Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  “So why are you leaving?”

  “Because I’ve been recalled, my friend. I’m afraid I have no choice at all.”

  “No, I mean why are all of you leaving? Why has Italy recalled you?”

  “I suspect it might be something similar. On top of that, it’s obvious that Mustafa Kemal is going to win, and why should we face up to him when there’s nothing to be gained by it? We’ve had a lovely time here, and now it’s time to go, and the important thing was to prevent the Greeks from getting anything we might have wanted for ourselves.”

  “I heard that the Greeks are in full retreat,” said Rustem Bey. “I just hope they don’t burn Smyrna if they leave. I have a lot of friends there, and that’s where all my money’s in the bank.”

  “They’ve burned everything else, I am sorry to say, but, speaking as a soldier, there would be no point in burning Smyrna because one only burns towns to make them useless to an advancing enemy. It slows him up a great deal because then he can’t supply or accommodate himself locally. Once the Greeks are at sea, Mustafa Kemal will have no reason to follow them any further, and there would be no point in burning it. Personally I am more worried about what Kemal’s troops are going to do when they get the freedom of the Armenian quarter.”

  “Mustafa Kemal is becoming a giant,” observed Rustem Bey, his thoughts looping away on a different track. Then, returning to the subject, he asked, “If you and the Greeks are both leaving, am I right in thinking that only the British will still be here?”

  “Well, yes. They control Istanbul and the Dardanelles. Whether or not Mustafa Kemal will turn on them after the Greeks have gone, I wouldn’t care to say. The British will be the last of the Allies, allied in the end to no one at all. Not an enviable position.”

  “Surely Mustafa Kemal wouldn’t dare take on the British? He doesn’t even have a navy.”

  Granitola laughed and shook his head. “You’re a Turk. What would you do in his place?”

  “I think I would threaten the British and see what happens. Like a cat that bushes up its tail to frighten a dog.”

  “As an Italian, I think I would do the same.”

  “I shall miss our discussions,” said Rustem Bey.

  “We have sorted out the world so much that now it cannot help but become absolutely perfect.” Granitola looked at his watch, twisted his mouth into a wry expression, and continued: “But unfortunately I really must go and make ready. We leave very early in the morning.”

  “I shall come down to the meydan to see you off.”

  As he left, Granitola kissed Rustem Bey on each cheek, according to the custom that he had quite unconsciously acquired, and then he said, “Did you know that the sergeant of the gendarmes has given Sergeant Oliva his backgammon set as a farewell present?”

  Rustem Bey laughed. “I have never heard of a Turk making such a terrible sacrifice.”

  “Apparently he was weeping when he handed it over, but I don’t know whether it was on account of parting with Sergeant Oliva or the backgammon set.”

  “It was probably both,” said Rustem Bey, adding, “When you go back to Italy I doubt if you will be able to carry on wearing that fez.”

  Lieutenant Granitola took it off his head, looked at it, and then replaced it. “I doubt it too. It isn’t yet standard issue in the army, I believe, and is unlikely to become so. Even so, I shall wear it in the evenings as I sit in my study and contemplate, and I shall feel briefly like a Turk.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Rustem Bey, and he went into the house and came back bearing his waterpipe. “You must take this,” he said, holding it out. “No, please, I have another. Smoke it in the evenings with the fez on your head.”

  CHAPTER 84

  Mustafa Kemal (21)

  Mustafa Kemal moves to a house bought for him by public subscription, and, in accordance with his long-standing determination both to be and to appear to be incorruptible, he promptly transfers the deeds to the army. He has a piano and a billiard table. He makes agreements with the Russians and the French. The latter are leaving Cilicia, but are to retain Şskenderun, and they agree to sell their abandoned military matériel for a pittance, so that Kemal can use it against the Greeks. The Turks regain their territory in the south as the French leave, taking with them those Armenians who had previously returned. The Italians also leave behind them plenty of matériel, and more is illicitly sold to Kemal by both the Italians and the French. Weapons are smuggled out of caches in Istanbul, where they are supposedly under guard.

  It is at this juncture that the Greeks entirely lose the sympathy of the rest of the world. They make the mistake of committing atrocities too near to Istanbul, where everybody will notice. As they retreat they destroy everything left behind, so that towns, villages and countryside are reduced to smoking desert. Greek irregulars, calling themselves “Black Fate,” make a career of murdering Turkish civilians.

  Turkish atrocities are less noticeable since they occur in places where Allied observers have left. Nurettin Pasha viciously suppresses a Kurdish rebellion. In the Pontus, on the Black Sea coast, a Greek battleship bombards Ankara’s feeder port, Inebolu. The Greek population of Pontus is enormous, swollen by Greek refugees from Russia, and to prevent an uprising Nurettin Pasha recommends that all Greek men between the ages of fifteen and fifty should be deported to the interior. Kemal accepts the idea, and what follows is an exact repetition of the death marches of Aegean Greeks in 1914, the death marches of Armenians in 1915, and the death marches of British prisoners of war after the fall of Kut. In Samsun the Turks execute those suspected of being Greek or Armenian leaders. A notorious Turkish guerrilla leader named Lame Osman does his worst, and the Greeks make it all worse still by bombarding the port of Samsun from the sea.

  For some months Mustafa Kemal devotes himself to consolidating his own power and resisting other people’s attempts to moderate it. He has to deal with the peacock pride of his own officers, who are always jostling for prestige and precedence.

  The Allies propose a peace treaty, and the Greeks accept it, even though its terms are mostly favourable to the Turks. Kemal delays, however, because he realises that he is winning the war. General Papoulas has resigned and is replaced by General Hazianestis, a man widely considered to be mad, who sometimes thinks that his legs are made of glass or sugar. Hazianestis is sanguine about the chances of success, and does not even establish a second line of defence behind his army, which is stretched out almost in single file along an impossibly long front of four hundred miles. Hazianestis has his headquarters in a ship anchored in Smyrna harbour, which is about as far from the front as it is possible to be, short of going back to Greece. He moves large numbers of his men to Thrace. The Greeks have a new plan to take Thrace and occupy Istanbul, thinking that this will end the war.

  When the British and the French find out, they inform Athens that they will resist any such plan by force of arms. British and French troops are sent to man the borders, and the British fleet puts to sea.

  Kemal and Ismet realise that one cannot attack the Greeks along an entire front that is four hundred miles long, and so they pick one place in which to attack in force. This is the Afyon salient. Preparations are carried out in the utmost secrecy, mainly at night.

  The attack is initially slow to succeed. There is one heroic but tragic commander who promises Mustafa Kemal that he will take Mount Çişiltepe within half an hour. Before long Kemal receives Colonel Reşat’s suicide note, saying, “I have decided to finish my life because I have failed to keep my word.” Colonel Reşat is an old comrade of Kemal’s from the Great War.

  On the second day the Turks break through, and their cavalry appears in the rear of the Greek line. The Greek 1st Corps retreats in a hurry, leaving behind its stores. Communications break down altogether, and General Hazianestis issues an order to counterattack which he might as well have addressed to thin air.

  Mustafa Kemal risks sending his men in pursuit of the fleeing Greeks, even though ther
e are intact Greek formations elsewhere. The attack is successful, and the Greek 1st and 2nd Corps disintegrate completely. The 3rd Corps in the north, which has so far stayed out of the fighting, prepares to retreat to Marmara because it is now vulnerable from the south. Kemal issues the famous order: “Armies! Your objective is the Mediterranean. Forward!”

  The Turks take thousands of captives, ambushing them as they descend from the slopes of Mount Murat. Mustafa Kemal has the delightfully ironic task of informing the captured General Trikoupis that he has just received information that the latter has been appointed commander of the entire Greek front.

  The Greeks wreak havoc on their retreat, and everything is laid waste without sense or pity. The Greek army sidesteps Smyrna, and leaves it defenceless against a Turkish army that has advanced through the desolation, becoming more astonished with outrage at every pace. The Turkish soldiers heading for the city are commanded by Nurettin Pasha, its former governor, and victor against the Kurds. Mustafa Kemal has issued orders that the civilian population of Smyrna must be treated with respect, and that any soldiers violating this code will be hanged, but the Pasha is a prickly character who dislikes and envies Mustafa Kemal, and disobeys him whenever possible. He has a well-earned reputation for shameless brutality.

  It is one of history’s little ironies that in one century the Greeks should have fought a war of independence against the Turks, and in the following century the Turks should have fought a war of independence against the Greeks. In the final battle of this last war, the Greeks lost 70,000 men, and the Turks 13,000.

  In Smyrna the last great catastrophe of the war takes place. It is now time for the Christian population to become the mirror of the Muslim one. Having seen what the Greek troops did to Anatolia, the Turkish troops are in the mood for revenge.

  Nurettin Pasha summons Archbishop Chrysostom, the hell-raising cleric who originally got the pasha dismissed from his job in Smyrna in 1919. He hands the archbishop over to the Turkish mob, who mutilate him mercilessly until finally a sympathiser puts him out of his misery and shoots him. A French patrol nearby does nothing to intervene.

  The Armenian quarter is set alight, and soon the European and Greek quarters are completely destroyed. The Turks say that the Greeks did this to prevent them from having it. After all, the Greeks burned everything else as they retreated. However, in this case the Greek army had already departed some days before. Some say that Armenians started the fire in order to prevent the Turks from having it. Some say that the fire was started because there were Armenian snipers in some of the houses, and it is common military practice to burn out snipers. Some say that Turkish soldiers started it on purpose to disguise what they had done to the Armenian civilians who lay eviscerated and raped inside the houses, or to make sure that they would have to leave and never come back. Some blame Mustafa Kemal, others Nurettin Pasha, who was a rabble-rouser and demagogue. Some blame Turkish regular troops, and others blame the uncontrollable irregulars who came along for the ride. In other words, everybody has someone else to blame and to despise for what happened to the fairest and happiest and most prosperous port on the Levant. In the end the blame really lies with Venizelos and the Allies, and in particular with David Lloyd George.

  Out in the harbour the crews of Allied warships watch as the city becomes an inferno and the desperate Christian population crowds on to the quays. The ships are there to evacuate their compatriots, not to help the locals. At first both Turkish and Allied patrol boats prevent them getting out to the ships, but finally the captains and crews of the warships can take this cruelty no longer, and begin to allow them on board. In the end they save about 200,000 people, but there are many who have never forgiven them for waiting so long.

  Beneath the oily water, thrown out of a boat and shot, it is too late for Georgio P. Theodorou, dealer in commodities and general merchandise, frequenter of Rosa’s cathouse, philanthropist, creator and donor of the fine neoclassical pump house at Eskibahçe.

  CHAPTER 85

  I Am Georgio P. Theodorou

  Yes, it’s me again, Georgio P. Theodorou, at your service, merchant and philanthropist. Should you have forgotten, it was me who erected the pump house at the entrance of Eskibahçe, and it was me who regaled you with a somewhat overlong description of the town, and related to you the events surrounding the humiliation of Daskalos Leonidas, when he was made to wear a pack saddle. I wonder what happened to him; in fact, I wonder if he is even still alive. He certainly got what he was agitating for, and no doubt he was jumping up and down with glee when the Old Greeks turned up. I don’t suppose he’s so gleeful now, though, now that the Old Greeks have buggered off and left us all neck-deep in the proverbial excrement, with vengeful Turks beating down our doors.

  You catch me at an awkward moment, my friends, and you may find my thoughts a little disconnected, but if you find me a little incoherent, if you detect that my discourse has come adrift, you will surely find me blameless, for I am at this very moment sinking slowly through the oily waters down to the harbour floor of this very lovely city that was Smyrna. I am, so to speak, neck-deep in the proverbial excrement only in a most metaphorical sense, as I am in reality considerably over my head in brine.

  When you are not a strong swimmer, my friends, you are even less of a strong swimmer when fully dressed. This is a law of nature that no one can deny. I have been proving it empirically for the last hour or so. Sooner or later one has to give up the struggle, and the weight of one’s sodden garments, combined with the extreme exhaustion brought about by panic and physical exertion, causes one to make peace with death at last, and then begins the long, slow descent to the murky realm of crabs and flatfish, seaweed, abandoned anchors encrusted with mussels and limpets, and inexplicable offcuts of thick rope and rusty hawser.

  I can’t convey to you the relief, the sheer pleasure, of abandoning the impossible struggle, the moment when one realises that it is less horrifying to die than to continue to struggle for life. It is nice, so very nice, to breathe the cold water deeply in and let it fill the lungs. One feels comfortable and clean, and a curious wavering solidity establishes itself in the head. I have just seen a large fish, and for the first time in my life have felt a pang of envy for the fishy lot.

  Not far off I can see someone else sinking to the bottom, but her skirts have floated up around her face, and I wonder if she is concerned about dying in a state of immodesty, with her white camiknickers exposed for every drowning man to see. I would say that she has excellent legs, but I don’t recognise them, so they probably don’t belong to any of my little favourites.

  All the canals of my nose have filled up, but my ears are hurting, and above me I can see the hull of a boat, and I have already become accustomed to the taste of salt. There are knocking noises reverberating through the water, and the sound of engines. They must be from the Allied warships that are watching with principled neutrality and cautious apathy as we struggle and drown. At first the water was stinging the burns on my face and hands, but now they are quite cool, I am pleased to say, and I can hardly feel the wound where the Turkish soldier shot me as I tried to swim away from the jetty.

  I was very bitter about this death until I started to die it properly. I had envisaged a more ideal death, such as being shot at the age of ninety by a jealous lover of twenty-one whilst in the arms of her nineteen-year-old rival. Better still, and thoroughly ideal indeed, would have been never to die at all. I loved my life. Who could have had a more wonderful time? And the only price to pay for it was the occasional trip to the clapquack, and the occasional worry about rates of interest and whether or not the raisin harvest was any good. I had such a wonderful life that I was even inspired by my serene mood to commit unwise acts of philanthropy, such as erecting the little pump house at Eskibahçe, and not collecting debts from my friends.

  What bothers me is that I am dying (albeit quite pleasantly) because of the most gigantic fuck-up, brought about by domnoddies, nincompoops and ninnyhamme
rs of the first order who happened to find themselves in charge of fucking everything up. Excuse the strong expression of my feelings. I would not normally use strong language in the presence of ladies, but as a drowning man who has lost everything because of the antics of addlepates, I feel entitled to express myself picturesquely. (I have just been cursorily examined in the face by a harbour mullet, and it has swum away, presumably unoffended.)

  Let’s get one thing clear; I am not and never have been a dumbbunny. If I were a dumbbunny, I would not have made my substantial fortune, would not have paid almost no taxes, and I would not have made good connections at every possible level of society. Nothing, my friends, is as innocent as the pursuit of cash, the avaricious but honest exchange of goods and labour. I am a capitalist, and no good capitalist can afford to be a dunderpate. I have made money out of every commodity, and even out of thin air, and I have spent it liberally on both necessities and frivolities. I have generated so much employment that when I get to Heaven God should give me a medal and my own private whorehouse. Without me many a fig grower would be poorer, and many a little tart less well dressed.

  I will tell you who the rattlebrains are, beginning at the top. Actually, there is not a top, because there are so many contestants for the lackwit championships that all come in equal first. Before nominations begin, let me make it quite clear that I am not an Old Greek. I don’t come from Athens or any other poky little hole like that, where they don’t even speak Greek properly. I am a rayah Greek, a twenty-four-carat Asia Minor Greek, and my family have thrived here in Smyrna for generations, and I will hobnob with any old Turk or Jew or Armenian or Levantine as long as they are inclined to strike a mutually beneficial deal. I make no distinctions of race and religion as long as there’s some lovable cash in it or a good night out at Rosa’s, which I fear has now been burned to the ground in this very conflagration which, from Bella-Vista Street to the Custom House, from the Custom House to Basma-Khane, and northwards to Haji-Pasha and Massurdi, is reducing the prettiest little playground in the Levant to a heap of ash composed in equal parts of bones and timber.