Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  These years of war have been utterly wearisome, and I can’t wait for the time when my beloved returns, and I hear the kaval again, and he pops up from behind a rock and bleats the bleat of a goat with nothing to say.

  CHAPTER 78

  Mustafa Kemal (18)

  General Liman von Sanders once remarked that it was impossible to get Turkish officers to cooperate with each other because of their rivalries. In Samsun, nonetheless, Mustafa Kemal begins the difficult process of trying to bring about the impossible. The British catch on too late to what he is really up to.

  Kemal’s task is to take advantage of Muslim anxieties. In the east, Kurds are worried about Armenians, as is the population of French-occupied Cilicia, to which Armenians are returning, intent upon revenge after their ill treatment during the Great War. In the west, Muslim refugees from the Balkan Wars, who have been rehoused in the homes of Greeks displaced in 1914, are now under threat from the return of those same Greek refugees. So many winds have been sown by previous stupidities and injustices on all sides that Mustafa Kemal now has several whirlwinds to reap. A British captain, L. H. Hurst, is sent to keep an eye on him, and Mustafa Kemal treats him politely but does not allay his suspicions. The British induce the government to recall Mustafa Kemal to Istanbul. He doesn’t go. He spends his time exploiting the country’s excellent telegraph system in order to set up the necessary contacts, and his activities become more political than military. He begins liaisons with irregular bands, which one might describe either as terrorists, bandits or freedom fighters, according to one’s own prejudices and inclinations. They were certainly not the kind of folk to be invited to the Pera Palace Hotel to meet one’s maiden aunt.

  Armed resistance to the Greeks begins in the west, in response to the havoc and economic ruin brought about by the occupying Greek forces. A crucial point is approaching, as it is becoming more and more clear that the government in Istanbul is incapable of standing up to the Allies and defending Turkish interests. Sooner or later a new nationalist government has to be formed elsewhere. Kemal defies a ban by the government on his use of the telegraph system, and threatens any uncooperative telegraphist with court martial. The turning point comes when Kemal and his fellow officers and dignitaries set up congresses in Erzurum and Sivas. The process begins of exploiting Bolshevik Russia’s hostility to the Allies, while remaining independent of it. The Istanbul government finds that it is powerless to remove him. He receives a missive from the Sultan, who says that he understands that Kemal is motivated solely by patriotism, that he doesn’t want to dismiss him, and perhaps he should take a couple of months’ leave. On 5 July 1919, Mustafa Kemal informs the War Minister that he is no longer serving the Istanbul government, but the nation.

  On 9 July, the War Minister and Mustafa Kemal spend hours on the telegraph, and the latter resigns from the army as the War Minister simultaneously cashiers him. Kâzim Karabekir is appointed in his place as inspector of the 3rd Army, but stands by his comrade, and at a meeting of important leaders it is agreed that all should continue to take their orders from Mustafa Kemal even though he has been dismissed. Nonetheless, Kemal descends into despair because he feels he has lost his legitimacy, but this is abruptly relieved when Kâzim Karabekir arrives, salutes him, and informs him that he is still the commander. Karabekir has brought a cavalry escort and a car with him in order to prove his point. “Pasha, we are all at your service,” declares Karabekir.

  There is a congress in Erzurum, and Kemal and Karabekir go to it together. A sheep is sacrificed, prayers are said, and democratic politics begin. Kemal is elected chairman, and he exercises his oratorical powers to good effect, talking of the state of the nation and its unjust subjection to the Allies. There are statements of loyalty to the Sultan, and already splits are appearing between modernisers and traditionalists. He borrows civilian clothes from the governor, in response to objections to having the chairman dressed as a general. The congress concludes with a charter which amounts to a declaration of independence.

  Kemal is not pleased to have to work with such “miserable people” as the leader of a Kurdish tribe and a Nakşibendi dervish sheikh, but he intends to use the committee for his own ends, of whomsoever it might consist. In Istanbul, the government progressively weakens as it fails to win any points over the Allies at the Paris Peace Conference.

  Another congress takes place in Sivas, and Mustafa Kemal has to borrow a retired major’s life savings in order to be able to afford to go to it. He leaves accompanied by a machine-gun detachment, and has a machine gun mounted on the leading car. He and the Nakşibendi dervish sheikh have to travel through territory controlled by the Dersim Kurds, who have only three principles. One is greed, the other is violence, and the third is to have no principles other than these two.

  At the conference it is resolved not to revive the Committee of Union and Progress, and not to be partisan to any political party. The era of the Young Turks is over. The conference confirms that it wants national independence within the lines set out at the armistice; in other words it wants to get rid of the Arab lands. The Arabs either fought badly in the Great War or defected to the British side, and the Turks want nothing more to do with them. Kemal and his comrades have fully embraced the principles set forth by President Wilson concerning national self-determination. There is talk of an American mandate whilst the country recovers, but Mustafa Kemal prefers help to hegemony. He will accept aid from anyone, as long as nobody tries to tell him what to do.

  The new War Minister in Istanbul decides to send a detachment of Kurdish cavalry to arrest Mustafa Kemal, and the British seek to exploit Kurdish nationalism in order to disrupt Kemal’s plans. Nothing comes of it, because Kemal has managed to befriend Kurdish chieftains, and anyway, organising Kurds is like trying to keep kittens in a box. Typically, they go home as soon as they have as much plunder as they can carry. Kemal suspects the Sultan of plotting against him, but keeps quiet about it. Nationalists begin to seize civil control almost everywhere. The British begin withdrawing in order to avoid clashes with them, and to prevent the Ottoman government from taking action, so as to forestall a civil war. The government is in an impossible position, and the Grand Vizier resigns. In Sivas it is becoming increasingly clear that Mustafa Kemal is accumulating powers tantamount to dictatorship, and there are many who do not like it.

  Kemal discovers that one cannot govern in chaotic times and keep one’s hands clean. He raises taxes to fund his operations, but it amounts to banditry. He does not in any case hesitate to employ bandits. There is dissent and plot and counterplot, among officers and throughout the nation, against a background of national elections.

  In the meantime, there are wars to prosecute. Kemal cannot afford direct confrontations with the Allies, so he sends irregulars against the French, commanded by a gentleman who takes “Ali the Sword” as his nom de guerre. The French find themselves not only confronting Arabs and Turkish nationalists, but also having to cope with the embarrassing misbehaviour of their own Armenian legionaries, and the plans, plots and ambitions of the British. Clemenceau loses the French election, and it is clear that things are going to change.

  It is decided to move the nationalist headquarters from Sivas to Ankara, and Kemal borrows petrol and tyres from the headmistress of a local American school for Armenians. The Sivas branch of the Ottoman Bank is besieged for a week by a colleague of Kemal’s until the manager stops pretending to be ill and comes up with a loan.

  Kemal is welcomed in Ankara, a town ruined economically by a fire and by the expulsion of the Armenians who had made it prosperous. There have been national elections, and Kemal himself has become a member of parliament, but he remains in Ankara. Parliament in Istanbul is now packed with his supporters. The government returns his decorations and revokes his cashiering from the Ottoman army, but Kemal is still uncooperative. He declares his intention of driving the Greeks from the region of Smyrna, and is shortly joined in Ankara by Colonel Ismet, another of the new country
’s men of Destiny.

  Kemal and Ismet realise that they cannot rely indefinitely upon irregulars, whose actions are frequently barbaric, capricious and counterproductive, and so the build-up of the regular army proceeds apace. In the meantime, Kemal has to face off the British. They are interfering in government and trying to dictate who should be in the Cabinet. Kemal orders his officials countrywide to be prepared to arrest British control officers. He steps up military pressure against the French in Cilicia, and an astoundingly daring guerrilla band raids a French arms depot in Gallipoli, and empties it out.

  Kemal begins to feel marginalised in Ankara. Nationalist politics are going ahead without him in Istanbul. An interesting thing happens, however; whereas the word “Turkey” has been in common usage for centuries in countries outside the Ottoman Empire, it is now used for the first time in an official document in Istanbul. The use of the word signifies that the Turks are beginning to see themselves as the inhabitants of the Anatolian heartland. They are no longer thinking of themselves as Ottoman, and so they are losing their affinity with their co-religionists in Arabia, or anywhere else in the former empire. When “Turkey” becomes a word used by Turks, it really means the end of the ulema, the pan-Islamic dream of Muslim idealists, a fantasy just as fantastic as the Greek dream of Greater Greece.

  The Allies of the Paris Peace Conference become enmired in confusion. They have contradictory ideas as to how to deal with Turkey. The Italians leak information to the nationalists, and Kemal has the confidence of the commander of the French detachment in Ankara. The British occupy Istanbul in a clumsy and bloody operation. They arrest the nationalist leadership there and send them to Malta.

  This is the most marvellous thing that Kemal could have hoped for. The British have removed the legitimate government and ensured that he is the only important nationalist leader left. Kemal declares that the Ottoman state is finished. He says, “Today the Turkish nation is called to defend its capacity for civilisation, its right to life and independence, its entire future.” He orders the arrest of British officers, and these effectively become hostages. The Istanbul parliament resigns in protest against the British action, and Kemal organises new elections, whose deputies duly arrive in Ankara. Nationalist intellectuals and activists go to Ankara in a steady stream. Once he has won over the commander of the 12th Corps, all real power in unoccupied Turkey has effectively devolved upon Mustafa Kemal.

  Back in Eskibahçe, no one has been able to follow these events. News percolates slowly into the countryside from the big towns, and by the time it has arrived, it has undergone a whole series of mutations.

  The current preoccupation in these parts is with the ever more virulent plagues of outlaws and bandits. Rustem Bey is in charge of tracking them down, and has seen some vicious fighting in the mountains, as bad as anything he experienced when he was in the army. This amounts to guerrilla war, a nervy chaos of ambushes, long and fruitless treks through unfamiliar country, terrifying surprises, single shots from indeterminable directions that ricochet among the rocks, and short and brutal engagements. Rustem Bey has become thin and dark-skinned, and his riding boots are so scuffed that there is little point in polishing them any more. Instead he rubs them with fat. He has a bullet hole through his fez, and a long scar from a sabre on his right arm. Leyla Hanim weeps with anxiety whenever he departs, and weeps again with joy when he returns.

  His militia consists of old men, little boys, the mildly disabled and those, like Iskander the Potter, who have somehow escaped from military service. Iskander is an enthusiastic outlaw-hunter, as he likes to seize any opportunity to use the pistol and hunting rifle that he bought from Abdul Chrysostomos. He enjoys the long marches out into the countryside and the roasting of birds in the ashes of campfires. Unfortunately, Iskander is a poor shot, he is hasty at the trigger and is slightly shortsighted, so that his contributions have consisted merely of adding to the general din of the skirmishes.

  He has once had a chance to shoot Red Wolf, the notorious outlaw whose trademark was always to wear a scarlet shirt, when the latter was scrambling away up a hillside, but the bullet was a dud, and by the time that he had cleared the breech it was too late.

  Iskander takes pride in his prowess, and regrets only that he has not yet managed to prove it. He says, “The patient hunter gets his reward.” He sometimes wonders whether Abdul Chrysostomos made the barrel straight, or whether all his bullets might be defective, but the fact is that Rustem Bey once tried out the rifle, to satisfy his own curiosity, and knocked a bottle off a wall at 150 yards. When Iskander tried it, he knocked chips out of a stone two paces away.

  CHAPTER 79

  I Am Philothei (13)

  I remember once I was out gathering figs and I had gone quite a long way, and I had picked a lot of them because I needed them both for my father’s house and for Rustem Bey’s house. Then Ibrahim appeared. He had done the bleat of a goat that had nothing to say, and so I knew he was coming.

  When he popped up from behind a bush, he made me laugh as usual. Then he came out and took my hand and kissed it, and said, “My little bird,” and I said, “Why do you always call me little bird?” and he said, “Because you are delicate and beautiful, and you sing when you are working, and I have always thought of you as a little bird. When a thought of you suddenly comes into my mind, I think, ‘Oh, it’s the little bird.’ ”

  I said, “Do you remember when Karatavuk and Mehmetçik my brother tried to fly and ran around flapping their arms, and it never worked?” and he thought about it and said, “I think it’s because arms don’t have feathers.”

  I said, “If we had feathers on our arms, do you think we could fly?” and he said, “Maybe not. If that was possible, someone would have done it by now,” and I said, “Think how free we would be. We could fly to the top of a mountain and there would be no one to tell us to be ashamed, and no one would see us.”

  Next time I saw him he said, “I had a dream about flying, and when I woke up I had verses in my head.”

  I said, “Verses? Can you remember them?” and he recited:

  “Don’t pity the eagle

  Who can climb the sky and fly

  But for the little wingless bird

  Cry.

  Fire will be found by

  Birds that fly too high

  And all his feathers burn

  And he’ll fall down and die.

  What bird has two nests

  Only one shall remain

  And his wings burn

  And he’ll not fly again.

  What if I make a high nest

  But the branch sinks low?

  They will take my little bird

  And I will die of woe.

  Oh my little bird

  Who will chase you?

  Who will put you in a cage

  And tenderly embrace you?

  It’s not possible to light a

  Candle that doesn’t drip,

  And it’s not possible to love

  And never weep.”

  And I said, “Oh, Ibrahim, where did these words come from?” and he said, “They were given to me by the night,” and I said, “With words like these you could become famous, if only you were known in the Sultan’s court.”

  He said, “I will never be known in the Sultan’s court. Sometimes I feel I am like an eagle. I feel I am strong and whole in the heart, I feel as if I could accomplish anything. I could look down on the earth and beyond it, and I would be lord of the earth because I am lord of the air. But I have been tied to the ground. I will be scratching dust for ever, like a chicken.”

  Then he paused and turned away from me, and said, “I would be an eagle, but God has clipped my wings.”

  I said, “What kind of a bird would I be?”

  He thought for a few moments, and said, “A partridge.”

  CHAPTER 80

  Mustafa Kemal (19)

  A virtual state of civil war exists between Kemal loyalists and those loyal to the Sultan,
particularly between Circassian factions. The Sheikulislam issues a fatwa stating that nationalists are infidels and must be killed. The mufti of Ankara issues a counter-fatwa signed by 250 colleagues, stating that since the Sultan Caliph is a prisoner of the infidels, fatwas issued under duress have no validity.

  Kemal very cleverly, and no doubt cynically, allays the fears of religious and political conservatives by ensuring that the opening of the Ankara parliament on a good Muslim Friday is preceded by recitations from the Koran and the Hadith. The Prophet’s banner and a hair from his beard are processed. Sheep are sacrificed, prayers are offered for the safety of the Sultan Caliph. Similar ceremonies are organised by nationalists all over the country, and there are plenty of enthusiasts to shout “God is Great.” When he is elected President, Kemal declares his hope that the Sultan will rule for ever, free of foreign interference. Mustafa Kemal knows how to dissemble.

  The day after, Kemal begins the seduction of the Bolsheviks in Moscow, asking for arms, ammunition and five million roubles, and speaking to them in their jargon. Then he sends a telegram to the Sultan, declaring his loyalty. Then he sends out expeditions against the Sultan’s loyalists, easily defeating them and hanging their leaders. Many of the enemy desert and change sides. The British bomb Kemal’s troops to keep them away from the capital. The British urgently need new Allied troops, and only the Greeks are near enough. The Greek Prime Minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, seizes the opportunity.

  Venizelos has been warned that if he goes to war with Turkey he will get no support, but now he offers a division to help out the British, and in return he gets permission for a concerted action in the region of Smyrna. He takes this as carte blanche to undertake a full-scale invasion, convinced that ultimately the British will support him and hoping to establish a fait accompli. Greek troops advance beyond the boundary laid down for them, and move east and north. They occupy the Aegean coast, and the southern coast of Marmara. The Turkish troops are away, suppressing rebellions elsewhere. The Greeks take Bursa and advance two hundred miles to Uşak. Far away in eastern Thrace they overrun the Ottoman garrisons, and occupy Adrianople. In Ankara, Kemal reacts to the anger of the assembly by declaring a jihad. A turbulent Circassian warlord is dispatched against the Greeks, and his irregular forces drive the Greeks from Demirici.