A Prince of the Captivity (Unabridged). Buchan JohnЧитать онлайн книгу.
loutishness had been swollen by the idleness of his years in Stambul. Yet he was quietly busy, and in his own purposes he was rather efficient.
Orders from headquarters, frequently countermanded and habitually misinterpreted, kept the division north of the Bulgar Dagh till early August, and it did not reach Aleppo till the beginning of September. During the summer heats Adam had been a good deal away from headquarters by permission of Colonel Aziz, and had been in many strange places and among many queer folk in his task of tangling up the connections which linked the embarrassed Liman to his base… These were laborious and difficult days, but he found them curiously exhilarating. He felt himself within the electric zone of war, an actor in a drama which was moving to some stupendous climax. The toil of it rejuvenated a body which had been too long cramped and under-exercised. Moreover, he was among novel scenes, and his interest in the unfamiliar revived in him. Almost he became young again.
By way of motor-car, motor-bicycle or weedy horse, and sometimes on his own feet, he prowled about a land which had been for many thousands of years the cockpit of war. It was all pared and gnawed to the bone. He found everywhere irrigated fields where the water-furrows were dry, and orchards which had been felled for firewood. He entered towns where the lattices hung broken, and the mud walls crumbled, and only a lean child or a beggar showed in the narrow streets. He had days of blistering heat, when the sky was copper above and the earth iron below, and when hot winds stirred the baked mud into dust-devils. He had days, too, when bitter blasts blew from the north-east, or when the rain storms swept in battalions till he could almost cheat himself into the belief that he was on a Scots moor and that the tamarisk scrub was heather. The open air and the weather’s moods put new vigour into his body, and never for one moment was he sick or sorry. There was disease everywhere among the troops, but, while his colleagues went down like ninepins with fever and dysentery and heat-stroke, Adam in his shabby field-grey went steadily about his business. “You are a mountaineer like my own folk,” said the admiring Aziz. “You are as hard as the hillside quartz.”
As they moved south he began to mix with new types—shaggy Druses, sleek Damascenes, Arabs from the Syrian desert as thin and fine as sword-blades. His imagination caught fire, and he had visions of the vast hidden life astir behind the front where Liman played his mechanical game of war. That life was breaking loose from the game, and it was his task to expedite the breaking. For a blow was in preparation, and its force must be aided by defection in the rear, so that when it fell it would strike not a solid but a hollow shell.
The blow came, as all the world knows, at dawn on the 19th of September, by which time Adam’s division had not reached the Asian corps in Djevad’s Eighth Army to which it had been attached as reserve. It was still a mile or two short of Nablus. Presently it was caught up in the backwash of the great defeat, and turned its face northward. Down upon it came the fog of war, nay the deeper fog of a pell-mell retreat… These were busy days for Adam— and for Aziz and for many obscurer folk. There was a German staff-officer who used to appear mysteriously at cross-roads and give authoritative orders to fleeing columns. He must have been raw to his job, for most of his orders contrived to shepherd those who obeyed them into the arms of Allenby’s terrible horsemen.
Adam had one moment of indecision. Liman was routed, so his task must be over. Was not the next step for him to be picked up by the pursuit and restored to his own people? But a thought deterred him. He did not know what might be happening in the north. There might be a stand beyond the Lebanon at Homs or Aleppo, or in Anatolia itself, and work for him to do. So he clung to his fleeing division, and struggled with it past Rayat to the broad-gauge line, and across the Orontes till the minarets of Aleppo rose above its orchards—on past the junction with the Bagdad railway, and up the long slopes of the hills which circle Alexandretta. The division was now only a rabble of scared and starving men, and soon he was convinced that Turkey’s last shot was fired, and that for her broken army not even the shores of the Marmora would be a sanctuary. His work was done.
He realised something more—that it was high time for him to go. Aziz had left him, and there were ugly faces turned on him among the troops. He was a reminder of the race that had led the children of Islam into the mire. One night he had to run for it to escape a rifle bullet at the hands of a crazed sergeant. He had for some days dropped his uniform, retaining only his field-boots, and wore a ragged Turkish tunic and greatcoat. He had made ready, too, a slender packet of food, and he had a map, a compass, and twenty rounds for his revolver. Thus equipped, he hid for one night in the scrub of a nullah, and next morning started, like Xenophon’s Ten Thousand, on his march to the sea.
For three weeks he was a hunted man, and had his fill of the hardships which those British soldiers suffered who escaped from a Turkish prison-camp. To be sure, there was no pursuit, but there was a more menacing thing, a land where all order and discipline had gone, and a stranger was like a sheep among wolf-packs. The countryside was starving, with the people fighting like wild beasts for food. Also it was strewn with broken men on the same desperate errand as himself, striking out frantically for safety like a weak swimmer in a heavy sea. He moved only by night, and in these weeks he learned the shifts of primeval man whose mind is narrowed to a single purpose— the purpose of the meanest sentient thing. He had schooled his body to need the minimum of food, but even that little was in constant jeopardy. He had twice to fight for his life with famished dogs, and used up four of his pistol cartridges. Once he stumbled on a group of Kurdish soldiers who had set up as bandits, and only the fortunate approach of a moonless night enabled him to escape. Every day he felt his strength growing less, so he husbanded it like a miser. Lightheadedness was what he feared: too often the scrub and the hills would dance about him, and he would lie face down, his fingers pressed on his throbbing eyeballs, till he won touch with earth again.
It was a nightmare time, but he was not unhappy, for a veil seemed to be lifting from his horizon. He had recaptured his own country. The most alien sights and scents were translated into the idiom of home. As he lay in the hot tamarisk at midday he smelled thyme and bracken, and under a sky of glittering stars he could make believe that he was belated on some familiar moorland. Especially in rain could he retrieve these links, for the odour of wet earth seemed to re-create for him a whole world of ancient comfortable things. His body might be stretched to its ultimate endurance, but his mind was at peace…
One afternoon he came over a scarp of hill and looked down at last on the sea. There was a little bay below him and a few fishers’ huts; off shore lay a British destroyer, from which a watering-party had just landed. He looked at this assurance of safety with no quickening of the pulse, for he was too weary for such emotion. Besides, he had somehow expected it.
He was taken on board and met by a brisk young lieutenant. There had been a conversation between the lieutenant and a petty officer. “Escaped prisoner, I suppose. Good God, what a scarecrow! I suppose we must take charge of the poor devil. Bring him along at once.”
A few words from Adam sent the lieutenant’s hand to his cap.
“Adam Melfort! Of course I know all about you, sir! What almighty luck that we put in to this God-forgotten hole! You want a long drink, and then a bath, and a square meal, and then you ought to sleep for a week. I can lend you some kit… Hold on, sir. Perhaps you haven’t heard the news. It came through to us last night. The jolly old war is over. Yesterday morning Germany got down from her perch.”
But Adam scarcely listened, for he was in a happy dream. The lapping of green water and the tang of salt had carried him over great tracts of space and time. He had found Eilean Bàn.
Part 3
Chapter 10
In the smoking-room of the club where this story opened Christopher Stannix sat on a warm June evening. It was the day of the Peace celebrations in London, when the returning generals had passed through the streets, and from Pall Mall came the shuffling sound of homing spectators. The war had grizzled Stannix’s thick dark hair above the temples, and had slightly rounded his shoulders, for he had spent four years at office work. Also it had hollowed his cheeks, and made faint pencillings