Description: Eastern Nights - And Flights: A Record of Oriental Adventure by Captain Alan Bott. Published by Doubleday, Page & Company (1919). Hardback in blue cloth with rubbing, edge wear and some loss to the tips and spine ends. 298 pages of text. Three portrait photos: photo of him while in prison and using an alias , Fritz...; photo of Capt. White; photo of Capt. Yeates-Brown in drag so he could escape from the Turks . In 1917, Bott learned to fly. His first assignment as a pilot was to No. 111 Squadron, which was stationed in the Sinai Desert. He was shot down and spent four months in a Turkish prison from which he escaped to freedom. 298 pages of text with some age toning and foxing, particularly around the three photo illustrations. During WWI, British pilot Captain Alan Bott was stationed in Syria. In one of air-fights he was shot down by a German plane. After a crushing landing he was captured by Arabs and interrogated in French by a young Turkish officer who turned out to be Armenian. “I had been lucky enough to fall among Arabs and Armenians, whose officers were, one and all, pro-British. They were a labour unit, explained the young Armenian, and their work was to make roads and tracks the hill-country. Like all the conscript Armenians, Greeks, and Jews, and most Arabs, they had not been sent to the fighting front because most of them would have deserted to the British at the first opportunity.” (p.16). Turks sent Bott and other British POWs to Damascus where they tried to escape from using “the secret caravans, by means of which Arabs and Armenians were slipping southward from Damascus to Akaba…Anyhow, the Armenians who organized the secret caravans must be shy of adding immensely to their risks by taking British officers, and if they did take such risks they would expect to receive more ready money than we possessed.” (pp. 62, 72). From Damascus, British POWs proceeded to Afion-Kara-Hissar. On the way they were helped by a French-speaking Armenian interpreter. In Afion they lived in confiscated Armenian homes. The Armenians they saw were “the dark-haired Armenian girls – the only Armenians left in the town – who had been saved from exodus and massacres of 1915-16 that they might serve the pleasures of Turkish officers and officials.” (p. 136). Turkish high rank officers sought pleasure not only in girls – “…two British soldiers, thrown into jail for some trivial offence, had been forcibly outraged, first by the commandant and then by his sergeant-major.” (p. 129). This commandant was, “one Muslim Bey, who was reported to have committed several executions for Enver Pasha during the turbulent days of the Young Turks coup d’etat in 1908. He was a brute, a swindler, and a degenerate, and during his reign unspeakable outrages were committed.” (p.128). Uncommon title.
Price: 250 USD
Location: Providence, Rhode Island
End Time: 2025-01-12T20:51:37.000Z
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Subject: Military & War
Place of Publication: NYC
Topic: WWI (1914-18)
Country/Region of Manufacture: United States
Language: English
Origin: American
Original/Facsimile: Original
Binding: Hardcover
