Judge — May 31, 1924 — page 21: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Henry Ford vs. the Terrible Turk by Waller Prichard Eaton I ALL the “war books” written since 1914 were placed end to end they would reach from Dexter, Me., to Hollywood, € turn sharp left at the stone watering trough, cross the Mc : desert, and stop in Death Valley which we, in common with the majority of other people, consider a very good place for most of them. But not for Adventures in’ the Near East,” ly Lt. Col. A. Rawlinson (Dodd, Mead & Co.), which is not only very nearly the most interesting war book we have ever read, but one of the most gor- geously amusing and romantic and excit- ing and informative volumes of recent years. There are two kinds of English- men—those with a sense of Immor, and those without. The former, whe invariably play the game, of fi dogs and say so, love their fellow-men and refuse to say so, are about the best are devoid ar, greet destiny with a grin, love companions and the most reliable and likeable speci mens of the genus homo which our alleged civilization has pro- duced. Colonel Rawlinson is a supreme The other kind r all, what international example of the bree of Englishman. is—we is the use in’ startin, complications? — The other kind of Englishman it) was who caused Heine to say that he would like to live in England if it were not for two things he would find there, coal smoke and Englishmen, C tinguished family. His father was a scholar and a soldier. His brother wa a general in the He himself the Army, and Jonel Rawlinson comes of a dis- the hook be, in the last year of the war, when he jomed the “Hush, Hush? army in Mesopot: and piloted a fleet of flivvers from Bagdad to the Caspian ed in’ the air. His 1s, however, na brave but vain effort to rescue the oil of Baku from the Turks and Bolsheviks. We know more than we did in this country, too, about oil. But Colonel Rawlinson was, and is, a soldier, and less concerned with the in national aspects of oil than with its operation in. the engine of his. car. Next to taking a Ford from my house age of Sheffield, Mass., when the frost is coming out of the ground, I suppose his performances with a flivver in the wild mountain passes of eastern Turkey, Persia and the Cau- us must stand as a record. And he certainly kept much better natured than T do. Once, when they were climbing a pass where the road { Mechanics Liens out of the side of a precipice, the grade became so steep that his boiling Lizzie would no longer budge, and had to be pushed. But the road was so narrow that the men in front could not get to the rear on either side of the car. On one side she grazed the cliff, on the other her wheels hung over an abyss. So they had to crawl under! Yet Colonel Rawlinson records — genially that, he leaned against the rocks and shook with laughter. Most of us, piloting a car in a spot like that, would probably — she too, but not with laughter The Colonel later converted this indomitable Ford into an armored car, in which he mounted his two private machine guns, guns that he carried with him wherever he went, as you and I carry our watch pillow. ‘The board and gi id kept under his armor consisted of paste- paint, but the effect and seared off the moun- ands. In this contraption he was excellent, tain bri later eda 30 Ip. Vauxhall down a long defile in the mountains of Persia, holding his mechanie in by the tail of his coat, and got to the bottom as soon as his) stream-line rival. The British army didn’t accomplish very much in the Caspian regions, but what they did accomplish was quite evidently due to their possession of a fleet of Fords aud a few men like Colonel Raw- linson to drive them. He complains, however, that spare parts were hard to come by. We never knew before that there was a section of the inhabited globe where you couldn't buy Ford parts. But most of Colonel Rawlinson’s ad- ventures happened after the war was over, or should we say after the Peace ‘Treaty was signed? Still in a Ford, he was dispatched into Kemalist: Turkey and the ice, to find ont what the Nationalist Turks, who refused to be bound by the asus on intelligence serv- treaty, meant to do; and he found out a great many things—about Turks, and) Fords, nd mountain passes in out the inside of Turkish + he and his companions were starved and frozen for a year and a half, and finally about the gratitude winter, anc prisons, wl of governments, for to-day, incapaci- tated by his privations, he is drawing down a pension from the British govern- ment of stly 57 shillings, 814 pence per week, and even that will soon cease. Meanwhile, the Turks took away all his possessions, including his two house- broken machine guns. ‘They took everything except his humor, — his British pluck, and his supreme and charming belief in the eternal rightness Way (Continued on page 29)