Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  I will tell you a curious thing about the Franks. When we took them prisoner they believed that we were going to castrate them.

  CHAPTER 64

  Mustafa Kemal (14)

  The pattern of the Gallipoli campaign becomes established on almost every front of the war. Whoever attacks loses spectacular numbers of soldiers. Not even Kemal’s night attack works, and neither do the assaults in overwhelming numbers that are tried by other commanders.

  Kemal is appointed full colonel, and receives battle medals from the Sultan. Kaiser Wilhelm gives him an Iron Cross, and King Ferdinand of Bulgaria creates him Commander of the Order of St. Alexander. He has another falling-out with Enver Pasha, who opposes Kemal’s plans for an attack. The attack fails, as Enver had predicted, and Kemal resigns, blaming Enver for his interference, but after Enver has returned to Istanbul, Kemal is persuaded to stay by Liman von Sanders. Enver offers Kemal a command in Tripolitania, a considerably less important theatre of the war, and Kemal says he will think about it, but nothing comes of it.

  Kemal remains quarrelsome. He fires off letters demanding better defence of his positions, and disputing the command structure in his sector. He is seldom guilty of subtle and tactful diplomacy, and he makes a vocation of antagonising important people.

  The corps commander comes to see him, and Kemal explains to him how the enemy will circle round from Suvla Bay. Essad Pasha looks at the difficulty of the terrain, and says, “Don’t worry, beyefendi, they can’t possibly do it.” Of course, and perhaps irritatingly, Mustafa Kemal turns out to be right again, and in midsummer the enemy attack occurs exactly as he had predicted. The empire is saved only because the new landing and the assault are grotesquely mismanaged.

  Kemal longs for the sweet company of Corinne Lütfü, and corresponds with her regularly. He asks her advice about which novels he should read, and explains to her why it is that Turkish soldiers fight so well. He says that if they survive they think they will become Ghazis, and if not, they will go to paradise and spend eternity in the arms of a vast number of houris. Kemal does not believe in any of this, but he is always quite willing to take advantage of the naive spiritual strength of his men. Either he is cynical, or he is like Plato’s philosopher king, who acquiesces in a noble lie in order to consolidate the greater good.

  CHAPTER 65

  Karatavuk at Gallipoli: Karatavuk Remembers (5)

  I will tell you about something that happened with Fikret. There was once a battle at Çonk Bayiri, and then there was a ceasefire, and the dead were collected, and then the ceasefire was over, but the battle had not yet begun again.

  Not long after, terrible cries came from in between our lines. I do not know any English, and so I do not know what the man was calling out, but obviously he was wounded and was in very great pain. The sun was growing hot, and the thirst and burning that this brings inevitably increases the agony of wounds. Often there were also ants that attacked the wounds. In fact, the Franks always suffered from thirst, and if you were to capture one, or rescue one who was wounded, he always begged for water, and his tongue might be blackened and swollen up in his mouth, and “su” was the first word in Turkish that he learned. I remember one summer day when Lieutenant Orhan had been watching the Franks through his binoculars, and as he came past us he said, “I’ve just seen any number of Franks drinking their own piss.” The Franks had few wells behind their lines, but we had plenty of them, and water was brought in on mules and then carried to us by water boys. Our water boy for some months was an old man called Irfan, and he was half crazy, and every morning he would hang his washing out on a bush, but no Frank ever shot at him, because he was old and mad.

  The Frank continued to cry out in a most pitiful way, and we tried to seal our ears against it. Normally a wounded man eventually passes out or becomes too weak to cry out, and normally we would let him die, because if we had come out of our trench, we would have been shot. So we would just listen to the dying man, and wonder if this would also be our fate, and whether the rewards of martyrdom would be any compensation. But I will tell you a secret, which is that almost no soldier truly believes that he will be killed. This is because it is impossible for the human being to imagine that he is dead, and this is because he is always alive and present in the act of imagining. This inconceivability of death is what makes it possible for a soldier to fight. He sees his comrades die, but he thinks himself immune, and this fatal lack in his nature makes him a good fighter. Even a man who has decided to die on purpose and become a martyr does not really believe in his own death.

  Fikret was leaning with his forehead against the parapet, and he was muttering obscenities every time that the Frank cried out, and the sounds of the crying were cutting into our souls and hurting our hearts, and we all wanted to do something about it, even if it was only to go out and shoot the soldier, but none of us would move.

  Then Fikret turned round and bent down, and started to rummage in his knapsack. He pulled out some white underwear. He fixed his bayonet in his rifle, and he impaled the underwear on it, and then he began to wave his rifle above the trench.

  A strange thing happened, because the shooting in our sector suddenly stopped. Fikret took a ladder and started to climb out of the trench, and I was very stupid, and I caught hold of his leg and said, “Where are you going?” and he said, “Up your mother’s cunt,” and I said, “You’ll be killed,” and he looked down at me and said, “I am from Pera, so I don’t give a shit.”

  He put his hands up to show he was unarmed, and he walked to where the man was crying. He bent down and took the man up in his arms, and he carried him to the Frankish trench and laid him down at the edge of the parapet. Then, very slowly and carefully, walking upright, wiping his forehead on his sleeve, he came back, and the Frankish soldiers were cheering him.

  When he had dropped back down among us, we were astonished by what he had done, and we just looked at him. He went to his rifle and plucked the underwear from his bayonet, and he showed us the rent it had made, and he just said, “Another damned hole,” and then he stuffed the underwear back into his knapsack, and said, “Fortunately, I don’t give a shit.”

  The odd thing about this act of heroism and compassion is that often I had seen Fikret coldly dispatching the wounded with his bayonet, and joyfully killing prisoners. When I asked him why he had unexpectedly turned into an angel, he looked guilty, and cast his eyes down, and said, “Sometimes a man suddenly feels like doing something decent for a change.”

  From then on, whenever he said, “I am from Pera, I don’t give a shit,” we no longer believed him.

  CHAPTER 66

  Karatavuk at Gallipoli: Fikret and the Goat (6)

  Generally, we had two days in the trench at a time, and at least a day behind the lines. Then we could wash and delouse, and eat better food, and sleep. Because the trenches were full of shit and flies and corpses, it made the beautiful places behind the lines seem even more beautiful. The Franks had no areas behind the lines, because their bridgehead was very small, so they cannot have had any good rests as we did, as we could always shoot or shell them wherever they were. It would have been very bad to have been a Frank.

  There was a village where we stayed that was a Greek village, but the Christians had mostly gone because of what happened to their women. In this village there was a well that had no wall around it. It was just a hole in the ground, and one day a goat fell in.

  The first thing we knew was that we heard echoey bleating coming up from it, and Fikret went to have a look, and he called us over, and we saw the goat very dimly down below, swimming and kicking out at the sides, as if it thought it could climb them. I went to fetch Lieutenant Orhan, and he came and looked over the side, and he said, “If it dies down there, it’ll poison the water, and anyway, this is a good milking goat.” He looked at us, and said, “I need a volunteer,” and he looked at each one of us, and we tried to avoid his eyes without looking as if that was what we were doing, and he said to Fikr
et, “It’s you.”

  Fikret came to attention and said, “I don’t give a shit, sir, and I am happy to volunteer.”

  “Good man,” said Lieutenant Orhan.

  So it was that we lowered Fikret down on a rope, and there were about ten of us on the rope, so it wasn’t too difficult, and Fikret had the rope around his chest and under his armpits, but not very tight.

  It was a fairly small goat, but Fikret had a lot of trouble grabbing hold of it because it was dark and because the animal was in a panic and did not want to be lifted up. It took a long time, and the goat was bleating, and there was great splashing, and Fikret was saying, “Son of a whore, son of a bitch, Iblis fuck your mother’s cunt, and your mother’s mother’s cunt and the cunt of every cunt of every mother’s cunt,” and we were looking down and making it all worse by bleating like the goat and laughing at Fikret. Fikret’s curses and all the laughter and bleating echoed in the well and made a booming sound.

  Finally he got the goat round the body and held it under one arm, and started walking up the side of the well as we hauled on the rope. He was still cursing as he came up, and when he arrived at the top he threw the goat over the rim, and just as he did so, the goat shat, and the shit fell down into the water. Then the goat bleated and ran off. The bleating reminded me of the various kinds of bleats that Ibrahim used to mimic, such as “the bleat of a goat with nothing to say,” and I had a pang of homesickness.

  When Fikret came up over the edge he was panting from the effort and soaking wet, and you could see that he was bleeding and bruised all over from where the goat was kicking out with its sharp little hooves. Fikret complained, “That son of a bitch kicked me in the balls.”

  Lieutenant Orhan called Fikret to attention, and said to him, “Now go down and collect the shit, Fikret Nefer,” and a look of outrage passed over Fikret’s ugly face, and he said, “Permission to speak, sir,” and the lieutenant said, “Permission granted,” and Fikret said, “Why me, sir? Not that I give a shit, sir,” and the lieutenant said, “Because there is no point in anyone else getting wet, and partly because you don’t give a shit, but most of all because it was an order.”

  So Fikret went down the well again, and Lieutenant Orhan said, “Men, we just have to hope that goatshit floats.”

  So Fikret came back up, absolutely soaked, with his pockets full of shining black pellets of goatshit, and ceremoniously laid them at the lieutenant’s feet in a crescent pattern, and then he stood up, dripping with water, and saluted. Lieutenant Orhan saluted him back, and the two men looked at each other, and the lieutenant said, “Fikret Nefer, if there were a medal for rescuing goats and goatshit, and thereby securing the purity of our water supply, I would recommend you for it.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Fikret.

  “But fortunately, you don’t give a shit,” said the lieutenant.

  “No, sir,” agreed Fikret.

  “Do you want to know why it was you who volunteered?” asked Orhan.

  “No, sir,” answered Fikret, according to his time-honoured principle of not giving a shit.

  “Well, it was because you smell exactly the same as a goat, and I thought that she would be less frightened if I sent you down rather than someone else. Also, I thought you would be pleased to get your hands on something female, even if it was only a goat.”

  Fikret looked genuinely pleased, as if he had received a compliment, and said, “Thank you, sir,” and then he saluted, and Lieutenant Orhan smiled very slightly, and saluted him back, and said, “Dismiss,” and he was still smiling when he walked away.

  Later on Fikret turned to me when we were eating cheese and olives under a lemon tree, and we could hear the big guns thumping in the distance, and he tapped the side of his nose, and said to me, “That lieutenant and me, we really understand each other.”

  CHAPTER 67

  Karatavuk at Gallipoli: The Death of Fikret (7)

  One of the odd things about being at war is that you are exposed to all sorts of miracles, such as when you bend down, and suddenly a ball of shrapnel smacks into the trench wall just behind you where your head had just been, or you are on the latrine when a karakedi mortar shell comes down and explodes in the bit of the trench where you had been posted, or a hand grenade lands next to you, but it doesn’t go off, or it lands next to you just when you are shifting a sandbag, and all you have to do is drop the sandbag on the top of the grenade. These small things make you feel that God is looking after you.

  Speaking for myself, I would say that what I found most miraculous was seeing aeroplanes in the sky. The first time I saw one, I could not believe my eyes. Obviously your first impression is that it is a huge and strange bird that makes a coughing and droning noise, but you realise very quickly that it is not, and everyone says, “Look, an aeroplane!” and they wave, and if the plane is low, the pilot waves back. I asked everybody how they worked, but no one seemed to know. Of course there is an engine, which is something I now understand, but instead of flapping its wings like a true bird, the aeroplane has a propeller at the front which goes round very quickly and eats the air in front of the plane and throws it behind. The German Franks had brought with them a plane called the Taube, which means “dove” in their language, and it was a monoplane, and the wings really were shaped to be exactly like a bird, and the tailplane was shaped to be like tail feathers. It contained two men, and it was the most beautiful and elegant of all the planes that I saw. The Taube used to drop little steel arrows on to the enemy, and these were called “flechettes.” I have one that I pulled from a tree after the campaign was over. Unfortunately, the Taube was bombed by the Franks when it was in its hangar at Çonk. We also had a plane, called the Aviatik, but it wasn’t beautiful. The Franks had a lot of planes, at least eighteen, and I used to be able to recognise all of them. We men took great pride in being able to identify enemy aircraft, just as we had a pride in being able to identify their ships and know the names of their regiments. They had Farmans, Sopwith Tabloids and BE2s. The Farman looked like a skeleton held together with wires, but the Tabloid and the BE2s were very pretty, though not as pretty as the Taube. The Franks used to drop little bombs on us, a few at a time, and when that happened you could hear the Frankish soldiers cheering in their trenches. I think the planes were good for reconnaissance and taking photographs, but I don’t think they will ever be much use for attacking. They did cause panic every time they appeared overhead, but the damage was never very great. Anyway, of the things I remember with pleasure, the aeroplanes are the best, and in my opinion they are the greatest miracle of the world. If I was as rich as Rustem Bey, I would buy one, and fly out over the sea like an osprey and look down at the ships, and I would fly into the mountains like an eagle and look down on the valleys, and every day it would be like a new miracle.

  The imam was always announcing miracles. He was a mean man who fulfilled the proverb that my father Iskander liked so much, the one that said “You might as well expect tears from a corpse as alms from an imam,” but anyway he had a great ability to perceive miracles, which shows that anyone who believes in them will think that they see a great many, and it is true that many times we could have been defeated if only the Franks had realised their opportunities. We cheered and praised God when we sank the Bouvet, the Goliath, and the Triumph, and the Majestic, which were great ships, but naturally we didn’t praise Him when the Guj Djemal was sunk with six thousand new troops on board. We praised God when Enver Pasha announced that the Sultan Padishah had been pronounced a Ghazi. We praised God when there was a break that allowed us to bring up ten new divisions, and when there was an attack by the Frankish Australian Light Horse. On that occasion their bombardment stopped several minutes before the attack, which gave us time to reoccupy our positions, and we massacred them completely, without taking a single casualty ourselves. There was also an attack by the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, and we praised God because they forgot to clear the communications trenches when they advanced, and so our
men were able to rise up and shoot them from behind. We praised God for the miracle that the Frankish invasion began on the very night when Mustafa Kemal had all of us marching about on a night exercise, so we were already fully kitted up and mobile when it happened. We also praised God in spring when the enemy aeroplanes bombed an encampment behind the lines, and so our troops had to be moved up to the front early, and this turned out to be just in time to meet an attack. We didn’t praise God when the Frankish ships managed to fire right over the peninsula by means of using observation balloons, and sank some of our ships. We praised God when we heard the Frankish bugler announcing the imminent arrival of a shell from our giant gun on the other side of the water. This bugler would watch out for the flash, and every French Tango would know that he had twenty-eight seconds in which to hide. We did not praise God when the Gurkhas took the top of the hill at Çonk, which gave them a big advantage, but we did praise God when the Frankish big guns stupidly opened fire on them and wiped them out, so that all we had to do was wait a little while, and then charge them and finish them off. That was when I took the bent Gurkha knife that I now have on my wall. After this the Franks brought up new troops, and there was a terrible battle in which countless thousands of us died. We were fighting like the mad, with our teeth, and with stones, as much as with our bayonets, and we did not praise God for that, even though we did praise Him when finally we were left in possession of the top of the hill. We praised God when the enemy landed at Suvla, and for some reason gave our German Frankish Major Wilmer time to bring up three battalions.