people gathered when they were leaving, weeping families of those arrested, all the people weeping to see Bediuzzaman being taken from them in this pitiable state. One of the gendarmes sent from Ankara to escort them related this and the journey, first telling how they had been fitted out with new equipment and how Bediuzzaman had been described to them in the most exaggeratedly unfavourable terms, Sükrü Kaya, the Home Affairs Minister, calling him in derogatory fashion, "the Kurdish Hoca". In fact the order was to offload Bediuzzaman and his students in some isolated spot on the road and to shoot them. However, the officer in charge, Ruhi Bey, was sympathetic and did not carry out the order. Moreover, he ordered their handcuffs to be unfastened at the appropriate time, so they could perform the prayers. One student records that he was expelled from the army as a consequence. They travelled as far as Afyon in the lorries, in which they had been permitted neither to speak nor to open any window for air, and still handcuffed in pairs and under the bayonets of gendarmes, were transferred to a train. The following morning they arrived at Eskisehir.

• Eskisehir Prison

Conditions in the prison were appalling. Bediuzzaman was put in solitary confinement, the others together in a ward. Their number grew from thirty-two to one hundred and twenty as they were joined by more Students arrested elsewhere. Once they entered the prison they were not allowed to visit the lavatories. After hours some warders came and dug a hole near the door and inserted a pipe. This is what they would have to use, they were not to be allowed out. With the filth, the bed-bugs, and the cockroaches, it was impossible to sleep at night. For twelve days they were kept without food. The fact was they were considered to be condemned prisoners doomed for the gallows. Notwithstanding the conditions, Bediuzzaman continued to write, completing five more treatises in the months he was here. These were the Twenty-Eighth, twenty-ninth, and Thirtieth