Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  If you are a soldier, you are forced to think about God more than those who are at home. All around you is death and devastation. You look at a disembowelled body, and you see that man consists of coils of slime inside, and yet he is smooth and beautiful on the outside. You look at a body and you see that it is not a man because the spirit has fled, and so the body does not fill you with grief. You believe that God caused every second of your destiny to be written on the fortieth day after conception, and so you do not complain about hardship and horror, and you know that every single little thing that happens is because God wills it. This is a great comfort, knowing that God carries us in the palm of His hand, just as a man might carry a fledgling in the palm of his hand. You realise that there is no point in resisting the will of God, and so you recite the martyr’s prayer for the hundredth time, and so you say to yourself and your comrades “Allah koruson,” and you go over the trench parapet shouting the name of God, knowing that whatever horror comes upon you, it is only the first difficult step to paradise. There are very few people, and I was one, who begin to wonder why God wishes such cruelty and suffering upon His flock, and, when people say “God is merciful,” feel perplexity and a contrary feeling stealing over them. It is only people like me who wonder why God does not do just one good miracle, and make the world perfect in an instant.

  It is very possible to believe it a miracle from God when you duck down and thereby miss a bullet in the head, but then why does God decree a week later that you will die of dysentery?

  The dysentery came upon us when the hot weather arrived. Çanakkale was perfect in the spring and autumn, but in the winter it was cold beyond imagination, and in the height of summer it was like being in a bread oven along with the loaves. All the green plants turned brown, all the flowers vanished away, the birds sat on the branches with their beaks open, and the sun made the skin shrink and the eyes ache, and the lips crack, and dizziness overwhelms. There was so much thirst that the water boys couldn’t keep up with us. You couldn’t touch anything made of metal, and you couldn’t touch the stones. The sweat would pour down our faces and down our chests, and pour off the backs of our necks and down our spines and between the buttocks, and our uniforms would have thick wavy lines of white where the salt had dried out of the sweat. We would sit in our trenches longing for the night, and when the night arrived, the relief of it was like being caressed by the hand of an angel, and then, of course, it quickly became too cold.

  Much worse than the heat itself was what it brought with it. All the thousands of unburied corpses rotted so violently that the stink drifted over us at every movement of a breeze. It was such a stink that you got used to vomiting from it. If you want to know what it was like, you should kill a dog in midsummer, leave it in the sun for a few days until it swells up, cut open its belly, and thrust your head inside and breathe deeply. Sometimes the corpses would swell up so much in front of the trenches that they would obstruct our view, and so we would shoot at them and the gases would escape with a hissing sound, and the smell of sulphur would come over us. But no matter how many times you deflated a corpse, it would always blow up again, and I never understood why, because you would think that the holes would prevent it.

  The other thing was that the corpses made millions of maggots, which were very big, and had shrewd-looking eyes, and black heads, and these maggots were crawling everywhere. Sometimes you saw what looked like a puddle of maggots, and you realised that it was because there was a corpse buried very shallowly, and the maggots were coming up to the surface. I had a comrade who was terrified of the maggots. His name was Ocak, and he was from Van, and he was otherwise very courageous, but he was so horrified by the maggots that one day he refused to advance over some ground where there were corpses full of maggots, and so the officer shot him, and it wasn’t long before he was full of maggots too, and we would say, “Look at poor Ocak, he must have got used to the maggots by now.”

  The violent rotting and the stink brought in the corpse flies, which were very big, and bright green. These flies were so numerous that they covered the world, and you would look around and everything seemed to be moving and shimmering, and a kind of desperate madness tried to overtake you, because the flies were so persistent that all you wanted to do was run away for ever, or run down to the sea and sink beneath the water. It was useless killing the flies, because it would have been like counting grains of sand, and if you did kill them, there were other very tiny flies that laid eggs on their bodies and made tiny maggots. The corpse flies went in and out of the mouths of corpses, because when you die your mouth falls open, and they were attracted to open wounds.

  The corpse flies landed on your food when you were eating, and it was impossible to eat at all without eating the corpse flies. They landed on your cup when you were drinking, and you could not drink without drinking corpse flies. The corpse flies were as desperate for moisture as we were, and they would try to drink from our eyes, and they would cling to our lips so that we would have to pull them off by force. One day I fell asleep with my mouth open, and when I awoke my mouth was full of the corpse flies. After that I cut a corner from the white shroud that my mother had sent me in the event of my martyrdom, and I put this corner over my face whenever I wanted to sleep. As time went by I cut more bits off for my comrades, on condition that they would be gathered up and sewn back together if I was killed, but the truth is that you never know where the bodies of your comrades are, and so I never got the pieces back, and it was lucky I wasn’t killed, and now I have a new shroud waiting for me, that was made by my wife, and no doubt she looks forward to the day when she can wrap me in it.

  It was because of the corpse flies that diseases came upon us. The flies were full of the filth of the putrid corpses, and they transferred this filth to us when we ate and drank them. Some people got a disease called enteric fever, and this disease gave you an unbearable headache and a sweating fever, and a cough deep in the chest, and pains in the stomach, and big spots, and it also gave you the shits. Some people got malaria if they came from places where malaria was bad, because when they got weak and unhealthy with the bad conditions at the front, the malaria would come back upon them, and this killed some people, and some people were made helpless for days at a time. Other soldiers got an illness where the heart stopped working properly. All of us became very thin and weak, and it became difficult even to lift a rifle or walk.

  The very worst thing was dysentery, and it is hard to explain the horror of it. It comes upon you very suddenly, and you have to run to the latrine, and to begin with you are shitting proper shit. Soon afterwards you become more and more desperate to shit, but all you can shit is slime and blood, and it oozes out of you, and in your stomach you feel cramps and spasms that make you double over and clutch your stomach and cry out with pain and misery. The fever comes over you, and the sweat pours from you, and you can’t make sense, and you are longing for water with a terrible thirst, and your tongue in your head turns white and yellow, and one of the worst things is that you can’t piss, however much you want to.

  It happened to Fikret and me at the same time, and we spent whole nights asleep on the latrine between shitting blood and slime, and there were uncountable others like us, and there were many who died at the latrine because they were so ill that they died shitting out entrails, and fell into the latrine, and if they were not quite dead, then they drowned in the shit and blood, which were also covered with corpse flies, and they were so ill and wretched beyond measure that they were glad to die by drowning in shit and blood, and the shit and blood in the latrine was also heaving and buzzing with flies. Afterwards, you have to wipe yourself with your hands and then clean your hands with earth, but your hands never felt clean. One of the small satisfactions of life was to throw sand down into the latrines and bury the flies. I don’t know how many soldiers died of dysentery or left as invalids, but I think it was very many thousands. Fikret nearly died, and so did I, and the field hospital had so many cases tha
t the doctors couldn’t help us, and we just lay there in a fever, shitting blood and slime, with our lives and our will to live pouring out between our legs. I missed many battles, and at one point it seemed I would never go back to the lines. Whenever I think of the military glory that we won at Çanakkale, and my throat swells with pride, I also remind myself of the inglory of groaning and sweating and shitting blood and slime, and not being able to piss, which is also a part of the military life. I remember our second officer, who was very smart and correct when he arrived, with his boots polished, and with a neat waxed moustache and the smell about him of lemon cologne, but soon he was crawling on his hands and knees among the corpses, crying out like a wounded dog, with blood soaking into the seat of his breeches, and we pitied him for the loss of his dignity, and then finally he shot himself because of the indignity.

  After a while Fikret and I were moved to a hospital that had been set up further behind the lines, near Maydos. We were taken on a cart pulled by a little donkey, and the cart was full of men, and the road was very bad, and you could tell that the donkey was being worked to death, its ribs stuck out against the skin, it was blind in one eye and was covered in scars, and out of pity some of the wounded got out of the cart and stumbled along at the back of it, half pushing it and half being held up by it.

  One good thing I remember about the hospital was a nurse who took an interest in Fikret and me. The military nurses were like angels or ghosts, dressed completely in robes of white with only their faces showing, and they went silently from man to man, and spoke in modest voices, but they could be very strong when it was necessary, such as when a man was in a delirium or in too much agony. It seems strange now that I should have been tended and cleaned up by women who were not from my family, and touched me, but spoke to me as a mother does. I was too ill to let it concern me back then, and everybody knows that in time of war all the rules are changed, and it is like a man who eats the flesh of a pig because he is starving and there is nothing else to eat, and therefore he is forgiven.

  The nurse who was very good to Fikret and me spoke Turkish badly, with an odd accent that we couldn’t identify, and she had a Frankish name, which was “Georgina,” and she had an extra name. Instead of being “Georgina, daughter of so-and-so,” she had an extra name which was “Iliff.” I said, “What does it mean?” and she answered, “I’m told it means ‘long life,’ ” and Fikret, who was feeling not so bad by then, said, “Are you sure it’s not ilik?”* and she laughed because she was very pretty, and she made a deep impression, and it was a good compliment, and after a time she became very like a sister to us, and it is acceptable to be familiar with a sister. I looked at her blue eyes and fair complexion and pink cheeks, and I said, “Are you a Frank? Or are you Circassian?” and she said, “I am Irish,” and I said, “Is that a kind of Frank?” and she said, “I suppose so,” and I said, “Are you a Christian?” and she said, “Yes, I am,” and Fikret said, “Even so, I am going to marry you when I get out of here, and you won’t even have to convert,” and she said, “The bride price is very high, and in any case my husband would object,” and we wondered what kind of a man it was who let his wife work with men, and be in contact with them, and we concluded that he must be an infidel, and it turned out that her husband was a diplomat who had married this Georgina in England before being recalled when the war began. We said, “Is your husband an infidel?” and she was puzzled at first, and then said, “He’s an Ottoman, and his mother is from Serbia and his father is from Smyrna.” Fikret said, “Why are you here in the hospital?” and she sighed and said, “Because I didn’t want to be useless.” This Georgina made us mint tea with a great deal of sugar in it, and I am sure it was a good medicine for dysentery, and she said we should eat salt, and she gave us ayran with salt in it if there was any ayran to be had. That good nurse is one of the excellent memories that I have of the war, and it also saddened me because it reminded me of the sisters and mother I had left behind in Eskibahçe. When I left, I gave her one of my miracles that I had picked up at the front. It was a German bullet perfectly penetrated through the middle by a French bullet, so that it made the shape of a cross, and Georgina Iliff was very pleased with it, and she said she would have it made into a brooch, but I don’t know if she ever did.

  Fikret and I were back in the lines for the big attack that happened in late summer, when the heat is at its worst. We were both very weak, and probably we should not have gone back, and I think that if we had not been so weak, then perhaps Fikret would have survived his wound. We believed that we should prove ourselves men, and not let down our comrades, and we pretended to the Greek doctors that we were better than we were.

  The Franks began their bombardment in the afternoon, and there was no air to breathe and no wind, and so when the shells exploded they threw up great clouds of dust that hung in the air and made the world invisible, and the world was shaking and vibrating all around us because of the explosions, and I remember this in particular because at the time I had a toothache, and the vibrating of every explosion made it much worse, and sent pain through my head with every impact. It was like the continuous roaring of a storm when you are standing by the sea, but much louder.

  About an hour and a half after the bombardment began, we realised that the British Frankish troops were coming, even though we couldn’t see them, and our guns opened fire on the space between the lines, hoping to kill the Franks as they advanced. When we were able to see the British Franks, we shot them down. As a result of this, their attack failed. In another part of the line the Australian and New Zealander Franks managed to capture a trench after two days of fighting in the darkness, and it was said that we lost five thousand men. At the same time there was an attack from Suvla Bay, but it was no good, and the Franks were beaten.

  Because it was high summer all the bushes were very dry, and because of the guns these bushes caught fire. As a result, the Frankish soldiers who fell wounded were burned to death, or suffocated, and most often their ammunition pouches exploded, and that killed them even if the fires did not, and that was just as well, because otherwise the ants would attack the wounds and the burns of the wounded, which was an agony, and the thirst of dying out in the stones among the burning bushes was also an agony, and we could hear them crying out for hours. There was a very big fire in the other attack that was taking place not far from us, and the sky was full of smoke and dust, and the smell of charring meat, and the bullets were whistling like birds.

  In this battle Fikret stood up on a ladder to get a better field of fire, and there did not seem to be much danger because it was we who were mowing down the Franks, and not them us. Suddenly he fell back from the ladder, and for a moment I thought he must have been hit in the head. I was torn between tending to him and continuing to shoot down the British Franks, and I knew my duty was to shoot the Franks, so I had to leave Fikret. I kept turning to look at him, and he seemed not too bad. He was just sitting with his legs out before him, staring at the opposite wall of the trench, and trying to say something.

  Fortunately the attack of the British Franks ended, and as soon as I was sure that no more were coming upon us, I came down from the firing step and knelt down beside him at his left side, saying, “Where are you hit, my friend, where are you hit?” and with his left arm he reached round and pointed to his right arm, but said nothing.

  I looked and I saw that a bullet had gone through his arm above the elbow, and completely shattered the bones, and the rest of his arm was just hanging there as if it belonged to no one, and there was scarlet blood pouring down it and dripping to the end of the fingers, which had no life in them. He also had a bullet through his belly, and the dark bloodstains were swelling out into his tunic both at the front and the back, and I realised that this would be the wound that would kill him, because the blood just fills the belly.

  Fikret turned his head very slowly, and his eyes had the look of a dead man, and he said, “Is your bayonet sharp?” and I said, “Yes, my f
riend, very sharp,” and I thought he was going to ask me to kill him.

  He gestured again with his left hand and pointed to his right arm, and said, “You’d better cut it off.”

  “Cut it off?” I repeated, feeling a sickness coming over me.

  “It’s no good. I want it cut off.”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “If you love me, cut it off. It offends me. If you honour me, cut it off.”

  So I took my bayonet, and made sure it was sharp. I went round to his right side, and I knelt beside him, and I prayed, and first I cut through the cloth of his uniform, and then I held the lower arm in my left hand, and I said, “In the name of God,” and with the bayonet in my right hand began to cut through the muscles and tendons that were full of shining white fragments of bone. Fikret was a strong man, and he had big muscles. When I was cutting him, it was like cutting meat off a sheep, and made a crunching sound, and he was moaning softly, and I was weeping, with tears that ran down my cheeks and fell on to him. I wept so that I had to keep wiping my eyes with my sleeves, because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to see, and because I was weeping I could not speak to him.

  When I had cut away the arm, and laid it gently down beside him, he said, “Tie something round the stump,” so I took the piece of sleeve I had cut off, and cut it into strips, and the strips were just long enough to tie around the stump, and when I had done this, the bleeding was much less. With his left hand Fikret picked up his right arm, and hefted it in his hand, and he said, “I didn’t know my own arm was so heavy,” and I thought it strange that he was holding his own right arm and couldn’t move the fingers of the hand any more because it was just meat. He put the arm down, and then held hands with it, feeling the fingers with his fingers. Fikret said, “It was a good arm,” but I thought it didn’t look as though it belonged to anyone at all, it was just an object. He said, “How the whores of Pera are going to miss these fingers.”