BY Captain M. A. B. JOHNSTON, r.g.a. AND Captain K. D. YEARSLEY, r.e. William Blackwood and Sons Edinburgh and London 1919 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED...

" Il n'y a pas trois officiers ." Such was the memorable epigram by which Sherif Bey, Turkish Captain of the Prisoners-of-War Guard at Kăstamōni, and a man regardless of detail, announced to us that four officers, whose escape has been described in 'Blackwood's Magazine,' [1] had got safely away from the camp. Those of us who knew that the attempt was being made were anxiously waiting for news. To others it came as a great surprise. Captain [2] Keeling, in his story mentioned above, does not, fo

No. 2 was now allowed to lead the way. Of this he said he knew every foot; but we had only just started when the course he took veered almost to due north. Cochrane, who was next to him, caught hold of his arm and told him we were not imbeciles, and the man then led us along a fair line of country bearing between S.S.W. and S. He informed us that we would come to water on that night's march after four hours, and that we would then halt. It was decided to leave affairs in his hands: if his plans

Shortly before sunset on August 15th we started to climb the ravine. This was a mile and a half long, and by the time we reached the top night had fallen. On our way up we had seen a stone that looked very like a bird; as one of us stooped to pick it up, the stone, to our great surprise, turned itself into a night-jar and fluttered away. The hills we now crossed were very rough and steep. At the bottom of the first valley to which we came we found a stream, by which we halted in the bright moonl

An hour later, having refilled every water-carrying vessel, we too got under way. Scarcely had we gone three hundred yards from the well, however, when a rifle bullet whizzed over our heads and plunked into the higher ground some distance beyond. We stopped and turned, to find that we were followed by a party of five ruffians, two of whom we could see had rifles. Grunt shouted out to ask what they wanted, upon which they waved to us, as much as to imply that it was all a mistake and we could go

As the country before us appeared to be quite deserted, we began to move off a little before 3 P.M. The going was much the same as in the early morning, but what had then been small nullahs became broader and deeper ravines, running across our path at intervals of seven to eight hundred yards. The north sides of the ravines were especially steep. An hour and a half after our start we saw ahead of us some men and a string of camels, possibly engaged in contraband affairs with Cyprus. Accordingly

During this 25th August we had fixed our position so far as our obsolete map would permit. We had, we thought, just crossed the watershed of the Taurus, and if the day had only been clearer might perhaps have obtained our first view of the sea from our point of vantage that morning. This fact of being on the watershed, together with a compass-bearing on to a peak recognisable to the south, settled our position fairly definitely as a little to the west of the range marked Gueuk Tepe on the map. T

When daylight came, we found ourselves in a network of extraordinary valleys. Large trees grew on the rock-strewn slopes, while along the bottoms were little strips of bright red soil, sprinkled with stones, and yet suggestive of great fertility; and indeed in some parts it was clear that the ground had in a previous year been ploughed. Yet as far as human habitation was concerned the valley seemed entirely deserted; only here and there as we marched on we passed a few timbers of some ruined she

There was still, however, no time to be lost in discovering and obtaining the motor-tug or other boat, seeing that we had arrived on the coast with barely three days' supply of food. That same night, then, Cochrane and Nobby carried out a reconnaissance, continuing to follow our ravine down towards the sea, in the hope that they would come out opposite the bay into which the tug and her tow had disappeared that afternoon. The remainder settled down to sleep as best they could, without a dinner a

Our experiments at chupattie-making had led us in the end to grind the wheat in two stages—first into coarse meal, and then, with a finer setting of the mill, into flour. This meant less strain both for us and for the machine: upon the safety of the latter practically depended our survival, and frequent were the exhortations to the miller on duty not to be too violent with the wretched little handle. Standing there in the sun—for though there were trees in the ravine, they were not high enough t

There is one note, however, which we feel we must add before laying down our pens. Many of our readers will have already realised that there was something more than mere luck about our escape. St Paul, alluding to his adventures in almost the very same region as that traversed by us, describes experiences very like our own. Like him, we were "in journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, ... in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in peril