On the fifth day, hunger took over in the nose of the plane. Both the pilot and the co-pilot fell into despair at the deep, green water rippling beneath them without end and the midday sun shining without respite overhead. For the last time before they fainted from hunger, they encountered such a huge aircraft that they felt that they had a whole planet beneath them, and another above them. Then they lost consciousness and fell into a sugar coma. Soon afterwards the two pilots died. Their LVG C.II continued to furrow the sky, but that is no longer part of the history of the Great War: the plane finally crashed in southern Patagonia and created considerable panic among the natives and gauchos, who had never even heard of the Great War.
In Old Europe, Fritz Krupp and Dietrich Strunk were declared missing in action. They were the first crew to be lost in the new planes which, like chemical warfare, were meant to turn the course of the war decisively in Germany’s favour. But the war in the air continued and the days of the flying aces were ahead. Planes and Zeppelins fought air-battles near Dunkirk and off the eastern coasts of England. One of those Zeppelins, commanded by Captain Karl Linnarz, took off on 20 April 1915 from an aerodrome north of Brussels. In complete silence, it made its way to London unnoticed. The first bomb on the British capital was dropped from the basket beneath the cabin, and it was followed by thousands of leaflets. The explosion caused some minor damage by the Thames, but the leaflets were a challenge even for British composure. They read: ‘You damned English, we are coming to either destroy you or cure you. Signed: Linnarz.’ Since it had come in silence, the Zeppelin also flew away unobserved, while down on the ground fire engines began to wail through the streets of London, although nothing was ablaze in the city. The firemen gathered up the leaflets, removed them from monuments and grabbed them out of the hands of passers-by. Still, thousands of them ended up in the pockets of travellers and so made it not only to Salisbury and other nearby cities, as well as further north and even to Scotland. But by evening, everything had calmed down and the rain was turning the last of Captain Linnarz’s shameful proclamations to papier-mâché.
Rain set in that night in Istanbul, too, forcing Yıldız Effendi to move all his spices into the dry. He lugged them into the shop with his fez pulled down over his ears and managed to get them all inside in good time. Since no customers came, he even started a hushed conversation with the deserted shop and its contents. He thought the war could be ended in its second year with the help of the traders and merchants. He even went so far as to loudly ask the red spices what price they wanted so they would start selling less than the brown and green spices. There was no reply, or perhaps the reply for the red and orange spices came from the rain beating persistently against the dilapidated tile roof of his shop. Drop by drop, life by life, the rain seemed to be saying, there was hardly anything here to be traded.
It was also pouring rain in Bad Gleichenberg, where General Boroevich von Boina was recuperating. The spa resembled an enormous hotel complex from better times, when German families came here on holiday, convinced that nothing could dispel the idyll. Here the broken field marshal from the Eastern Front was given a large apartment with a terrace overlooking the spa’s promenade. He entered the room as a commander, but as soon as the door closed behind him he slumped into the armchair like a crushed man. The suitcases he had put down gaped at him, and the sun slanted in through the venetian blinds on only one of his half-closed eyes. In that room, Boina began his arduous recovery. He no longer spoke of the two Przemysls — neither the false one he had captured, nor the real one he couldn’t reach. He just smiled at the friendly doctors, who prescribed him medicines he found strange, and kept an eye on all his things, which were still double. Every morning he discussed the schedule of the day with his two adjutants, as if he were still at the front, and painstakingly polished his two pairs of boots. Two coats hung in the wardrobe along with two shiny, black-plumed helmets.
At the stroke of noon, the general would go down to the dining room ceremonially dressed in his ironed uniform and wearing a black- plumed metal helmet. Everyone saw him, but he didn’t mix with anyone. It was wartime, and he considered that he belonged at one of the fronts, but how was he to know which was the right one? When, after more than a week, the medicines showed little effect, a young intern doctor from the spa volunteered to devote himself to the field marshal. They struck up a friendly rapport. He tried to behave as if he were his son. After two luncheons together, he admitted that he wasn’t a patient, but a doctor. Seven more were needed for Boina to invite him up to his apartment.
In the large sitting room there, the doctor could hardly fail to notice that everything of the general’s was in duplicate but that he only ever wore one; there were reserve things meant for the spirits of the past — pieces of clothing which were ironed, polished, washed and put away ready for use but never saw the light of day. He immediately realized that for Boina to tread the path of recovery he would have to persuade the great man to begin wearing those ‘reserve things’ too. The young doctor was not surprised when the field marshal rejected the idea, but he knew this was the beginning of Boroevich’s Sisyphean rise on the rocky terrain of schizophrenia, which would end either in his discharge from the sanatorium or in the complete ruin of one of the Dual Monarchy’s most brilliant officers.
Every day at noon, the doctor and his illustrious patient lunched together. The general in his dress uniform, the doctor in a smart, chequered jacket with a fine linen belt around his waist. The doctor quickly learnt to distinguish the twin boots, twin sets of medals, twin uniforms and twin helmets. He needed twelve more midday meals to prompt Boina to put on the pair of tall boots he had never worn. This was utterly new for the general. He sweated, dithered and threw aside the boots meant for the Serbian Orthodox Boroevich, only to put them on in the end. As soon as he had pulled them up, an evanescent image of life came back to him. He remembered his mother and a certain Serbian lullaby, which no one had sung to him for almost half a century. The general burst into tears in his apartment, but he didn’t want to show that weakness before the young doctor, who praised him when he saw the ‘ostracized boots’ on him at lunch.
‘Now we’ve set off on a long march,’ said the doctor, who smelt of skin cream. ‘It will be a thorny road, a harsh and stony one, but we must stick to it till the end.’ And Boroevich did. When he donned the uniform which for years had been meant for his childhood phantasm, he remembered his grandfather’s prickly moustache; when he put on the unworn helmet for the first time, he smelt the frankincense in the small church in Boina . . . he cried, bawled and tore at his chest, and he had just enough presence of mind not to uglify his face, because that would have given him away at lunch where he still went outwardly composed, orderly and with soldierly punctuality. But the doctor knew that the field marshal’s process of recovery would only be concluded when he stopped dividing the food on his plate into two halves and eating only the half closest to him — not a forkful more. Five more lunches were needed to persuade him that they ‘cross into enemy territory’ and ‘requisition’ a little food from there (he intentionally used military expressions), and when Boina managed that too he was able to report for duty again at the high command.
Was he cured? No, but he was able to serve the monarchy once more. As soon as he arrived back at the Eastern Front, he asked for two horses, two batmen and two chiefs of staff, but now he made a point of using both horses, both batmen and both chiefs of staff in the conviction that this perspective would prevent any errors of judgement and, when everything was viewed binocularly, enable him to choose the correct military objectives. On 20 April 1915, Boroevich was sent to the Italian Front because lady spies more successful than Lilian Schmidt had reported that Italy would soon be entering the war as an enemy of Austria-Hungary. Boina thus became commander of the Isonzo Front. He located his headquarters north of the River Piave, wore his pairs of boots alternately, rode his horses one in the morning and the other in the afternoon, and was convinced that he
had left all his problems behind him.
Things were quiet on the future Italian Front at first, but the field marshal knew a great battle was brewing at the other end of Europe because he had to sign an order for all the ships under his command, anchored at Fiume and Pola, to sail for the Aegean Sea. There they were to intercept the British and French fleets, which on 25 April 1915 began an invasion of the southern, Asian end of the Dardanelles, on the Gallipoli peninsula, not far from the place the Turks call Çanakkale. The story told by these ill-considered landings, whose ultimate goal was to capture Yıldız Effendi’s Istanbul, only concerned Boina insomuch as he was needed for signing the order. It had a lot more to do with bootlaces.
Among soldiers, there were two common ways of doing up boots: one with the lace divided into two unequal lengths and parallel lacing along just the longer side, from the lowest to the highest hole of the boot, and another with the lace divided into two equal lengths and crossing at right angles from left to right and right to left. Only one shoe-cleaner from Trieste with a face as dark as brown shoe polish, who only came along when a stiff breeze was blowing from the first quadrant of the sea, knew twenty-four more ways of lacing; but he only revealed his secrets to the retarded children at the home, who were thrilled beyond measure. Soldiers in the Great War tied up their boots now this way, now that, and coincidence had it that five Australian and five Turkish soldiers became the eyelets, through which the joker of fate pulled the long lace that was the Gallipoli Campaign.
It all began with the landings. Once the Allied ships had picked up their human cargo — the men who would go ashore on Turkish soil — and managed to avoid the traps set in the deep waters off the Dardenelles, the invasion could begin. The objective in the mind of Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, was to crush Turkish resistance there and march on to Istanbul like in medieval times, when the Crusaders liberated Constantinople. But six Turkish divisions at Çanakkale under the command of Esad Pasha and Vehip Pasha were of a different mind. The Turks had prepared well, dug in artillery and infantry, and like real Ilians, here near the site of Troy, waited for the attack of the modern-day Achaeans. They weren’t deterred by months of daily bombardment from the sea or the arrival of the amassed seafarers. Aeolus scattered the thick smoke from their ships, leaving them fully exposed, and so the British 29th Division, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps and the French Oriental Expeditionary Corps were met by withering fire. Soon the sandy beaches were littered with bodies like a freshly cut harvest.
But the attackers made it up to the grass and rocky slopes and quickly dug themselves shallow trenches south-east of Anzac Cove, and then, on 1 May 1915, an exchange of rifle fire began and chance started to do up its bootlace. First, it was pulled through from the Australian to the Turkish side of the lines near Chunuk Bair. A soldier of the 2nd Company, 1st Battalion of the 9th Turkish Division, Esad Saledin, suddenly smelt horses in the middle of the exchange of fire. A moment later, a picture appeared to him, as vivid as only a vision could be: he was in the Australian outback speaking English, breaking in horses, drinking coffee by the fire and, for sport, grabbing horseshoes from the top of posts at the gallop. That gilder from southern Turkey smelt and felt all this although he had never ridden or owned a horse. He looked at the palms of his hands, and before his very eyes they became strangely furrowed as if he had just let go of reins. A second later, a bullet from the Australian side passed through the head of Esad Saledin the gilder. This projectile was fired from a range of several hundred metres from Rhododendron Ridge by Graham Dow, a stable boy and horse breeder from South Australia. Chance determined that all his experience from the time before the deadly shot would be passed to his Turkish victim, and so the bootlace passed through its first two holes.
Now it had to go back from the Turkish to the Australian side. Liaison officer Peter R. House had been yelling all day and was now completely hoarse. For this reason he was unable to yell in surprise or confide in anyone that he suddenly acquired all the experience of a Turkish smuggler of gold coins. It became clear to him all at once: how the fake gold coins were made in Italy, how peasants were cheated into buying them, and what could be bought with them. All of a sudden Peter R. House saw Izmir as his native city, and smelt the smells of tallow and saffron as if they had impregnated his shirt collar back when he was child. When he sniffed his hands, he realized they smelt like the copper used in imitation Ottoman gold coins. He wanted to share this unexpected knowledge with the soldiers around him, but before he could reach out his hand he was dead. Chance had pulled the lace through from the Turkish to the Australian side. The bullet which killed House was fired from the rifle of Cevdet Baraklı, an Izmir black marketeer and maker of fake gold jewellery and coins.
The next eyelet for the ominous bootlace was pulled through from the Australian to the Turkish side. The third victim of this Gallipoli lacing was, appropriately, a poor shoemaker by the name of Koca Umur. Koca’s legs started to jiggle of their own accord, although he had never as much as run over the bridge of the Golden Horn. He looked down at his poor legs and suddenly realized he was a sprinter. He caught a glimpse of Perth, as if it was his home city, and saw the Australian national championship in the hundred-yard race. He even smelled the red dust strewn on the lanes of the track. Just as he realized he had crossed the line ahead of his greatest rival from Sydney. He was fatally wounded by a bullet fired by Simon Hatings, the Australian national champion in the hundred-yard race held in Perth, 1913.
Philip Hershaw was the next. He saw himself as a Turkish shoemaker from the town of Abydos, not far from the positions in the Dardanelles, who was so poor that he took out his two imitation gold coins every evening and looked at them as if they were holy. And, to his surprise, Hershaw began to repeat to himself in Turkish: ‘With these I can buy a good hunting falcon with a cage and a glove, or ten dozen rounds of fresh bread; I can pay a dervish labourer from Tabriz for a month, or buy three grave-plots, and the coffins too.’ Then he stopped, because at the same instant his life was snuffed out. Hershaw was killed by the penniless shoemaker Şefik Kutluer, who had never as much as trodden on another’s shadow. Four soldiers were dead, but two holes remained to complete the deadly act. A shot still had to be fired from the Australian side; and that was performed by Sergeant Rodney Kellow.
The bullet was intended for an ordinary apprentice from a shop for European and oriental spices, who considered Effendi Mehmed Yıldız his second father and mentioned him every evening in his prayers. That red-headed apprentice’s name was Orhan Fişkeçi. He had a swarthy younger brother recruited into the army in the Caucasus, who he heard had been cut down by Russian Cossacks. Now, before he too became someone else and was shot dead, he thought back once again to his real life with Effendi Yıldız and to cheating so adroitly at the scales, just so much that his master was satisfied and the customers wouldn’t complain. He laughed out loud, and the next moment, without warning, he became Rodney Kellow, a solicitor from Canberra. Suddenly he was able to cite various articles of the British Empire’s penal code almost off by heart, and in English . . . and then a bullet bored right through him, just below his left eye. Orhan Fişkeçi was dead, and with his death chance had finished lacing up its boot and tied a knot. A lace in the form of a bullet passed from stable boy Graham Dow to Esad Saledin; from the counterfeiter Cevdet Baraklı to Peter R. House; from the sprinter Simon Hatings to Koca Umur; from the impoverished shoemaker Şefik Kutluer to Philip Hershaw, and finally from the Canberra solicitor Rodney Kellow to Yıldız’s eldest apprentice, Orhan Fişkeçi. Five living soldiers: five dead soldiers. Çanakkale Savaşları or the Battle of Çanakkale, as the Turks called their first and only major victory in the Great War, thus did up one of the war’s many boots. The attackers of Gallipoli never made it to Istanbul, but rumours about the dead of Çanakkale certainly did.
Now there was no longer any joy or great expectation. Still, Tanin, which the spice trader Mehmed Yıldız bought a copy of that morni
ng too, gave a romanticized account of victory in the First Battle of Çanakkale. It was two-dimensional, the way everything was meant to be in Turkish history: the attackers came from the sea, and we met them on the beaches and the rugged slopes. They attempted to charge and were cut down. The righteous triumphed. The infidels sowed the ground with their own bodies so they would sprout with weeds and become the homes of snakes. The correspondent from Gallipoli made it sound as if no Turk could be killed in that holy war of the righteous against the wrong, but a chill crept over Effendi Mehmed’s heart because he knew there were no fell dragons which could simply be put to the sword without devouring a martyr or two first. What had become of his oldest apprentice, Orhan?
Who could he ask? No one, of course. As long as no rumours reached him, everything was alright. The battle was very large and many souls departed for the bosom of Allah. But no rumours reached him. It would be best not to go out and meet them. He closed the shop for several days because the rain over the Bosporus was relentless, and there were no customers anyway. With a sheet beneath his knees, he prayed to Allah on his small terrace. He kept the door closed but was under no illusion: if rumour wants to reach us, it will make its way through a gate with five locks. And so it was this time, too.
There was no fire this time, and no stranger came up to speak to him. Instead, Yıldız had a bad dream, in which Orhan appeared. His red-headed apprentice laughed in his face and bit a gold coin in front of him to show that it was fake. When the spice trader woke up, he took the Koran and began searching for the word hazen (melancholy). He decided to prepare himself so that Orhan’s death would not catch him unprepared as Şefket’s had. He found the word spelt as huzn in two verses and hazen in three others. The year in which the uncle of the Prophet Mohammed, Abu Talib, and his wife Khadiya died is called ‘Senettul huzn’ (Year of Melancholy), he read, and he thought of preparing himself for the impending deaths in his family.
The Great War Page 19