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[Page 3]
Preface
It was during the first five months of my captivity that the idea of writing a diary, or perhaps, more correctly, a history of submarine AE2 from the time of her construction until she was sunk 300 feet deep in the Sea Marmora. She had been my home for nearly eighteen months and I missed her.
I kept an accurate, a minute account, of my prison life in Turkey up to the end of January 1916 when we began working on the Taurus mountain section of the Bagdad railway.
This section has been the subject of much speculation, and I believe that in the diary of a German officer killed in Palestine and which was found by an Australian Light-Horse-man, this narrow gauge section was mentioned & an incomplete account given therein.
Having served a sentence of "three years hard labour" in this locality, and "doing time" on the construction of these twelve tunnels, I think I am in good position to give first-hand data on this subject.
Speaking generally, one good side of our work there helped to make it possible for the traveller to get aboard the train at Calais, and go by rail to the Upper Nile, with one break only in the journey, and that at the Bosphorus to Scutatri Ferry. This completion extension of the Jewish Bagdad Railway is one of the few good results to the Allies of the work of the allied our prisoners in the East, and- like the convict roads in