The matter was very serious indeed. There was some very incriminating stuff there, and we did not at all desire another two months of the church. All sorts of measures were proposed and rejected. Burning the whole place down was mooted, but decided to be impossible, for paper burns so slowly that the sacks would certainly be saved. Then Bart did a very daring thing. He had slim shoulders, but a great heart, and he thought his narrow body might squeeze through the unbarred window. He waited an opportunity and dived through. Once in, squatted on the floor, the sentry would have to come right up to the window in order to see him. But the sentry only watched the door. And while he watched, Bart went through the lot as swiftly as a post office sorter, and removed more than half of the most dangerous items. He got safely out again, while the sentry still watched the door.
In No. 3 house, an officer named Budd was less fortunate. Trying to explain that he wanted to keep the mess accounts, he lost his temper and damned the interpreter. He was at once searched personally, and sent away into the town, where he was confined in a cellar. When he asked for bread, the gaoler said, “Para yok, ekmek yok,” which means, “No money, no bread.” Fortunately, Budd had money; but he had a very unpleasant five or six days before he was released. In the cell next to his he heard a poor, miserable little Chaldean priest, who had bravely but unwisely kept some record of the Armenian girls enslaved in various Turkish families, being mercilessly flogged, and screaming in his agony.
Bart had collected some of the diaries, but there were still others, and at least one plan of escape most unwisely committed to writing. A community would be incomplete without its salt of folly.
A few days later the remaining documents returned to us too. The Turks had bungled over the cooks, bungled over guarding their spoil, and now they bungled again worse than ever. They had a positive genius for incompetency: a masterly faculty for determining the wrong way to do a thing, and for doing it. After a few days, a sack of papers and note-books was returned to the camp. To our surprise, it was found to contain all those documents which we had feared the Turks might discover and keep.