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- Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
I followed them on a journey into nightmares, as what seemed to be a simple escape plan (simple? A lunatic escape plan of infinite complexity and unlikelihood, more like) transmuted and transformed' Neil Gaiman, from the foreword Captured during the First World War, Lieutenant E.H. Jones and Lieutenant C.W. Hill are prisoners of war at the Yozgad prison camp in Turkey. With no end to the war in sight and to save themselves from boredom, the prisoners hit upon the idea of making of a makeshift Ouija board to keep themselves entertained. But Jones, it turns out, has a natural skill for manipulating his fellow inmates, and Hill ably fulfils the role of magician's assistant and partner in crime. As their deception succeeds beyond their wildest imagination, other possibilities begin to emerge. What if this new-found hobby could be put to better use? Together Jones and Hill conjure up an almost unbelievable plot to dupe their captors into setting them free, featuring séances, ghost-guided treasure hunts and faked suicides. A runaway success when fi rst published, this true life-story is a remarkable tale of courage, ingenuity and resilience in the face of adversity. This brand new edition contains never-before-seen letters and photographs, an introduction from the descendants of E.H. Jones and a foreword by Neil Gaiman and is published alongside a free companion ebook containing even more fascinating material.
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The Road to En-dor
Being an Account of How Two Prisoners of War at Yozgad in Turkey Won Their Way To Freedom
By E.H. Jones, Lt. I.A.R.O.
With Photographic Material by C.W. Hill, Lt. R.A.F.
To
W.R. O’Farrell,
An Irish Gentleman,
Who, Himself Injured, Tended the Wounded
On the Desert Journey from Sinai into Captivity,
Going on Foot That They Might Ride,
Without Water That They Might Drink,
Without Rest That Their Wounds Might Be Eased;
And Afterwards,
With a Courage That Never Faltered
Through Nearly Three Years of Bondage,
Cheered Us in Health,
Nursed Us in Sickness,
And Ever Found His Chief Happiness
In Setting the Comfort of a Comrade
Before His Own.
E-Book
A profile of Harry Jones, the story of the siege of Kut-el-Amarah and the horrors of the subsequent death march can be found in e-book format on the website reached by scanning the Quick Response (QR) code below or visiting www.hesperuspress.com/the-road-to-en-dor.
It includes the original postcards and letters sent by Jones to his family from Mesopotamia and Yozgad and the encrypted messages which they contained, many of which were passed on to the British cabinet and War Office.
Contents
Foreword by Neil Gaiman
I did not steal the book. I did something worse.
I found the book in the old school library. The library was next door to the Matron’s office, where the school’s Matron (fat and funny and nice), and her deputy (sharp-faced and suspicious) and a variety of young deputies (sympathetic teenagers, with red cheeks) would read magazines, and drink tea. It took a certain amount of bravery to tell them I had a headache. If I told them I had a headache they would give me a cynical look, then dissolve an aspirin in a glass of water, and when I drank it I was sent to sit in the library to wait until my headache went away.
Sometimes I really did have a headache.
The book had a red cover, and it was called The Road to En-dor. I was ten years old and I read it utterly fascinated.
I started reading it because it had a sheet that folded out attached to the back cover with glue: a sort of chart, showing objects and numbers and such, and common phrases. I did not understand what the sheet was, and so I read the book.
And I was in Yozgad, with Jones, as he learned to fake the Ouija board, with Jones and Hill as they began to fool the Commandant and the Pimple. I followed them on a journey into nightmares, as what seemed to be a simple escape plan (simple? A lunatic escape plan of infinite complexity and unlikelihood, more like) transmuted and transformed, forever being thwarted by their own side. It was a journey into madness and self-delusion, in which a terrifying folie à deux somehow kept them both sane. It was a strange thing for a ten year old boy to be reading.
Somewhere along the way I understood what the chart in the book was: it was a mind-reading code. Two people could learn it and communicate information with a simple phrase like ‘Quick now, what am I looking at?’ I had heard of such things – my mother’s aunt and uncle had a mind-reading act – but now I was looking at a way to do it.
I removed the chart from the back of the book, and took it home, certain that I would one day meet someone who would be the Hill to my Jones, and we would create an astonishing mind-reading act together, but I never did.
I did not forget the book. The book was unforgettable.
Thirty years later, magician Penn Jillette told me in an email that there had never been a fake medium who had ever had a noble or good reason for doing what they did, in hoodwinking the easily hoodwinked, and I agreed with him. Up to a point, anyway. ‘Except for The Road to En-dor’, I said.
Being Penn Jillette, he had found a second-hand copy of the book on the internet within minutes of receiving my email. Also being Penn, he read the book and emailed me within the week, and told me he thought it would make a good film, and that we should write it together.
I reread it. I was surprised how much I had remembered of the book, and amazed at how much better, deeper and, eventually, darker it was than I remembered.
We set out on a quest to find who owned the film rights. Which took us to Hilary Bevan Jones [granddaughter of E.H. Jones], who has, in the decade since, become one of my best friends. We even wrote the film script. We learned how much Lt. Jones underplayed the horrors that he and Hill went through. We learned of the other film people who had wanted to bring the story to the world. We learned how much love there is for this forgotten book.
I wonder sometimes where the mind-reading chart that I stole from the book is today: somewhere in the attic, at a guess, or in some random papers. I would never have thrown it out. It was the key to the mysteries.
I am so glad that this edition of the book is now available. It’s a true story, underplayed, a story of heroism, of magic and of madness. And you can wonder, as I wonder now, as I wondered when I was ten, whether what Hill and Jones went through was worth it, whether their madness actually kept them sane.
Neil Gaiman
February 2014
Introduction
In the heat of the Burmese summer of 1915 a young Welshman elected to give up his job as Deputy Commissioner, based in the Moulmein District of Lower Burma, and leave the relative comfort of his Colonial Office appointment to fight in the First World War. The Welshman was Elias Henry Jones, known as Harry or Harri to his friends and family. He was thirty-one.
Harry was my grandfather. He died on 22nd December 1942, eleven days before I was born. For that reason I have always felt a certain affinity, some sort of a continuation. I was brought up with his story and the story of The Road to En-dor seeped into my consciousness as was the rest of our family, including my cousin Hilary.
Less than two years after marrying his childhood sweetheart Mair, Harry bade farewell to her as she boarded a ship in Rangoon to sail to England together with their four month old daughter and pregnant with their second child, and joined the army. Little did Harry and Mair know that they were not to meet again for three and a half years. Harry was to be captured by the Turkish army and marched nearly 2,000 miles across the deserts of Iraq and Syria into Turkey before making one of the most audacious prisoner of war escapes to take place during the First World War.
The war of 1914–18 is viewed in Europe as a war fought largely between European nations on the battlefields of France and on the Eastern Front in Russia but major campaigns also took place further south against Turkish troops of the Ottoman Empire. In Mesopotamia, an area which now largely comprises modern-day Iraq, British and Indian troops confronted the Turkish Army. Many tens of thousands of soldiers died in battles fought over the same places as those encountered by British and American soldiers in the recent invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Harry enlisted in the Indian Army Reserve of officers as a member of the Volunteer Artillery Battery (Rangoon contingent) and travelled across India and then by ship to Basra to join the Indian Expeditionary Force ‘D’ under Major General Sir Charles Townshend. Sent initially to protect the oilfields of southern Persia and Mesopotamia, the Indian Expeditionary Force pushed up the Tigris River to try to capture Baghdad from the Ottoman Empire and was lured into entrapment by the Turkish Army under Khalil Pasha.
On 3rd December 1915, after a major battle at Ctesiphon, south of Baghdad, Townshend’s army was forced into retreat and one of the longest sieges in modern British military history began. Over 13,000 soldiers from the Indian Expeditionary Force were surrounded by troops from the Turkish Army at Kut-al-Amarah on the Tigris river south-east of Baghdad. Harry was one of those trapped and fighting in the town.
The siege lasted 147 days with the blockaded British and Indian forces largely starved into submission after all food supplies, including almost all of the horses, mules and other animals accompanying the army, had been consumed. At the end, the men were limited to just four ounces of rice and one pound of meat per day (largely horse meat from the sacrificed animals). The Indian sepoys, because their religious beliefs prevented them from eating horse meat, suffered greatly, surviving on just ten ounces of atta and half an ounce of ghee per day.
All attempts by the British Army to relieve the besieged ended in failure. On 29th April 1916 over 13,000 troops and followers went into captivity at the end of a campaign that had seen some 33,000 British and Indian casualties. Of these, 23,000 resulted from the efforts to relieve Kut, almost twice the number that they were trying to rescue.
Harry was one of the many taken captive that day at Kut-el-Amarah. During the next sixty-two days he was force-marched with fellow prisoners, in the heat of the summer months, across the parched terrain of the Middle East and over the Taurus mountains, deep into central Turkey where he was to be held as a prisoner of war.
The march took a terrible toll. Of nearly 2,600 British and 10,500 Indian sepoy and camp followers captured at Kut some sixty-eight per cent of the British and some twenty-nine per cent of the Indians died from cholera, dysentery, beatings, maltreatment, thirst, starvation, exhaustion, even murder or simply being abandoned during the march or from their use as slave labour. The march from Kut-el-Amarah became a trail of dead and dying and skeletal remains.
Harry survived and arrived at the Yozgad prisoner of war camp in the remote Anatolian mountains on 30th June 1916. Using ingenious codes embedded in messages sent home he was amongst the first to inform the British government of the terrible destiny of the men from Kut-el-Amarah. His ingenuity and skill as an amateur code-maker, which went undetected throughout his two year stay in the prisoner of war camp, were a prelude to the complex plan that he developed with Cedric Hill, an Australian airman with the Royal Flying Corps captured in Turkish-occupied Sinai after a forced landing in a Blériot Experimental Aircraft (BE2). Cedric was an accomplished magician and this, combined with Harry’s skills of deception and subterfuge, allowed them to pull off an escape from the camp that was deemed to be impossible.
The first germs of the escape plan started to form in Harry’s mind in late spring 1917. He had received a postcard earlier that year from an aunt suggesting that he tried a Ouija Board to while away the time. It culminated fifteen months later when he boarded the Red Cross exchange ship at Smyrna (now Izmir). He and Cedric reached Alexandria as free men just as the armistice was signed in November 1918 and arrived back in England three weeks later.
Harry and Cedric took great risk in the execution of their plan and endured great mental hardship during months of investigation and a near fatal hanging. That the plan outwitted all who stumbled under the influence of ‘the Spook’, including the Camp Commandant, who was court-martialled after being hoodwinked by Harry and Cedric, is a testament to their mental strength, the subtlety of the escape plan and their devastating use of belief in the mystic and paranormal to manipulate the minds of not only their captors but also their fellow prisoners.
The Road to En-dor is the story of the escape, told in Harry’s own words. It is a remarkable story, first published in 1919 and reprinted many times.
Tony Craven Walker
Hilary Bevan Jones
February 2014
The Road to En-dor
Oh the road to En-dor is the oldest road
And the craziest road of all!
Straight it runs to the Witch’s abode,
As it did in the days of Saul,
And nothing is changed of the sorrow in store
For such as go down on the road to En-dor!
– RUDYARD KIPLING
Preface
The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of ‘spiritualism’ is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a ‘medium’ hired at a guinea a séance.
– T.H. Huxley.
Professor Huxley was never a prisoner of war in Turkey; otherwise he would have known that ‘spiritualism’, provided its truth be taken as demonstrated, has endless other uses – even for honest men. Lieutenant Hill and I found several of these uses. Spiritualism enabled us to kill much empty and weary time. It gave ‘True Believers’ satisfactory messages, not only from the world beyond, but also from the various battlefronts – which was much more interesting. It enabled us to obtain from the Turks comforts for ourselves and privileges for our brother officers. It extended our house room, secured a Hunt Club for our friends, and changed the mind of the Commandant from silent and uncompromising hostility to a postprandial friendliness ablaze with the eloquence of the Spook. Our Spook in Yozgad instituted a correspondence with the Turkish War Office in Constantinople. (Hill and I flatter ourselves that no other Spirit has dictated letters and telegrams to and obtained replies from a government department in any country.) It even altered the moral outlook of the camp Interpreter, a typical Ottoman Jew. It induced him to return stolen property to the owner, and converted him to temporary honesty, if not to a new religion (whether or not the same as the ‘New Revelation’ of which Sir A. Conan Doyle is the chief British exponent we do not quite know). Finally, what concerned us more, it helped us to freedom.
There is a good deal about spiritualism in this book because the method adopted by us to regain our liberty happened to be that of spiritualism. But the activities of our Spook are after all only incidental to the main theme. The book is simply an account of how Lieutenant Hill and I got back to England. The events described took place between February 1917 and October 1918. The incidents may seem strange or even preposterous to the reader, but I venture to remind him that they are known to many of our fellow prisoners of war whose names are given in the text, and at whose friendly instigation this book has been written.1
One thing more I must add. I began my experiments in spiritualism with a perfectly open mind, but from the time when the possibility of escape by these means first occurred to me I felt little concern as to whether communication with the dead was possible or not. The object of Lieutenant Hill and myself was to make it appear possible and to avoid being found out. In doing so we had many opportunities of seeing the deplorable effects of belief in spiritualism. When in the atmosphere of the séance, men whose judgment one respects and whose mental powers one admires lose hold of the criteria of sane conclusions and construct for themselves a fantastic world on their new hypothesis. The messages we received from ‘the world beyond’ and from ‘other minds in this sphere’ were in every case, and from beginning to end, of our own invention. Yet the effect both on our friends and on the Turks was to lead them, as earnest investigators, to the same conclusions as Sir Oliver Lodge has reached, and the arrival of his book Raymond in the camp in 1918 only served to confirm them in their views. We do not know if such a thing as a ‘genuine’ medium exists. We do know that, in the face of the most elaborate and persistent efforts to detect fraud, it is possible to convert intelligent, scientific, and otherwise highly educated men to spiritualism, by means of the arts and methods employed by ‘mediums’ in general.
When we reached England Lieutenant Hill and I thought our dealings with spiritualism had served their purpose, but we now hope they may play an even better part. If this book saves one widow from lightly trusting the exponents of a creed that is crass and vulgar and in truth nothing better than a confused materialism, or one bereaved mother from preferring the unwholesome excitement of the séance and the trivial babble of a hired trickster to the healing power of moral and religious reflexion on the truths that give to human life its stability and worth – then the miseries and sufferings through which we passed in our struggle for freedom will indeed have had a most ample reward.
E.H. Jones
1919
Figure 1: ‘The Furious’ – E.H. Jones.
Figure 2: ‘The Melancholic’ – C.W. Hill.
Acknowledgements
The photographs taken at Yozgad were taken using illicit cameras made by Lieutenant Hill or smuggled in to Lieutenant Wright and, together with the photographs of Lieutenants Jones and Hill, the autograph photograph of Mazhar Osman Bey and the drawing of The Mad Machine, appeared in the original publication of The Road to En-dor. The illustrations are by Howard Elcock and were originally published in The Wide World Magazine with an anecdoted version of The Road to En-dor entitled ‘The Lifted Veil’. The photograph of Doc. O’Farrell is published by courtesy of his descendants. The coded postcards and extracts from the original séance diaries given in the appendices are provided courtesy of the decendants of E.H. Jones.
Chapter I
How Spooking Began in Yozgad
On an afternoon late in February 1917 a Turk mounted on a weary horse arrived in Yozgad. He had come a 120-mile journey through snowbound mountain passes from railhead at Angora, and he carried a belated mail for us prisoners of war.
I could not feel grateful to him, for my share was only one postcard. It was from a very dear aunt. But I knew that somewhere in the Turkish Post Office were many more – from my wife, my mother, and my father. So I grumbled at all things Ottoman. I did not know this innocent-looking piece of cardboard was going to provide the whole camp with a subject for discussion for a year to come, and eventually prove the open sesame that got two of us out of Turkey.
Mail Day at Yozgad meant visits. The proper thing to do, after giving everybody time to read their letters several times over, was to go from room to room and pick up such scraps of war news as had escaped the eye of the censor. Some of us received cryptograms, or what we thought were cryptograms, from which we could reconstruct the position on the various fronts (if we had imagination enough), and guess at the progress of the war. The news that somebody’s father’s trousers had come down was, I remember, the occasion of a very merry evening, for it meant that Dad’s Bags (or Baghdad) had fallen at last. If, as occasionally happened, we found hidden meanings where none was intended, and captured Metz or Jerusalem long before such a possibility was dreamt of in England, it did more good than harm, for it kept our optimism alive.
I allowed the proper period to elapse and then crossed to the Seaman’s room. ‘Come in,’ said Tudway to my enquiring head, ‘Mundey has been round already and we can give you all the news.’ (Mundey was our champion cryptogrammist).
We discussed the various items of news in the usual way, and decided that the war could not possibly last another three months. Then Alec Matthews turned to me:
‘Had you any luck, Bones? What’s your mail?’
‘Only a postcard,’ I said. ‘No news in it, but it suggests a means of passing the evenings. I’m fed up with roulette and cards myself, and I’d like to try it.’
‘What’s the suggestion?’ Alec asked.
‘Spooking,’ said I.
‘Cripes!’ said Alec.
We began next night, a serious little group of experimenters from various corners of the earth. Each of us in his own little sphere had seen something of the wonders of the world and was keen to learn more. There was ‘Doc.’ O’Farrell, the bacteriologist, who had fought sleeping-sickness in Central Africa. He argued that the fact that we could not see them was no proof that spooks did not exist, and told us of things revealed by the microscope, things that undoubtedly ‘are there’, with queer shapes and grisly names. (The pictures he drew of some of his pet ‘bugs’ gave me a new idea for my next nightmare.) Then there was Little, the geologist from the Sudan, who knew all about the earth and the construction thereof, and had dug up the fossilized remains of weird and enormous animals. His pets were as big as the Doc.’s were small. There was Price, the submarine man from under the sea, and Tudway (plain Navy) from on top of it. And there is a saying about those who go down to the sea in ships which was never truer than of these two men. There was Matthews, from India, sapper and scientist. He knew all about wireless telegraphy and ether and the various lengths of the various kinds of waves, and he did not see why ‘thought waves’ should not exist in some of the gaps in the series which we thought to be empty. And there was the writer, who knew nothing of scientific value. He had studied psychology at college, and human nature amongst the jungle folk in Burma.
Figure 3: The Ouija.
Such was the group which first took up spooking. None of us knew anything about the subject, but my postcard gave clear instructions and we followed them. Matthews brought in the best table we possessed (a masterpiece made by Colbeck out of an old packing-case), and Doc. groomed the top of it with the corner of his embassy coat, so as to make it slippery enough for the Spook to slide about on with comfort.
Tudway and Price cut out squares of paper, and Little wrote a letter of the alphabet on each and arranged them in a circle round the edge of the table. I polished the tumbler in which we hoped to capture the Spook, and placed it upside down in the centre of the circle. Everything was ready. We had constructed our first ‘Ouija’.
‘Now what do we do?’ Doc. asked.
‘Two of us put a finger lightly on the glass, close our eyes and make our minds blank.’
‘Faith!’ said the Doc., ‘we’d better get a couple of Red Tabs from the Majors’ House; this looks like a Staff job. An’ what next?’
‘Then the glass should begin to move about and touch the letters. Somebody must note down the ones touched.’
Doc. sat down and put his forefinger gingerly on the glass. I took the place opposite him. Price and Matthews, pencil in hand, leant forward ready to take notes. Little and Tudway and Dorling and Boyes stood round to watch developments. Doc. and I closed our eyes and waited, fingers resting lightly on the glass, arms extended. For perhaps fifteen minutes there was a tensesilence and our arms grew unendurably numb. Nothinghappened.
Our places at the table were taken by two other investigators, and theirs in turn by two more, but always with a total absence of any result. We warmed the glass over a tallow candle – somebody had said it was a good thing to do – and re-polished the table. Then Doc. and I tried again.
‘Ask it some question,’ Price whispered.
‘WHO – ARE – YOU?’ said the Doc. in sepulchral tones, and forthwith I was conscious of a tilting and a straining in the glass, and then, very slowly, it began to move in gradually widening circles. It touched a letter, and the whole company craned their necks to see it.
‘B!’ they whispered in chorus.
It touched another. ‘R!’ said everybody.
‘I believe it is going to write “Brown”,’ said Dorling, and the movement suddenly stopped.
‘There ye go spoilin’ everything with yer talkin’,’ growled the Doc., his Irish accent coming out under the influence of excitement. ‘Will ye hold your tongues now, and we’ll be after tryin’ again!’
We tried again – we tried for several nights – but it was no use. The glass did not budge, or, if it did, it travelled in small circles and did not approach the letters. We blamed our tools for our poor mediumship and substituted a large enamelled tray for the table, which had a crack down the centre where the glass used to stick. The tray was an improvement and we began to reach the letters. But we never got sense. The usual séance was something like this:
Figure 4: Doc W.R. O’Farrell.
DOC.: ‘Who are you?’ Answer: ‘DFPBJQ.’
DOC.: ‘Try again. Who are you?’ Answer: ‘DFPMGJQ.’
MATTHEWS: ‘It’s obviously trying to say something – the same letters nearly, each time. Try again.’
DOC.: ‘Who are you?’ Answer: ‘THRSWV.’
MATTHEWS: ‘That’s put the lid on. Ask something else.’
DOC.: ‘Have you anything to say? ‘Answer: ‘WNSRYKXCBJ,’ and so on, and so on, page after page of meaningless letters. It grew monotonous even for prisoners of war, and in time the less enthusiastic investigators dropped out. At the end of a fortnight only Price, Matthews, Doc. O’Farrell and myself were left. We were intrigued by the fact that the glass should move at all without our consciously pushing it – I shall never forget Alec Matthews’ cry of wonder the first time he felt the ‘life’ in the glass – and we persevered.
Then our friend Gatherer came in. He said he didn’t care very much for this sort of thing, but he knew how to do it and would show us. He placed his fingers on the glass and addressed the Spook. We, as became novices, had always shown a certain respect in our manner of questioning the Unknown. Gatherer spoke as if he were addressing a defaulter, or a company on parade, with a ring in his voice which indicated he would stand no nonsense. And forthwith the glass began to talk sense. Its answers were short – usually no more than a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ – but they were certainly understandable. Once more we were all intensely interested. Gatherer did more than add fuel to the waning fire of our enthusiasm. He presented us with his own spookboard, which he and another officer had made some months before, and used in secret. It was a piece of sheet iron on which the glass moved much more smoothly than on the tray or the table, and he suggested pasting down the letters in such a way that they could not be knocked off by the movement of the glass. Later on Matthews still further improved it by adding a raised ‘scantling’ round the edge which prevented the glass from leaving the circle.
Gatherer was in great request, for without him we could get nothing, try we never so hard. But he would not come – he ‘disliked it’ – he ‘had other things to do’, he ‘might come tomorrow’, and so on. Ah, Gatherer, you have much to answer for! Had you never shown us that intelligible replies could be obtained, I might have remained an honest little enquirer, happy in the mere moving of the glass. But now, mere movement was no longer satisfying. We were tired of our own company, and knew one another as only fellow prisoners can. We wanted a chat with somebody ‘outside’, somebody with ideas culled beyond our prison walls, whose mind was not an open book to us, whose thoughts were not limited to the probable date of the end of the war or of the arrival of the next mail from home. It did not matter who it was – Julius Caesar or Socrates, Christopher Columbus or Aspasia (it is true we rather hoped for Aspasia, especially the Doc.), but any old Tom, or Dick, or Harry would have been welcome. You ought to have known that, Gatherer, for you were a prisoner, too; but you were callous, and left us alone to record our meaningless X’s, and Y’s and Z’s.
After another week of failure we grew desperate. ‘If we get nothing tonight,’ said Matthews, ‘we’ll chuck it.’
We tried hard, and got nothing.
‘One more shot, Bones,’ said the Doc., sitting down opposite me.
I glanced at him, and from him to Price and Matthews. Disappointment was written on every face. Success had seemed so near, and we had laboured so hard. Was this to end as so many of our efforts at amusement had ended, in utter boredom?
The doctor began pulling up the sleeves of his coat as though he were leading a forlorn hope.
‘Right you are, Doc.’ I put my fingers on the glass. ‘One more shot,’ and as I said it the Devil of Mischief that is in every Celt whispered to me that the little man must not go empty away. We closed our eyes.
Figure 5: The Doc wriggled forward in his chair, tugging up his coat-sleeves. ‘Keep at it,’ he whispered excitedly.
‘For the last time,’ said the Doc. ‘WHO – ARE – YOU?’
The glass began to move across the board.
‘S-,’ Matthews read aloud, ‘A-L-L-Y – SALLY!’
‘Sally,’ Price repeated, in a whisper.
‘Sally,’ I echoed again.
The Doc. wriggled forward in his chair, tugging up his coat-sleeves. ‘Keep at it,’ he whispered excitedly. ‘Keep at it, we’ve got one at last.’ And then in a loud voice that had a slight quaver in it –
‘GOOD EVENING, SALLY! HAVE YE ANYTHIN’ TO TELL US?’
Sally had quite a lot to tell us. She made love to Alec Matthews (much to his delight) in the most barefaced way, and then coolly informed him that she preferred sailor-boys. Price beamed, and replied in fitting terms. She talked seriously to the Doc. (who had murmured – out of jealousy, I expect – that Sally seemed a brazen hussy), and warned us to be careful what we said in the presence of a lady. (That ‘presence of a lady’ startled us – most of us hadn’t seen a lady for nearly three years.) She accused me of being unbecomingly dressed. (Pyjamas and a blanket – quite respectable for a prisoner.) Then she complained of ‘feeling tired’, made one or two most unladylike remarks when we pressed her to tell us more, and ‘went away’.
I had fully intended to tell them that I had steered the glass, with my eyes shut, from my memory of the position of the letters. But the talk became too good to interrupt. There were theories as to who Sally could be. Was she dead, or alive, or non-existent? Was the glass guided by a spook or by subconscious efforts? Then round again on to the old argument of why the glass moved at all. Was it the unconscious exercise of muscular force by one or both of the mediums or was it some external power? I lay back and listened to the sapper and the submarine man and the scientist from Central Africa. Others dropped in and added their voices and extracts from their experience to the discussion. Dorling had schoolboy reminiscences of a thought-reading entertainment, which was somehow allied to the subject in hand. Winnie Smith knew someone – I think it was one of his second cousins in Russia, or a crowned head, or somebody of the kind – who had a pet spook in the house. I told my story of the dak bungalow in Myinmu Township in Burma, where there is a black ghost-dog, who does not mind revolver bullets. We talked, and we talked, and we talked, forgetting the war and the sentries outside and all the monotony of imprisonment. And always the talk rounded back to Sally and the spook-glass that moved no one knew how. The others slipped away to bed, and we were left alone. Alec, Price, the Doc., and myself. I braced myself to confess the fraud, but Doc. raised his tin mug:
‘Here’s to Sally and success, and many more happy evenings,’ said he.
Facilis descensus Averni! I lifted my mug with the rest, and drank in silence. Little I guessed how much water was to flow under the bridges before I could make my confession, or under what strange conditions that confession was to be made.
* * *
Next day I woke – a worm. I felt as if I had caught myself taking sweeties from a child. They had all accepted the wonder of the previous night so uncritically. It was a shame. It was unforgivable! I would get out of bed. I would go across and tell them at once.
‘Don’t,’ said the Devil of Mischief. ‘Stay where you are. It was only a rag. If you really want to tell them, any old time will do. Besides, it’s beastly cold this morning, and you’ve got a headache. Stay in bed!’
‘But it wasn’t a rag. We were experimenting in earnest,’ said I. ‘That’s why it was so mean.’ I got one foot out of bed.
‘Stay where you are, I tell you,’ said the Devil. ‘You gave them a jolly good evening, and you can have plenty more.’
I pulled my foot back under the blankets again. Yes, we had had a jolly evening – the Doc. himself had said so. I would think it over a little longer.
I thought it over – and started up again.
‘You ass!’ said the Devil. ‘They’ll only laugh at you! The whole thing’s a fraud, anyway. Let them find out for themselves. Oliver Lodge2, Conan Doyle, and the rest of the precious crew are victims in the same way.’
‘I won’t,’ said I. ‘I’m going to tell them.’ I got up and dressed slowly.
‘See here,’ said the Devil. ‘What you gave them last night was something new to talk about. Carry on! It does them good. It sets them thinking. Carry on!’
‘And what sort of a swine will I look when they find me out?’ said I.
‘But they won’t,’ said the Devil.
‘But they will – they must,’ said I, and opened the door.
On the landing outside was our ‘Wardie’, once of America, doing Müller’s exercises to get the stiffness out of his wounded shoulder. That was a Holy Rite, which nothing was allowed to interrupt. But today he stopped and faced me. I think my Devil must have entered into him.
‘Hello, Bones, you sly dog!’ said he.3
‘What’s up, Wardie?’
‘Oh, you don’t get me with your larks,’ he said, grinning at me. ‘I know you, you old leg-puller!’
I made to pass on.
‘You and your Sally,’ he chuckled.
‘Oh, that,’ I said, and tried again to pass.
‘Come on, Bones,’ he continued; ‘how d’you do it?’
‘Why, that’s spooking, Wardie,’ said I.
‘Oh, get on with you! You don’t catch me! I’m too old a bird, Sonny. How’s it done?’
‘You’ve seen! You sit with your fingers on a glass, and the glass moves about.’
‘Yes, yes, it moves all right. But this Sally business? These answers?’
‘That’s what everybody’s trying to find out, Wardie.’
‘I’ll find out one of these fine days, Bones me boy!’ He dug his thumb into my ribs and laughed at me.
‘Right-o, Wardie,’ said I, and went back into my room. My dander was up.
Chapter II
How the Camp Turned Spiritualist
I made up my mind to rag for an evening or two more and to face the music, when it came, in the proper spirit. There was a recognized form of punishment at Yozgad for a ‘rag’. It was a ‘posh’.4 In my case, with Doc., Matthews, Price, and of course the Seaman (who always joined in on principle) as my torturers, I expected it would be a super-posh, and trembled accordin’. I had no doubt in my own mind that discovery would come very soon.
When evening came round, there were Alec, Doc., and Price waiting round the spook-board with their tongues out, wanting more ‘Sally’. I sat down with the unholy joy of the small boy preparing a snowball in ambush for some huge and superior person of uncertain temper, and with not a little of his fear of being found out before the snowball gets home on the target.
‘Now, Doc.,’ said I, trying to avert suspicion from myself, ‘don’t you get larking. I’m beginning to suspect you.’
‘And I’m suspecting you,’ he laughed. ‘Come on, ye old blackguard!’
We started, and for several minutes got nothing but a series of unintelligible letters. The reason for this was simple enough. The ‘medium’s’ mind was blank. I hadn’t the foggiest notion of what to say, and could only push the glass about indiscriminately. Matthews and Price faithfully noted down every letter touched. This kept everybody happy, and as a matter of fact formed a useful precedent for future occasions.
‘It’s there all right,’ said Alec. ‘Keep it up, you fellows. We’ll get something soon.’
Gatherer came in, and after watching for a minute gave an order to the Spook in his parade voice: ‘Go round and look at your letters.’
The indiscriminate zig-zagging stopped and the glass went round the circle slowly.
‘Gee! Snakes!’ said Alec. ‘That’s the stuff, Gatherer; give it some more!’
‘No sense in being afraid of the blighter,’ said Gatherer. ‘Here! Stop going round now! Tell us who you are!’
‘Go – to – hell!’ came the answer.
Gatherer was not abashed. ‘Is that where you are?’ he asked, and the Spook began to swear most horribly. My mind was no longer blank; it teemed with memories of my court in Burma, and the glass said to Gatherer what the old bazaar women of the East say to one another before they get ‘run in’.
‘All right, old chap,’ said Gatherer. ‘That’s enough. I’m sorry. I apologise.’
‘Go away,’ said the Spook, and until Gatherer obeyed the glass would do nothing but repeat, ‘Go away,’ ‘Go away,’ to every question that was asked.
Looking back, I can see this was an important episode. Of course the glass wrote ‘go away’ because I could think of nothing better to say at the moment (practice was to make my imagination much more fertile), and it kept on repeating the request because I had begun to wonder if I really could make Gatherer leave the room.
‘Shall I go?’ Gatherer asked.
‘Faith! You’d better,’ said the Doc., ‘or who knows what It will be saying next?’
Gatherer went, and the Spook began to write again. It might well do so, for It had begun to establish its ‘Authority’.
Now, for successful spooking, ‘Authority’ is all-important. The utterances of a medium ‘under control’ must be, and are for the believer, the object of an unquestioning reverence.
I have two small mites of children. They usually demand a ‘story’ of an evening. Since my return they have gradually established a precedent, and it has become a condition for their going to bed. I take them on my knees, their silky hair against my cheeks, and look into the fire for inspiration about ‘elephants’ or ‘tigers’ or ‘princesses’, or whatever may be the subject of immediate interest and then I begin. I don’t go very far without a question, and when that is successfully negotiated there are two more questions on the ends of their restless tongues. The linked answers comprise the story. Nobody makes any bones about the credibility of it, because ‘father tells it’. Thousands of other fathers are doing the same every day. Parents yet to be will continue the good work for the generations unborn.
What the parent is for the child, the medium is for ‘believers’. The gentle art, as Hill (my ultimate partner in the game) and I know it, is merely a matter of shifting the authorship of the answers from yourself to some Unknown Third, whose authority has become as unquestionable to the ‘sitter’ as the father’s is to the child. Once that is achieved the problem in each case is precisely the same. It consists in answering questions in a manner satisfactory to the audience. I also find there is no fundamental difference in the material required for the ‘links’. Granted the ‘authority’, the same sort of stuff pleases them all alike, children and grown-up ‘sitters’. If you have ever watched a true believer at a sitting you will know exactly what I mean; and if you can describe the palace of an imaginary princess, you can also describe the sixth, or seventh, or the eighth ‘sphere’. But of course you must always be careful to call it a ‘palace’ in the one instance, and a ‘sphere’ in the other.
I did not realize this all at once. I did not set out with any scheme of building up the Spook’s authority. I laid out for myself no definite line of action against my friends. My policy, in fact, was that by which our own British Empire has grown. I determined to do the job nearest to hand as well as I could, and to tackle each problem as it arose. I would ‘rag around a bit’ and then withdraw as soon as circumstances permitted me to do so gracefully. But circumstances never permitted. One thing led to another, and my ‘commitments’ in the spook-world grew steadily, as those of our Empire have done in this.
Nor, needless to say, did I see at this time the faintest resemblance between Alec calling for ‘Sally’ and my small boy demanding a ‘story’ at my knee. To me, Alec and Doc. and Price (not to mention the rest of the camp) were grown men, thewed and sinewed, with the varied store of wisdom that grown men acquire in their wanderings up and down the wide seas and the broad lands of this old Empire of ours. They were ‘enquirers’ – not ‘true believers’ as yet – and as I was to find out in due course, they were ‘no mugs’ at enquiring. I could only hug myself at the idea of the poshing I would get when the rag was discovered, and fight my hardest to ward off the evil day.
Soon after Gatherer left the room my career as a medium almost came to an inglorious end. The trap into which I nearly fell was not consciously set, so far as I am aware, for in those early days when everything was fresh the interest of the audience was centred more in the substance of the communications than in the manner in which they were produced.
The situation arose in this way: being a medium was a tiring game. An hour on end of pushing the glass about at arm’s length required considerable muscular effort. Your arm became as heavy as lead; until we got into training Doc. and I had to take frequent rests. This fatigue was natural enough, and everybody knew of it, but nobody knew that practically the whole of my body was subjected to a physical strain. At this period of my mediumship I used to close my eyes quite honestly; I was therefore obliged to remember the exact position of each letter, not only in its relation to other letters but also to myself, so as to be able to steer the glass to it. The slightest movement of the spook-board, caused, for example, by my sleeve or the Doc.’s catching on the edge of it, as sometimes happened, was sufficient to upset all my calculations until I had had an opportunity of glancing at it again. I used to try to guard against this by resting my left hand lightly on the edge of the board. I could then feel any movement, and at the same time my left hand formed a guide to my right, for, before closing my eyes, I used to note what letter my little finger was resting on. I had two other guides – my right and my left foot under the table gave me the angles of two other known letters. If the reader will try and sit for an hour, moving his right hand freely, but with both feet and the left hand absolutely still, he will understand why indefinite sittings were impossible. Add to this the concentration of mind necessary to remember the letters, to invent suitable answers to questions, and to spell them out.
‘I am fagged out,’ I said wearily. ‘Don’t you feel the strain, Doc.?’
‘Only my arm.’ He rubbed the numbness out of it. ‘Come on, Bones, let’s get some more; this is interesting.’
‘I’m dead beat. I feel it all over me. It seems to take a lot out of me.’
The three looked at me curiously. They obviously regarded me as a medium who had been under ‘control.’ (En passant, I wonder if the ‘exhaustion’ of all mediums after a séance is not due to similar causes?)
‘Right you are, Bones,’ said Price, ‘I’ll take your place. You come and note down.’
I took his pencil and notebook, and he sat down to the board with the Doc. The glass moved and touched letters, but they made, of course, nothing intelligible. After a space, when I had rested, Doc. said his arm was tired and suggested I should take his place. I did so. Price and I were now at the gips. Somebody asked a question. I started to reply in the usual way, but luckily realized in time what I was doing, and instead of giving a coherent answer, allowed the glass to wander among the Xs and Ys at its own sweet will. It had flashed across my mind that so long as I obtained answers only when the Doc. was my partner, no ‘sceptic’ could tell which of the two of us was controlling the glass. If, on the other hand, I obtained answers in conjunction with others as well as when with the Doc., while no other pair in combination could do so, I was clearly indicated as the control, and a very simple process of elimination would doom me to discovery. I therefore came to a hurried decision that only when the Doc. was my partner should the Unknown be allowed to speak, and it was not till long after the Spook had proved to the satisfaction of our ‘enquirers’ its own separate existence that I permitted myself to break this resolution.
So Price and I continued to bang out unintelligible answers until everybody was tired of it. Matthews, who amongst other objectionable pieces of knowledge had acquired something of mathematics, then worked out the combinations and permutations of four spookists, two together, and insisted we should test them all. We did. The only result was pages of Qs and Ms, of Xs, Ys and Zs. Bones and the Doc. were the only pair who got answers.
At our after-séance talk, this led to a new discovery – new, that is, for us. It was obvious that mediums must be en rapport! We attacked the subject from all sides, and as usual others joined in our discussion. When I went to bed, Matthews was demonstrating, with the aid of two tallow candles on a deal box, something about wavelengths, and positive and negative electricity, and tuning up and down to the same pitch. I am sure I don’t know what it was all about, but it clearly proved the necessity of something being en rapport with something else in the material world. Therefore why not the same necessity for spiritual things? So far as I remember, Alec, old man, your theory was quite sound – it was your facts that were wrong! Perhaps I should have told you so, and saved you much hard thinking: but put yourself in my place – wasn’t it fun?
* * *
Thus we continued for several evenings. The camp looked on with mingled amusement and interest. Our séances began to be a popular form of evening entertainment. Quite a little crowd would gather round the board, and ask questions of the Spook. For the most part, at this stage, the audiences were sceptical – they suspected a trick somewhere, though they could not imagine how it was done. Curiously enough, suspicion centred not on me, but on the perfectly innocent Doctor. The poor man was pestered continually to reveal the secret. He swore vehemently that he had nothing to do with it, but it was pointed out to him that the glass only wrote when he was there – a fact he could not deny.
This sceptical attitude of the camp was of the utmost value to me. It amounted to a challenge and spurred me to fresh efforts. The whole affair being a rag, with no definite aim in view, it would not have been fair play to the enquirers to have told an out-and-out lie. But I considered it quite legitimate to dodge their questions if I could do so successfully. The following is a type of the conversations that were common at this period:
‘Look here, Bones, is this business between you and the Doc. straight?’
‘How do you mean, “straight”?’
‘This spooking business! Is it genuine?’
‘Jack,’ I would say confidentially (or Dick, or Tom, as the case might be), ‘I’ll tell you something. The whole thing is mysterious. I assure you there is no arrangement whatsoever between the Doc. and myself. The camp think we are in league for a leg-pull. But we’re not. We took this business up as an enquiry – see, here’s the original postcard.’
And I would produce the well-worn bit of cardboard which first suggested the spooking, and gently disentangle Jack’s fingers from my buttonhole.
Perhaps ‘Jack’ would be satisfied and go away, or perhaps he would be a persistent blighter and carry on.
‘But how is it done, Bones?’
‘You mean, what makes the glass move?’
‘Well – yes.’
‘My own theory – it may be wrong, of course, because I’ve never done much at psychical research – my own theory is that the movement must be due to muscular action on the part of the mediums. I believe Oliver Lodge and those other Johnnies hold that the muscular action is subconscious, but that is Tommy-rot. Anything is subconscious so long as you don’t think of the process of thought, and nothing is subconscious so long as it is known. Besides,’ I would add, looking up into my questioner’s face as innocently as I could, ‘as soon as the glass begins to move about I am quite conscious of every movement. That’s straight. The Doc. will tell you the same thing. I must admit that he has often pointed out to me that one seems to be following the glass about. He has been analysing his own sensations from the medical point of view, and he is rather interesting on this point. You should ask him about it.’
‘I will,’ Jack would say, and off he would go to cross-examine the poor old Doc.
Probably Dick or Tom had been listening to our conversation, and would now chip in with:
‘That’s all very well, Bones, but I believe you’re playing the fool all the time. Now aren’t you?’
‘Right-o, Dick! If you like to think I’m ass enough to sit there night after night for the mere lark of the thing, you’re welcome.’
‘But the whole affair’s absurd, impossible,’ Dick would protest.
‘You say so, but what about Oliver Lodge? He has studied this business for years, and swears he gets into communication with the next world in this way. And he is a scientist, my boy, while you are a plain soldier man and don’t know your arm from your elbow in these matters. A few years ago I expect you were saying that wireless telegraphy and flying and all the rest of our modern scientific marvels were impossible. You are the conservative type of fellow who doesn’t believe a thing possible until he can do it himself. Why, you old idiot, for all you know you may be a medium yourself. Why don’t you come along and try some night?’
And Dick would come, and try, and get nothing!
I was often grateful in those days for my past experience as a magistrate in Burma. My study of law and lawyers helped me considerably in the gentle art of drawing a red herring across my questioners’ train of thought.
I was beginning to think that the business had gone on long enough, and it was time to confess, when Fate stepped in again. Intrigued by our success, several other groups of experimenters had been formed in the camp, notably in the Hospital House5. One fine morning we were electrified by the news that there also ‘results’ had been obtained.
The Doc. came up to me as I was walking in the lane. He was all hunched up with glee.
‘Faith,’ he said to me, ‘the sceptics have got it in the neck. Here’s Nightingale and Bishop been an’ held a long conversation with the spooks last night.’
‘I don’t see that that will make much difference to the sceptics,’ said I.
‘But I do,’ said the Doc. ‘The camp doesn’t believe in it now because you’re you and I’m me. But who in Turkey or out of it can suspect fellows like Bishop and Nightingale? – that’s what I want to know.’
‘And why not suspect Bishop and Nightingale?’ I asked.
‘Ach! ye might as well suspect a babe unborn. Not one of the two of them has the imagination of a louse. They’re plain, straightforward Englishmen – not Celtic fringe like you an’ me – an’ the camp knows it.’
‘But don’t you suspect them yourself?’ I asked. ‘You said the other day that you suspected me, you know.’
‘So I did, but that’s different, as I say. These two are genuine enough.’
‘No doubt,’ said I, for I was quite open-minded about the possibilities of ‘spooking’. ‘Whom were they talking to last night?’
‘Oh – just Sally, and Silas P. Warner, and that lot,’ said the Doc. ‘Same crowd of spooks as we get ourselves.’
I glanced at him to see if he was joking. He wasn’t. Lord! Doc. dear, how I longed to laugh!
* * *
Either Nightingale or Bishop (I did not know which at the time) was fudging. I knew this for certain because they were using ‘spooks’ of my own creation. It puzzled me at the time to know why they should not have invented spooks of their own. I learned long afterwards that mine were adopted because it was thought that my show was possibly genuine. If so, what could be more natural than that the spirits which haunted the Upper House should also be found next door?
The position was now rather funny. I knew, of course, that both ‘shows’ were frauds. The villain of the piece in the Hospital House knew his own show was a fraud, but was not sure about mine. The majority of the camp, on the other hand, were inclined to think there might be something in the Hospital House exhibition, although they had viewed mine with suspicion. But if they accepted the Hospital House, they had to accept ours too, the spooks being the same. And, in the course of time, that was what happened.
Figure 6: Freeland drew a poster for me.
The development in the Hospital House had another result. My little ‘rag’ was assuming larger proportions than I had intended, and as often happens in this funny old world, circumstances were beginning to tie me up. I could not now confess without giving somebody else away at the same time as myself. Besides, I did not very much want to confess. The ‘conversion’ of a large portion of the camp was in sight, for Doc. was quite right in his analysis of the situation, and the entry of Bishop and Nightingale on the scene had disposed everybody to further enquiry into the matter. The position was beginning to have a keen psychological interest for me.
So I compromised with my conscience. Freeland drew for me a fitting poster – a picture of a spook-glass and board, and beneath it I placed a notice which said that ours was the original Psychical Research Society of Yozgad, that it had no connection with any other firm, and that we held séances on stated evenings. Our fellow prisoners were asked to attend. The closest inspection was invited. The poster ended by saying that the mediums each suspected the other and would welcome any enquirer who could decide how the rational movements of the glass were caused. Muscular action, thought transference, spiritualism and alcoholism were suggested to the camp as possible solutions.
Shortly after this notice was put up, Doc. and I were asked if we objected to a series of ‘tests’. Doc., strong in his own innocence, welcomed the suggestion. As for me, it was exactly what I wanted – the raison d’être
