The Road to En-dor Read online

  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

  Title Page

  Dedication

  E-Book

  Foreword by Neil Gaiman

  Introduction

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  How Spooking Began in Yozgad

  How the Camp Turned Spiritualist

  How the Mediums Were Tested

  Of the Episode of Louise, and How It Was All Done

  In Which the Reader Is Introduced to the Pimple

  In Which the Cook Appears and the Spook Finds a Revolver

  Of the Calomel Manifestation and How Kiazim Fell into the Net

  In Which We Become Thought-readers

  How the Spook Wrote a Magic Letter and Arranged Our Arrest

  How We Were Tried and Convicted For Telepathy

  In Which We Are Put on Parole by Our Colonel, and Go to Prison

  Of the Comrades We Had Left Behind and How Posh Castle Played the Raven

  In Which the Pimple Learns His Future Lies in Egypt

  Which Introduces OOO and Tells Why the Pimple Got His Face Smacked

  In Which the Spook Puts Our Colonel on Parole in His Turn, Saves the Hunt Club, and Writes a Speech

  How We Fell into a Trance and Saw the Future

  How the Spook Took Us Treasure-hunting and We Photographed the Turkish Commandant

  Of a ‘Dreadful Explosion’ and How OOO Sought to Murder Us

  Of the Four Point Receiver and How We Planned to Kidnap the Turkish Staff at Yozgad

  In Which We Are Foiled by a Friend

  In Which We Decide to Become Mad and the Spook Gets Us Certificates of Lunacy

  How the Spook Corresponded with the Turkish War Office and Got a Reply

  In Which the Spook Persuades Moïse to Volunteer for Active Service

  Of Our Mad Journey to Mardeen

  How We Hanged Ourselves

  In Which the Spook Convicts Moïse of Theft, Converts Him to Honesty, and Promises Omnipotence

  Of the First Day in Haidar Pasha Hospital and the Preliminary Examination by the Specialists

  Of the Wassermann Tests and How We Deceived the Medical Board

  Of Hill’s Terrible Month in Gumush Suyu Hospital

  In Which We Are Repatriated as Lunatics

  What the Pimple Thinks of It All – Three Letters

  List of Officers of the British and Indian Forces Interned At Yozgad, 1917

  The Matthews-Little Code-Test

  Extract From The Telepathy Code

  Extract From the Secret Séance Diaries

  Examples of Coded Messages from E.H. Jones Concerning the Escape

  Postcards and Letters

  Endnotes

  Copyright

  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 conv
erted 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.