The two protagonists could not have been more different. Jones, in his mid-30s, was a Welsh-born artilleryman, the Oxford-educated son of a lord. (His father, Sir Henry Jones, was one of the world\u2019s most eminent moral philosophers.) Trained as a barrister, Jones was married to his childhood sweetheart and serving as a magistrate in British Burma. He and his wife were the parents of a baby daughter, with another child on the way, when he enlisted with the Indian Army Reserve of Officers in the spring of 1915.<\/p>\n

Hill, an Australian-born flier, was a bachelor in his late 20s who had been a mechanic on a Queensland sheep station. When war was declared, he longed to join up as a trainee pilot, but Australia did not have a fully functioning military air corps: the airplane was barely a decade old. Sailing to England, he enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps, the precursor to the RAF.<\/p>\n

What the men had in common was keen intelligence, vibrant imaginations, and the willingness to risk their lives for the chance of freedom <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
For both men, the road to Yozgad was replete with hardship: for Hill, a forced landing and six-hour shootout with Ottoman forces in Egypt; for Jones, a desperate five-month siege at Kut-al-Amara, in present-day Iraq, followed by a forced march through 2,000 miles of brutal country during which scores of men would die. What they also had in common was keen intelligence, vibrant imaginations, and the willingness to risk their lives for the chance of freedom.<\/p>\n
The trouble was that freedom from Yozgad was considered unattainable. Part of a constellation of World War I prison camps spread over Turkey, it was among the most remote, lying 150 miles south of the Black Sea and 300 miles north of the Mediterranean.<\/p>\n
More than 4,000 feet above sea level, the camp had been earmarked for incorrigibles: those British officers deemed most likely to escape. The nearest railway station, Angora (present-day Ankara), was five days\u2019 journey by cart through forbidding terrain: jagged mountains surrounding the camp and the Anatolian desert beyond. Yozgad was the Alcatraz of its day.<\/p>\n
Read more: The rise of spiritualism after World War I<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
Making the most of the spiritualist ardour<\/h3>\n
But for the hundred British officers interned there, something else precluded escape even more forcibly. On the orders of the commandant, Kiazim Bey, an escape attempt by any one of them would bring severe reprisals \u2013 including lockdown, isolation and even execution \u2013 on all those who remained.<\/p>\n
Men of honour, the prisoners swore to one another that they would not flee. But some, including Jones and Hill, dreamed of liberty. The question was how to attain it without compromising the safety of their countrymen.<\/p>\n
Their plot began as a lark. Remanded to Yozgad in the summer of 1916, Jones and Hill spent their time much as their fellow prisoners did, trying to stave off the despair and boredom that are hallmarks of life in captivity. The inmates had already tried chess, poker and roulette, with a wheel made from a discarded door, but such distractions had paled over time.<\/p>\n
Then, in February 1917, Jones got a postcard from an aunt in Britain. Knowing that her nephew needed to fill his long, empty days, she suggested he try experimenting with a Ouija board. The war had renewed the spiritualist ardour that had suffused the Victorian age, rallying adherents in Britain, the US and on the Continent round spiritualism\u2019s central tenet: that through the agency of a spirit medium, it was possible for the living to communicate with the dead.<\/p>\n
Wielding a handmade Ouija board \u2013 built, like all of the Yozgad prisoners\u2019 furnishings, from salvage \u2013 Jones began faking s\u00e9ances for his fellow captives. His bona fides as a \u201cspirit medium\u201d were aided greatly by his stellar visual memory, which let him internalise the positions of the letters that were arrayed randomly round the handmade board.<\/p>\n
As a result, he was able to work the board blindfolded, subtly guiding the inverted water tumbler that served as an ersatz planchette. This prowess persuaded many of his fellow captives that Jones was truly receiving messages from the dead.<\/p>\n
Read more: Phantasmagoria: creating the \u2018ghosts\u2019 of the Enlightenment<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
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