukrainian notes, and Municipal notes—they were in scores and hundreds of thousands; and each issue was trailed by several kinds of forgery, so that only an expert could tell the true from the false.

Everything else was rare, and wildly expensive. Meat was ten, weak tea a hundred and ten roubles a pound. New suits of clothes were unobtainable at any price, for there was no cloth. Second-hand clothes could be bought in the Jewish market, where the dealers demanded from eight hundred roubles for a shoddy suit and from five hundred for an overcoat. A collar cost eight roubles; a handkerchief four. Other prices were proportionate.

Seven-eighths of the factories were idle. As for the rich grain lands of the Ukraine, about three-quarters of their produce went to Austria and Germany, this being the price paid by Skoropadsky's government for the policing of the Ukrainian Republic.

The colossal price of things was due as much to Jewish speculation as to scarcity. Everything for sale passed through the hands of a succession of middlemen before it reached the public. A consignment from Austria or Germany, or the produce of a local factory, would be bought by one speculator, sold to another, re-sold to a third, and perhaps to a fourth and a fifth. Each of the middlemen would allot himself a profit of from twenty to two hundred per cent. The same process was applied to the boots, foodstuffs, and equipment which Austrian officers and soldiers stole from their military stores and sold to the speculators.

All day long Franconi's and Robinart's, the two principal cafés of Odessa, were infested by swarms of swarthy Jews, who wandered from table to table, selling and re-selling, and piling up enormous fortunes in paper roubles. And elsewhere in the city hundreds of thousands of Russians were in little more than rags, many thousands of them half dead from want of nourishment.

As they passed the cafés where the Jews sat and haggled and made it ever more difficult for the half-starved masses to keep alive, the poorer Russians talked of pogroms. The talk culminated later, when the Germans and Austrians had withdrawn from Odessa, in massacres of the less prosperous Jews, while the richer ones, who were the real promoters of discord, were warned in time and stole away with their wealth; as always happens when pogroms are threatened. The actions of the Ukrainian Jews during the Austro-German occupation provided a very typical instance of the provocative part played by the Jews of Eastern Europe. The Hebrew—more calculating and infinitely more cunning than the Slav peasant and workman—ties, binds, and enmeshes him in a web of usury, speculation, mortgage, and irksome liability; until the Slav, goaded beyond his powers of endurance by the men who prey on his instability and ignorance, rises up and seeks a solution in regrettable violence.

Glorious news heartened White and myself during the period of waiting for the Red Cross ship to sail. Each morning we walked down the principal street of Odessa until we reached Austrian Headquarters, outside of which were posted the daily official and press bulletins written in German. I mingled with the crowd before the notice board while White looked in a shop window until I rejoined him and related the latest Allied victory—the capture of Lille, Roubaix, Tourcoing, La Bassée, Ostend, or the final phases of Allenby's advance in Syria. With Hatton, Waite, and other Britishers we rejoiced greatly in private; while the German soldiers became glummer and glummer, and the Austrian officers lost a portion of their corseted poise as they strutted, peacock-wise, along the boulevards.

The Russian bourgeoisie remained apathetic as ever. Their main interest in the prospect of a general armistice seemed to be the probable effect on prices, and on the rouble's value, of the expected arrival of the British. As for our Bolshevist neighbours, they continued to unearth and clean their rifles and revolvers; while the corps of ex-officers drilled, and planned defence works outside Odessa.

Under cover of dusk we slipped past the Austrian sentry at the dock gates on the evening before the Red Cross ship left for Varna, and boarded her. Louis Demy and Pat O'Flaherty accompanied us as far as the gangway.

We remained hidden throughout the night, and only ventured into the open when, at ten o'clock in the morning, we steamed out of the wide-curved harbour to the open sea.

CHAPTER XVII

SOFIA, SALONIKA, AND SO TO BED

Stimulated by the knowledge that Varna was occupied by the British we walked the decks openly, flaunting our protean rôles of British officers, highly contented men, first-class passengers, and third-class scarecrows.

Like the Batoum, the Red Cross ship brought others who began the voyage as semi-stowaways. Commodore Wolkenau had told us in Odessa that among our shipmates would be a certain General from Denikin's army. We found him—a tall, bearded, Grand-Duke-Nicholas-like man—dining in the second-class saloon, and wearing a suit of clothes nearly as shabby as our own. To dodge investigation by the Austrian port authorities he had assumed, with the connivance of the ship's captain, the character of an engineer's mate. The "engineer" who owned him as mate was in reality a commander of the Russian Imperial Navy, also attached to Denikin's forces. The pair of them were travelling to Salonika, as emissaries of General Denikin, to ask the Franco-British command for arms, ammunition, and financial support.

Another fellow-passenger was a former lieutenant of the Russian navy, who, since the German occupation of Sevastopol, had been acting as an agent of the Allies. He carried a complete list of the German and Austrian ships and submarines in the Black Sea, and details of the coast defences.

The three days' voyage was uneventful. The Black Sea remained at its smoothest. A pleasant sun harmonized with the good-will and friendliness of all on board, and with our deep content, as we continued to tread on air and impatient expectation. A Bulgarian destroyer pranced out to meet us, and led the vessel through the devious minefields and into the miniature, toy-like harbour of Varna. The Bulgarian authorities imposed a four days' quarantine upon all passengers; but the general, the naval commander, and the Franco-British agent joined with us in avoiding this delay by sending ashore a collective note to the French naval officer who controlled the port. As at Odessa, we rowed ashore with our complete luggage wrapped in two newspapers, each of which contained a toothbrush, a revolver, some cartridges, a comb, a razor, a spare shirt, a spare collar, and a few handkerchiefs.

Outside the docks a British trooper in dusty khaki, shoulder-badged with the name of a famous yeomanry regiment, passed at a gallop. The sight of him sent an acute thrill through me, for he was a symbol of all that I had missed since the day when I woke up to find myself pinned beneath the wreck of an aeroplane, on a hillside near Shechem.

White looked after him, hungrily. He had been among the Turks for three years, and since capture this was his first sight of a British Tommy on duty.

"How about it?" I asked.

"I don't know. Somehow it makes me feel nohow in general, and anyhow in particular."

We reported to the British general commanding the force of occupation, and gladly delivered ourselves of information about Odessa for the benefit of his Intelligence Officer. At the hotel occupied by the staff there were preliminary doubts of whether such hobo-like ragamuffins could be British officers; but our knowledge of army shop-talk, of the cuss words fashionable a year earlier, and of the chorus of "Good-bye-ee" soon convinced the neatly uniformed members of the mess that we really were lost lambs waiting to be reintroduced to rations, drinks, and the field cashier.

For many days our extravagant shabbiness stood in the way of a complete realization that we were no longer underdogs of the fortune of war, but had come back into our own. Bulgarian officers, their truculence in no way impaired by their country's downfall, wanted us to leave our first-class carriage on the way to Sofia. Outside Sofia station it was impossible to hire a cab, for no cabman would credit us with the price of a fare. The staff of the British Mission, to whom we gave reams of reports, tried their politest not to laugh outright at our clothes, but broke down before the green-and-yellow check waistcoat, many sizes too large, which White had received from a British civilian in Odessa.

Even the real Ford car, lent us by the British Mission for the journey to Salonika, failed to establish a sense of dignity. Once, when we stopped on the road near a British column, the driver was asked who were his pals the tramps.

We drove joyously down the Struma valley and through the Kreshna and Ruppel passes, still littered with the débris of the Bulgarian retreat. Rusted remnants of guns lolled on the slopes descending to the river. Broken carts, twisted motor-lorries, horse and oxen skeletons—all the flotsam of a broken army—mottled the roadside. In the rocky sides of the mountain passes were great clefts from which dislodged boulders had hurtled down on the Bulgarian columns when British aeroplanes helped the retreat with bomb-dropping. We passed through the scraggy uplands of Lower Macedonia, and so to Salonika.

The real Ford car halted in the imposing grounds that surrounded the imposing building occupied by British General Headquarters at Salonika. As we climbed the steps leading to the front door, warmly expectant of a welcome by reason of our information from South Russia, an orderly pointed out that this entrance was reserved for Big Noises and By-No-Means-Little Noises. We swerved aside, and entered an unpretentious side-door, labelled "Officers Only."

"Wojer want?" asked a Cockney Tommy, who sat at a desk inside it.

"We want to report to Major Greentabs, of the Intelligence Department."

The Tommy looked not-too-contemptuously at our sunken cheeks, our shapeless hats, our torn, creased, mud-spotted tatterdemalion clothes, and almost admiringly at White's check waistcoat.

"Nah, look 'ere, civvies," he instructed, "yer speak English well inuf. Carncher read it? The notice says 'Officers Only', an' it means only officers. Dagoes 'ave ter use the yentrance rahnd the corner, so aht yew go, double quick."

That day Salonika gave itself up to revelry by reason of an unfounded report that an armistice had been signed on the Western front. One of the celebrators was a certain 2nd-class air mechanic of the Royal Air Force. We stopped him in the street, and asked the way to R.A.F. headquarters. Beatifically he breathed whiskied breath at me as he stared in unsteady surprise.

"George," he called to his companion, "the war's over—hic—and here's two English blokes in civvies. Want to join the Royal Air Force, they do." Then, tapping me on the chest—"Don't you join the Royal Air Force. We're a rotten lot."

Armed with signed certificates of identity we went to the officers' rest house to demand beds.

"Speak English?" said a quartermaster-sergeant as we entered.

"Yes."

"Been expecting you. The Greek contractor's sons, aren't you?"

Later, not long before the bulletin-board showed the rumoured armistice with Germany to be premature, an orderly in the rest house wished to share the great news that wasn't true with the nearest person, who happened to be White. He stopped short on seeing a dubious civilian. But his good-fellowship was not to be denied. French being the lingua franca of the multi-nationalitied troops in Salonika, he slapped White on the back and announced: "Matey, la guerre est finie!"

Metamorphosed by ordnance uniforms from third-class scarecrows to the regulation pattern of officer, we spent glorious days of rest and recuperation. Then, by the next boat for Port Saïd, we left Salonika the squalid for Cairo the comfortable; and so to the world where they dined, danced, demobilized, and signed treaties of peace.

EPILOGUE

A DAMASCUS POSTSCRIPT; AND SOME WORDS ON THE KNIGHTS OF ARABY, A CRUSADER IN SHORTS, A VERY NOBLE LADYE AND SOME HAPPY ENDINGS

Of all the cities in the Near and Middle East Damascus is at once the most ancient, the most unchanged by time, the most unreservedly Oriental, and the most elusive.

Constantinople is Byzantium—cum Mohammedan lust for power—cum Ottoman domination—cum Levantine materialism—cum European exploitation and Bourse transactions, in a setting of natural andarchitectural magnificence; a city that expresses itself variously and inharmoniously by a blendless chorus from an unmixable mixture of creeds and races; a charming, feminine city with a wayward soul; a cruel, unstable city of gamblers; a city of pleasant, vine-trellised alleyways, delightful waterways, fear-haunted prisons and extravagant rogueries; to my mind the most intriguing city in the world.

Cairo is a compound of sphinx-and-pyramid antiquity, modern opulence, degenerate Arab touts, Arab Babudom, reserved and Simla-like officialdom, the cosmopolitan gaiety of four great hotels, sordid and curious vice, sand-fringed suburbs, traffic in tourists and fake scarabs, and the compelling, changeless charm of the Nile.

Alexandria is bastard Byzantine-Levantine, with a wonderful past, an insistent Cotton Exchange, a lovely harbour, a crooked racecourse where crooked races are run, and a summer colony for Cairo's white-ducked Westerns.

Port Saïd is a dull, heat-heavy hell, at which the traffic to the Far East calls of unwelcome necessity, pays its tolls, skirts the green-gray statue of De Lesseps, and gladly glides down the turquoise-toned Suez Canal.

Suez is a hard-faced ex-courtesan, formerly famed for outrageous spectacles, but now converted by that missionary of war-time expedience the British Provost-Marshal into an unreal, uninviting, hypocritical respectability; a harbour landlady for squat-sailed, dancing dhows.

Mecca is the pilgrim city in excelsis, with a Holy Stone, overpowering heat, much colour and squalor, a reputation for impenetrability, and no traditions earlier than the birth of the Prophet.

Jerusalem has a stupendous history and is yet the most disappointing city in the world; a small, gilded-gingerbread city with no beautiful building except the blue-tiled Mosque of Omar, no first-class view except that of the walls and roof-tops from the Mount of Olives; a city trading its past for Western charity; a city with a rebuilt Tower of David masquerading as the original, a probably authentic relic in the Tomb of Absalom, and many dubious ones where, within the space of fifty square yards of beflagged church-floor, mumbling guides point out to pilgrims in pince-nez the supposed tombs of Jesus of Nazareth, Joseph of Arimathea, and Nicodemus, hard by the supposed site of Calvary, strewn with supposed fragments of the Cross; a city sacred to three great religions, exemplified locally by scheming town-Arabs; ring-curled, lethargic Jews aloof from their Western kindred; and swarthy, lethargic Christians educated and largely supported by Euro-American subsidies; a city of narrow, denominational schools that ignore the Fellowship of Man; a city whose Church of the Holy Sepulchre should be an epitome of peace and good-will, but yet is a place where, in the name of Christian charity, Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, Armenian, and various kinds of Protestant priests intrigue and squabble over claims to guard relics, windows, and corners, and defray the cost of holy candle-light by collecting from visitors enough money to burn a hundred and one candles for one and a hundred years; a city better read about than examined.

Bagdad is a city with a romantic name, some fine Arabian architecture, and an impressive western gate whence the Damascus-bound caravans move dustily across the desert; a city fallen from greatness to the date and grain trade, minor bazaars, and the steamer and dhow traffic of the broad-bosomed Tigris; a city redolent of all that Haroun-al-Raschid was and modern Mesopotamia's opportunist sheikhs emphatically are not; a city with a prosperous future, thanks to the British engineers who have irrigated the Tigris-Euphrates basin into the way it should go.

Mosul is an unlovely mud city that straggles around the ruins of Nineveh the Magnificent.

But Damascus is indescribably a city with an unfathomable soul. In its complex ancestry are the strains of many ancient civilizations. The crooked alleys and decrepit buildings of its oldest quarter, perched on a mountain projection high above Damascus proper, have an origin lost in the conjectural mists of an epoch when the written word was not. Another part of it was co-incident with Baalbek and sun-worship. The plain façade of many a house (purposely plain to divert the cupidity of Turkish pashas) hides a wide, white courtyard soothed by fountains, the plashing of which is coolingly heard in divanned rooms precious with rugs and hangings, and ornamented by minutely detailed designs in fancy arches and miniature cupolas—houses exactly as they were when tenanted by rich merchants who flourished under the greater Arabian caliphs. The Street called Straight, the glass-roofed, unique bazaar and a dozen other city-marks are bafflingly suggestive of contact with a dozen periods of greatness. And last year, when the demoralized Turks marched out of the city under the Arab flag that flew defiantly from the city gate, Arab thinkers began to dream of yet another period of greatness, in which Damascus was to be the centre of a re-united Arabian Empire….

My motive in returning to Damascus was threefold—certain minor work at Air Force Headquarters, an unpraiseworthy resolve to buy carpets and knick-knacks before other officers of the Palestine Army chose their pickings from the merchants' war hoards, and a sneakingly benevolent desire to see George, the mongrel interpreter who had been bullied into betraying my escape plans in Baranki Barracks, but who was yet such a pathetic little nondescript.

With a passenger I left Ramleh aerodrome in a Bristol Fighter; for with an aeroplane available who would think of travelling by train or automobile over the disordered rails and roads of Syria? It was a sun-shimmery day, pleasantly cool in the early part of a Palestine November. Everything suggested peace as we flew northeastward—the calm cloudlessness, the silent, sparkling countryside, the rhythmic purring of the motor. The ground mosaic was radiant with that acute clearness which makes flying so much more interesting in the East and Middle East than elsewhere.

Far away to the right we could see from our height of 6,000 feet the ghostlike outline of the Dead Sea behind the bleak-ridged hills beyond Jericho. To the left were the shining sea, white-roofed Jaffa, and the lines of sand dunes that curved in and out of the coloured country-side. Ahead and around were brown surfaces of grain land and green blotches of woodland, interspaced with gray-gleaming villages.

Soon the Bristol Fighter droned over what had been the old front of Allenby's left flank, with uneven trenches snaking southeastward from the sand-bordered coast to the Jordan basin. The Jordan itself twisted and writhed through its green-and-gold valley, over which occasional trenchworks zigzagged. Then came the hill desolation of Lower Samaria. Near Shechem I reached out a fur-gloved hand and showed my passenger the approximate spot where, seven months earlier, I was shot down and awoke to find Arab nomads approaching my wrecked machine. Slightly to the west was Nazareth, perched pleasingly on high ground.

The pear-shaped Sea of Galilee flickered with iridescent twinkling in the sunlight. Just north of where the river flows into the lake I picked out the point at which a regiment of the Australian Light Horse, confronted on the far bank by a Turco-German force sent from Damascus to defend the ford, swam their horses across the Jordan and routed the enemy.

The patchwork flatness below changed to more plains of gray-brown grain-country and gray-green orchard land neighboured on the east by the desert that was a populous province in the days when armies of age-old civilizations—Assyrian, Babylonian, Medean, Persian, Macedonian, and Arabian—swept backward and forward in waves of conquest and counter-conquest, to and from Nineveh, Babylon, Ctesiphon, and Old Bagdad, until the Turkish hordes swarmed across from Central Asia and ruined all the lands they conquered.

Small and indistinct at first, then expanding into a vivid clearness as we flew toward it, Damascus came into sight; and of all the views from the air that I remember from flights in Palestine, Egypt, Syria, France, Italy, Bulgaria, Greece, England, and America, this was incomparably the loveliest.

Far away to the west was Mount Lebanon, and from it stretched a line of mountains, growing ever bleaker as they neared the Syrian Desert. The low ground dominated by the heights was a maze of forests, wheat-fields, pasturage, and orchard land, intermingled with patches of sand. Straight ahead was the ancient city of Damascus, a straggling surface of white roofs pierced by the domes and minarets of many mosques, all in a gray whiteness, as if powdered with the dust of its four thousand years of history. Pharpar and Abana, the twin rivers of Damascus, showed up plainly as, converging and diverging, they descended from their sources on the rim of the mountain, and lost themselves in the jig-saw of crooked streets and square-topped houses. The background is the wide, shimmering desert that loses itself on the eastern horizon.

Having, to the roaring accompaniment of a 1918 Hispano-Suiza aero-engine, circled over this city half as old as time, I spiralled down and landed on the aerodrome.

On horses borrowed from the Sikhs who guarded the aerodrome we cantered towards the city, three miles distant. The road was utterly vile, for apart from Turkish neglect it had for three years been dented and spoiled by German motor lorries. Every few yards we had to edge our horses round some large hole.

Inside Damascus long-disused tram-lines rose high above the roadway. Through the narrow, winding streets there streamed a medley of camels, horses, fat men riding on thin donkeys, goats, rainbow-robed Bedouins, veiled women in black, and fezzed Syrians and Armenians. All of them—camels, donkeys, horses, and humans—wound in and around each other without any pretence at order.

Under such conditions the least mishap is enough to bring about a block in the haphazard traffic. We were held up for nearly twenty minutes when a donkey, with a huge load of wood straddled on its back, lay down near a hole in the road, and refused to budge. Men, women, and animals mingled confusedly, and exhortation and imprecations were flung at the donkey and its master. The onlookers were raining advice as we halted our horses on the rim of the crowd, but none made an attempt to help. And the following is an approximate but far from literal translation of a few remarks:

"O thou unfortunate one! He has a donkey with a stubborn spirit. It has deposited itself on the ground and most annoyingly refuses to rise."

"Beat it hard, I say! I have a string of camels which become unruly because they cannot proceed. Beat it, I say!"

"Nay, rather speak kindly and apply gentle pressure to the under-parts. Then will it lift its forefeet and stand erect. Stubborn donkeys care naught for blows."

"Cow-faced son of an exceedingly fat she-dog! Displace thy heavy hoof from my astonishingly painful toes!"

"Ah-ee! Ah-ee! But a moment hence I had a money-purse, and it has left me."

"O thou unfortunate one! He had a money-purse, and it has left him. O thou unfortunate one!"

And although all knew that the purse was probably hidden in the folds of some Arab's robe, those near the unfortunate one searched and scratched the ground, probably none more assiduously than the man who could have produced it.

Now if the period had been two months earlier a Turkish gendarme would have taken the donkey-owner apart, and, if he failed to offer a bribe, shot his prostrate beast and hauled its carcase to the roadside. As likely as not it would have been the gendarme who stole the unfortunate one's money.

What actually happened was this. A sun-browned man in light khaki tunic, short trousers, and bare knees sauntered along, a cigarette drooping from the left-hand corner of his mouth.

"Saa-eeda, Tommy Effendi," said one of the loiterers, making way for him.

"Damned old fool of a moke," said the man in shorts; then bent down and alternately stroked, pushed, and spoke to the donkey. Somehow he persuaded it to rise and start walking. The crowd disentangled itself and its animals from each other, and dispersed. And the man in shorts, his cigarette still dangling from the left-hand corner of his mouth, passed on, as casual and unsurprised as if he had been in Brixton or Birmingham.

Both in appearance and in spirit Damascus had changed much since the days of my captivity. Destitution was yet evident, but far less flagrantly than when I had seen starving babies lying against the walls and crying their hunger. There were no more furtive looks, and many more smiles. The swaggering Germans were supplanted by companionable Tommies, the tyrannous Turkish gendarmes by the headdressed Arab police. In the long, arcaded bazaar the traders had brought out their stocks of carpets, prayer-rugs, silks, and precious stones, hoarded during the war, and were selling them at prices far below those ruling in war-time Cairo or war-time anywhere else. And everywhere the Arabian flag was prominent.

For many a day the talk in the bazaars had been of a new Arabian Empire, as a reward for the exploits of King Hussein's Arabs—exploits that had not only freed Arabia and helped to free Syria, but had involved the abolition of all blood-feuds in a thousand miles of semi-lawless country. The Emir Feisul, son of King Hussein (and thus a direct descendant of the Prophet), was on his way to the Peace Conference in Paris, accompanied by Colonel Lawrence, the young Englishman who was the soul of the Arab national revival, and of the Arabs' epic campaigns between Mecca and Damascus. And many citizens of Damascus were hoping that he would return with the realization of their dreams that the city was to be the centre of pan-Arabian greatness.

My enquiries at Baranki Barracks, and in the offices of the British Provost-Marshal and the Arab gendarmerie, failed to trace the fate of George; and I had to be content with the memory of a futile little figure standing on the steps of our railway carriage, on the morning after our betrayal, and saying, with despair in his voice: "I have so little courage. I ask pardon."

Of the other intimate characters in the story I can account for all but two. Jean Willi, the Israelite dragoman who was my benefactor at Nazareth, has not yet given me the chance to pay back in part the good deeds that I owe him; but I still have hopes. And I can only guess at what has happened to Michael Ivanovitch Titoff, now somewhere behind the screen which, since the Bolshevist reoccupation of last spring, separates Odessa from the normal world. From what I know of his character I am certain that when the Soviet troops arrived he proclaimed himself a Bolshevist, and took full advantage of the conditions whereby the unrighteous have special opportunity to flourish.

Vladimir Franzovitch—a Russian as estimable as Michael Ivanovitch was despicable—died for the country he loved and despaired of, fighting in Denikin's army.

For the rest, I can offer happy endings as conventionally apposite as those of the worst "best-seller" of any lady novelist.

Miss Whittaker, the noble girl who played in Constantinople the heroic part of an Edith Cavell, is now Lady Paul. Less than a month ago an American warship took her from Constantinople to Beyrout, where she married Captain Sir Robert Paul, one of the British officers whom she had helped to escape. She now lives in Aleppo, where Paul commands the Arab gendarmerie. In this crowded narrative I have failed to do justice to the brave and gifted woman who many times risked liberty and life in aiding unfortunate countrymen; but only because the last thing she would desire is advertisement have I refrained from writing the eulogy she deserves.

Another happy ending, almost too good to be true, was the recent wedding of Colonel Newcombe and Mlle. "X", the girl who arranged his escape from Broussa and concealed him in Constantinople while he worked for a withdrawal of Turkey from the war.

Mr. S., the British merchant who jeopardized his neck in helping no less than seven British officers to liberty, has returned to England, and should be conscious of much merit.

The Turkish armistice happened a few days before Theodore was to have been hanged. Fulton and Stone were released from the Ministry of War Prison, and twenty-four hours later, by means of threats, they obtained reprieve and freedom for the Greek waiter who had hidden them. He was then half dead, as a result of insufficient food, and of the dreadful, disease-ridden, insanitary, crowded state of his dungeon; but he recovered under careful nursing, and returned to his mother and sisters, in the house where the gendarmes had captured Yeats-Brown, Fulton, and Stone.

The Maritza restaurant, near Stamboul station, still flourishes; but Theodore is no longer there. With the money gained by acting as conspirator-in-chief for British prisoners, he talks of coming to London and opening a small restaurant of his own. If this happens, he can count on regular customers from among those who saw him, with his bent shoulders and blue-glassed spectacles, flicking a secret letter on to the tablecloth, under cover of a menu-card.

Those of us who schemed, escaped, hoped, feared, wore disguises and whiskers, assumed illnesses and insanities, suffered, and amused ourselves generally are dispersed over five continents. Fulton and Stone are still in Constantinople, but as responsible officials instead of under-dogs of war. White is a quiet-living manufacturer in Melbourne. Hill and Jones, the madmen of Yózgad, Haidar Pasha, and Gumuch Souyou have gone their demobilized ways in sanity and content, one to Sydney, the other to Glasgow. Paul is in Syria, Colonel Newcombe in Egypt. Yeats-Brown, ex-Mlle. Josephine Albert, is in London, with an eyeglass which he kept intact through three years of adventurous captivity, from the day when he was taken prisoner near Bagdad to the day when, from the verandah of his hiding-place opposite the deserted British Embassy in Constantinople, he looked along the Grande Rue de Pera and learned, from the fluttering Allied flags, that the Turkish armistice had been signed. Last and least, I am now in civilian blessedness and America.

Often I have left the satisfying solidity of London, the restful beauty of a Thames backwater, the comforting hospitality of New York, the wealth-conscious heartiness of Chicago, to hear the chanted summons to prayer from the minaret that faced my prison in Damascus, watched the intrigues that coloured Constantinople during the twilight of the Turkish Empire, discuss Bolshevism and the price of revolvers with Vladimir Franzovitch, as he sits on a camp bed in his tiny room at Odessa.

And Time, the greatest of romantics, has nearly persuaded me to disregard memory and believe that I enjoyed it all.

THE END

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS GARDEN CITY, N.Y.