Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  The new command is not the greatest job in the world, but at least Kemal has now been promoted to brigadier general, and become a pasha. He finds the armies at Diyarbekir in a desperate state, diseased and unsupplied, anarchic and miserable, and his requests to Istanbul are ignored. The Russians attack before he can get properly organised, and he is obliged to take part in a vicious battle in which he fights with the bayonet alongside his men. On his own initiative he then orders a retreat, gambling that the Russians will not follow. By the summer, his troops have been so transformed that they take Bitlis and Muş within five days, and drive the Russians out. He receives the Order of the Golden Sword. He writes to Corinne Lütfü, saying, “What a pleasure it is to face fire and death among those that one esteems.” Then the Russians retake Muş.

  That winter the situation of the troops once more becomes hopeless. They have no food or supplies for the ironical reason that they are operating in an area from which the Armenian population has been deported. There are no farmers, craftsmen or tradesmen left, and the place is a desert. To compound the situation, the Russian armies have driven before them several hundred thousand famished Muslim refugees, many of them Kurds. The Armenians and the Kurds have loathed each other for centuries, and, owing to the fact that there are many Armenian units and commanders in the Russian army, the same banal atrocities have been committed against the Kurds that the latter have always enjoyed committing against Armenians.

  That winter, dressed in the rags of their summer uniforms, with their feet bound up in shreds of rags, Kemal’s soldiers perish in blizzards and freeze to death in caves. The men are on one-third of normal rations, and there is nothing for the animals.

  Mustafa Kemal is promoted again, and then his ragged army is saved by the Russian Revolution. The front stabilises, and the Russian army disintegrates under the management of proletarian soldiers’ committees which churn out idiotic, pompous and turgidly prolix orders, and demote the officers to the ranks.

  It is on this front that Kemal makes friends with Colonel Ismet, who will accompany Kemal for the rest of his career, and become President after him. Ismet is so opposite to Kemal in temperament as to be indispensable, but to begin with they get on very badly.

  Now that the fighting on the Russian front has ceased, Mustafa Kemal establishes high standards in the officers’ mess, and turns every mealtime into a symposium in which he can talk brilliantly and at length in his customary style. He starts to work out his thoughts on the emancipation of women, which he believes will have an improving effect on men. Meanwhile, a plot to overthrow Enver Pasha has been uncovered in Istanbul, and suspicion of complicity falls upon Mustafa Kemal, but it is unlikely that he has anything to do with it. Enver very shrewdly decides to send Kemal to take command in the Hejaz, where the British have successfully encouraged the Emir of Mecca to raise the Arabs in revolt and declare himself King of the Arabs. Enver and Kemal and the local commander decide, however, that Medina is strategically useless, and prepare to give it up, but this is vetoed in Istanbul by the Grand Vizier, because the Caliphate cannot afford the disgrace of giving up Islam’s second-most-holy city. In any case, it is quite likely that T. E. Lawrence’s Arabs will destroy the Turkish forces as they try to retreat. The plan is abandoned, and the Turkish commander in Medina devoutly refuses to withdraw, whatever happens. The Ottoman forces remain entrenched there until long after the war is over, refusing to give it up, and eating the animals which would have been their sole means of transport out of it.

  In Istanbul, a plotter by the name of Yakup Cemil confesses under interrogation that the empire can only be saved if Enver Pasha is deposed and replaced by Mustafa Kemal as Minister of War and Commander-in-Chief. Upon hearing of this, the latter remarks, “I would have accepted the two posts, but I would have had Yakup Cemil hanged first. I am not the type to come to power with the backing of such people.”

  In Mesopotamia the British begin a series of spectacular successes under Generals Maude and Allenby, and Kut and Baghdad fall. Allenby pulls off some exceptionally brilliant and elaborate deceptions. Mustafa Kemal agrees to take command of the 7th Army under Marshal Falkenhayn, but it is clear that his intention is to obstruct Falkenhayn whenever possible, because he believes that the Germans ultimately want to oust the Ottomans from the Middle East, and take control of it themselves. He makes himself as awkward and quarrelsome as only he knows how, and insists upon taking command of all operations himself, with the Germans serving under him. Enver Pasha attempts compromises, but Kemal refuses even to meet the German commander, and angrily resigns, returning to him a sum in gold with which he says the German has been attempting to bribe him. Because he is penniless and needs money to get home, he sells his horses to his friend Çemal Pasha.

  Back in Istanbul he refuses an appointment to command the 2nd Army, and installs himself in the Pera Palace Hotel. General Allenby takes Jerusalem, and the Ottomans retreat to a line north of Jaffa and Jericho. There is an apocryphal story that Enver and Kemal have an argument so violent that it nearly leads to a gunfight. Mustafa Kemal is asked to accompany the heir to the throne on an official visit to meet the Kaiser. He finds the Prince dreamy and strange, and has serious doubts as to his competence as future Sultan. Nonetheless, it occurs to him that he might be able to influence him, and tries to persuade him that the Germans will not win the war. The Prince receives his suggestions lukewarmly.

  Mustafa Kemal meets the Kaiser, wrongly addressing him as “Your Excellency,” and manages to be his usual perverse, blunt and prickly self when dealing with the Germans. Back home in Istanbul he falls ill with a kidney infection, and the war has to go on without him. The Ottomans reinvade areas of the east that had been taken by Russia, partly to prevent Armenian massacres of Muslims. The Sultan dies, and is succeeded by the vague Prince, whilst Mustafa Kemal is being treated in a clinic in Vienna. His thoughts turn once again to the emancipation of women, and he writes that he is determined to bring the Turkish people up to his own level, rather than compromise by sinking to theirs. Before he is well, he is summoned back to Istanbul, but is delayed by an attack of the Spanish flu.

  He has three audiences with the new Sultan Mehmet, and tries to persuade him to take over the army, but he demurs, and appoints Kemal to the command of the 7th Army in Palestine, where he will once again be under his Gallipoli commander, Otto Liman von Sanders. He finds his new army in a pitiable condition; there are British spies everywhere, and he frankly acknowledges that the local population can hardly wait for the British to arrive and drive out the Ottomans. He himself continues to be prostrated by his kidney infection.

  General Allenby brilliantly defeats the 8th Army, and Kemal’s 7th Army is forced to retreat as a consequence. The Ottoman army has by now become so demoralised that there are 300,000 deserters. The men have no summer clothes for the unbearable temperatures of the Jordan valley, and as usual their diet is execrable. Perhaps most terrible of all, the cherished myth of Islamic unity has been broken apart for ever, even though it will perhaps always survive as the ingenuous ghost of a conventional piety. The Ottoman soldiers find that the Arabs, now that they know who is going to win, have completely switched their loyalty to the British, and the Bedouins descend ferociously upon them, committing the same incomprehensibly malicious atrocities against them as they had against everyone else when employed by the Sultan. Arabs have turned out to be not merely undependable, but treacherous.

  Liman von Sanders attempts to reorganise and regroup, but it is impossible. Australian cavalry take Damascus, and naively install an Arab government that immediately provokes ungovernable riots. Von Sanders pays the savage Druzes to allow free passage to Germans fleeing north, and Kemal decides to go to Aleppo. It is impossible to organise the retreat of armies that no longer exist, and Kemal fulminates against everyone except himself. There is vicious streetfighting, and Mustafa Kemal beats off angry Arab attackers with his whip. He finds it ironic that he is being attacked by those he seeks to defend, and soo
n organises for his machine-gunners to thin the crowds, with dramatic and immediate efficacity. On his retreat from that town, the Arabs go on a looting spree, neighbour against neighbour, whooping and firing feux de joie into the air. Mustafa Kemal successfully defeats a series of British attacks as he withdraws, in what will be the very last engagements of the war.

  He replaces Liman von Sanders as overall commander of the southern front. He is only thirty-seven years old, and the loyal core of his troops is still in place, battered and famished, guarding the long frontier that will mark the boundary of a new country. Among them is Ibrahim the Goatherd, who will one day be known as Ibrahim the Mad. He has marched thousands of miles, and has survived heat and cold, wounds, famine, disease, despair and shells. He is the spectre of his former self, emaciated and weak, his gums bleeding, and not a shred of his former uniform remaining. On his feet he wears the ruins of a pair of boots that he took from an Indian soldier after the siege of Kut. He is unaware that in so doing he condemned that soldier to death, because the prisoners of war were subsequently to be marched by Arab and Kurdish escorts for two thousand miles in implacable heat, without transport, food, clothing or water. It was to be an exact recapitulation of what was happening to the Armenians, and in this case half of the prisoners would die en route, for the same reasons.

  Ibrahim has often thought of deserting, but he does not know the way home, and in any case his sense of honour is too great. He has been profoundly disquieted to realise that it was not, after all, enough to be a Muslim, but he feels a new strength in the idea that now he is above all things a Turk. As peace descends upon the suddenly useless trench on the heights behind Aleppo, and the men take to sleeping above the parados, he dreams only of returning home and marrying Philothei, with whom he has had the misfortune to be in love since childhood, and who has been promised to him, and who has always been his destiny. He has a heavy necklace made of gold coins that he looted from an abandoned Armenian house, which he means to give to her. He has carried it for months, and never sold it even when he was starving. He does not know if Philothei is still alive, and she in her turn has had no news of her fiancé for four years.

  She is still employed by Leyla Hanim, and these days she is capable of sitting in perfect stillness during empty hours, having perfected the kismetic art of waiting. All around her, Rustem Bey’s extraordinary collection of clocks are synchronously effacing time, striking away the hours and ticking away the months. She is still beautiful, but these days her eyes glow with melancholy rather than ardour, and no longer does she sit in front of the mirror, as Leyla taught her, composing her face into ever greater forms of beauty. Nowadays, her inward eye is straining to envision things beyond the exiguous black horizon of sight.

  CHAPTER 73

  I Am Philothei (11)

  I remember once that Ibrahim came to me and recited a verse that he had made, and he said that he had remembered it badly from a trader that came from Crete, and so he had had to change it to make it whole again. He recited it, and it went

  I kissed your red lips and my own turned red

  And I wiped my lips and my kerchief was dyed red

  And I washed it in the river and the river turned red

  And the red spread

  To the farthest shore and

  To the middle of the sea

  And an eagle flew down to drink it

  And his wings were dyed red

  And away he flew

  And he painted the sun

  And the whole moon.

  He shrugged and said, “It’s an explanation of dawn and sunset.”

  Then he said, “Little bird, I have another verse for you, but it has to be whispered,” and I said, “Whisper it then,” and he leaned towards me and he whispered another verse in my ear, and I closed my eyes, and I could feel his lips against my ear and the softness of them, and the gentleness of his breath, and this verse was

  Your lips are like sugar

  And your cheeks an apple

  Your breasts are paradise

  And your body a lily.

  O, to kiss the sugar

  To bite the apple

  To reveal paradise

  And open the lily.

  I stood there with my eyes closed, hearing only the doves in the red pines, and it was only after a few moments that I understood the verse properly, and when I did, I felt the blood and the blushing rush to my face and my ears.

  I was astonished that he had recited such a thing, and when I opened my eyes he had already gone, and I felt as if my whole body was burning, and I had to sit down.

  CHAPTER 74

  Lieutenant Granitola’s Occupation (1)

  The column of soldiers marched wearily and out of step into Eskibahçe. At their head perspired Lieutenant Gofredo Granitola, distant relation of a distinguished Sicilian family, and late veteran of the battles of Isonzo and Caporetto. He and his men had tramped for several days, all the way from Telmessos, and they were not in the mood either for flirting or playing football, or, indeed, for playing mandolins and singing choruses from operas. They had been given a map that was not even notionally accurate, and had had the greatest difficulty in asking anyone directions. In the first place, not one of the soldiers knew any Turkish, and in the second place the civilian population ran away and hid at their every approach. On account of mass desertion from both the army and the labour battalions, the countryside was now plagued with bands of outlaws, Greeks, Circassians, Armenians and Turks happily competing in brigandage. As a consequence the people had learned to dread the very sight of an armed man, especially one in the remnants of a uniform. For lack of sensible advice, the soldiers had marched many unnecessary miles, and were by now hungry, blistered, thirsty, filthy, stinging with sunburn and more than disgruntled. “This place had better be important,” observed Lieutenant Granitola to Sergeant Oliva, more than once, “because if it turns out to be another little fleapit, I swear by the Virgin that I am going to have to shoot someone.”

  They had been sent to Eskibahçe on the grounds that it looked like an important town on the map, and therefore ought to have a garrison in order to partake fully in the rights and privileges of a proper Italian occupation, and it was, then, with a sense of relief and pleasure that they passed the tilting whitewashed graves of the Muslims and emerged from the pine forest to behold, at the entrance to the town, the neoclassical drinking fountain and watering house newly and munificently bestowed upon the town in 1919 by Georgio P. Theodorou, for the relief and benefit of all.

  The troops smiled with benign fatigue at an old woman in the shade of her doorway, who, petrified with consternation, suddenly stopped whirling her pancake around its stick, and let it fall to the floor. She picked it up, ran inside the house and out of the back door. Into the meydan she went, pancake still in hand, spreading word of the invasion.

  “Halt the men and fall them out,” Granitola instructed his sergeant. “We’ll take half an hour.”

  The men came to a shambolic and exhausted halt, and stood at ease whilst the sergeant issued his instructions: half an hour only, drink plenty of water, have a wash, and no wandering off, or, by the Virgin, he would come down on them like a thunderbolt from God His Very Self, and he’d send them home to their mothers with their balls torn off and stuffed up their arses. These threats from Sergeant Pietro Oliva were taken in good part by the men. He was a tall man with humorous dark brown eyes, black hair that receded from a high forehead and the learned air of a Florentine priest.

  A bellyful of water and half an hour’s rest on the hillside above the pines restored the men’s morale to the point where they felt revived, and by then it was almost unnecessary to take them into the town, because the town had come to them. They found themselves surrounded by a silent and intensely curious group of old men and tiny children, as well as a few women who, for decency’s sake, were holding their scarves across their noses and mouths. There were also the distorted shapes of a few younger men, those who had been m
aimed in the war, and been fortunate or resolute enough to find their way home. Dozens of pairs of brown eyes watched the soldiers intently and unblinkingly, with much the same pointless attention with which people watch dogs copulating.

  Word had got about that some proper soldiers had arrived, who were not brigands at all, and in truth the townspeople were glad to see them. All but two of their gendarmes had been called up during the war, many of them to fight with resolution and success at Gallipoli, and since then it had been very difficult to get any protection from outlaws. Iskander the Potter had been called out many a time, on account of his ownership of the magnificent gun made for him in Smyrna by Abdul Chrysostomos, but much to his frustration, it had always been too late, and he had never actually had the opportunity to shoot anyone with it. Thus far he had used it for hunting, and, after every firing of his kiln, he had also had the satisfaction of setting up the cracked or otherwise failed pots upon the wall, and blasting them to fragments. If there was an outlaw to be shot, it seemed that Rustem Bey always got there first, as if luck had a snobbish deference for rank.

  Granitola surveyed the onlookers and ordered his sergeant: “Make them go away. They make me feel like something grotesque in a museum.”

  Sergeant Oliva got up from the shade of his thorn oak, and waved his arms in the faces of the people, exclaiming “Via! Via! Vaffanculo! Sons of whores! Bitches! Pigpricks!”

  The people, who could clearly discern Oliva’s good nature, in spite of his attempt at ferocity, moved back a little, but stirred no further. “They think you’re swatting flies,” observed Lieutenant Granitola, drily, “and I feel that they don’t understand your pleasantries and compliments.” With an air of dutiful resignation the Lieutenant got to his feet, and told the sergeant to call the men together and form ranks, so that he could address them.