The hardships of war and a wave of magical new technologies (the phonograph, radio, flight) had renewed public interest in telepathy and the paranormal. On a lark, Jones made a Ouija board from polished iron and an inverted jar. Unlike the chaps at Yozgad, they were probably not procuring local greyhounds for the P.O.W.
Of course, somewhere outside the frame of Fox’s tale, there are an awful lot of enlisted men from both armies detained in far less humane conditions. Shell and starve them within an inch of their lives, force-march the survivors across Asia Minor and before you can sing “Rule, Britannia!” they have organized a debate society and started dress rehearsals for some light comic opera (title: “The Fair Maiden of Yozgad”). Much of the pleasure of “The Confidence Men” comes from the bewildering pluck of these young men of the empire. Sidelined for the balance of the war, the prisoners of Yozgad turned their energies to killing time. Near the end of the siege, with 15 to 20 men starving to death each day, “the gunners ate Mrs. Fox’s depiction of the infernal trench conditions in Mesopotamia rivals the more familiar horrors of the muddy Western Front. Milligan, a stoic hen beloved of the British gunners in Kut, than about David Lloyd George, or the Ottoman sultan. Rather than the high-altitude perspective of much military history, here we get a narrative hovering at eye level. Fox quotes one historian who suggests it was Britain’s worst defeat since Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. Thirty-three thousand Allied troops ultimately perished at Kut. After five months of relentless shelling, dwindling rations and failed rescue operations, the British raised a white flag. Toward the end of 1915, in the midst of an ill-planned campaign to march on Baghdad, British troops were besieged by Ottoman forces at Kut-al-Amara, a small town on the Tigris. Like the “Odyssey,” Fox’s book is less about war than the winding path home. “The Confidence Men,” Margalit Fox’s riveting account of two British officers who sprang themselves from an Ottoman prison camp during World War I using a Ouija board, sleight of hand, feigned madness and vast stores of creativity, is such a tale. Going all the way back to the stratagems of Odysseus, certain war stories draw their fascination from the breathtaking cleverness occasionally sparked by the will to survive. THE CONFIDENCE MEN How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History By Margalit Fox