There are quite a few books about the experience of British POWs in Turkey. They include escapers tales such as Sir Thomas White's Guests of the unspeakable , E.O.Mousley's The secrets of a Kuttite , Johnson and Yearsley's 450 miles to freedom and H.C.W.Bishop's A Kut Prisoner, in addition to The road to En-Dor. These, plus other accounts, paint a ghastly picture. The Turks inflicted appalling cruelty on their captives at Kut-al-Amara, for instance - for me, a still-unpunished war crime of some magnitude. The conditions in which prisoners were held were crude and squalid. Food was not provided, but "wages" were...and the POWs were allowed into the villages to buy what little food there was to be had. Thus it was not prison fences that bound the British, but the hundreds of miles of unfriendly, often mountainous terrain between the camps and freedom. The successful escapees were incredibly resourceful.

Lieutenants E.H.Jones and C.W.Hill perhaps more than most, for their escape took them well over a year of continuous and most complex deception. On face value, to obtain freedom by persuading your captors that you have been possessed and are mad (with your close enemy confidants being entirely satisfied that this is the work of a Spook who will eventually guide them to the buried treasure of a rich Armenian murdered by the Turks), sounds difficult enough. Doing this in the face of detailed examination by highly-qualified authorities, 24-hour observation and so on, for months on end..when you are starving, with dysentery, and mis-treated...is just beyond comprehension. The temptation is say 'to hell with this, I need some water' must have been there constantly.

Jones and Hill finally got away by being placed onto an exchange ship in October 1918. Ironically this was only weeks before their brother officers who had remained content to undertake not to escape, joined them in freedom.