by Ann Bridge
One of Dr. Pierce’s tasks—he was called “Major Pierce” in the Army —was the interviewing of the more important prisoners. He sat behind a small table, wearing the khaki uniform in which he somehow contrived always to look shabbily academic, never in the least military, and questioned them in their own tongue. Turkish prisoners had a thoroughly English habit of tough silence under examination, but the Doctor, from his long familiarity with the country and the people, got better results than most. Owing to the exceptional swiftness of Mustafa Kemal’s retreat—the British troops lost touch for some days—there was a certain time-lag in the examination process, and it was nearly a week after the Bulgarian Armistice that a young officer came to him one morning and said—“I say, Sir, we’ve got a Staff officer here. He doesn’t seem much inclined to chat, so we haven’t bothered to try to break him open—thought we’d leave him to you. May I bring him along?”
“Yes, do, by all means,” said Dr. Pierce, who was as unmilitary in speech as in appearance.
“Right, Sir. He looks such a nice chap,” the young officer added, presumably infected by Dr. Pierce’s naturalness, as he departed. And a few minutes later he returned, accompanied by Ahmet.
For a moment the two men stared at one another across the little table, Ahmet standing stiffly at attention; then Dr. Pierce got up and went over to him, and wrung him by the hand.
“Ahmet!—my dear fellow! How glad I am to see you! How is your Father? And Réfiyé Hanim? Still alive? Oh, excellent—wonderful old lady! She must be, what—over eighty now, isn’t she?” He turned to the young officer, whose eyes were expanding at all this—“Shearer, send for another chair, or stool or something, there’s a good fellow; Ahmet Bey is a very old friend—we have a lot to talk about.” Captain Shearer produced a seat for Ahmet, and then went off—to tell a crony that “the old Doc” and the Staff officer seemed to be “terrifically thick—practically blood-brothers.”
After making Ahmet sit down, which wasn’t easy, and giving him a cigarette, the Doctor went on with his very unprofessional questions.
“And Féridé—how is she? She must be nearly grown up now.”
“Féridé was married last week—on the 28th.”
“Married? Good God! Who to?”
“A very dear friend of mine called Orhan.” Ahmet was still a little stiff.
“He in this show?”
“No—he is up in Thrace.”
“Little Féridé! Well, I wish her every happiness. Ah dear me—married! How jealous Fanny will be of me, seeing you like this.”
Ahmet asked how Fanny was.
“Very well. She’s a V.A.D. now—a sort of military nurse, you know. She was wretched those last three years at school—the war on, and not able to help or do a thing! Terribly frustrated. But she loves this—seems to spend most of her time scrubbing floors, but she doesn’t mind; she’s in on the job.”
“Your women are wonderful,” said Ahmet, less stiffly, with a little sigh.
“And you, my dear Ahmet—are you married yet?”
“Oh yes.”
“Do I know her?”
“Do you remember Nilüfer, who came sometimes to the yali?—a distant relation. Miss Fanny knew her, I know.”
“Oh, ah, yes—I’ve heard Fanny talk of her. Plays and sings very well, doesn’t she?”
“Passablement, yes,” said Ahmet modestly.
“Well, I congratulate you—and her too!” Ahmet thanked him, a little stiff again, as Turks used to be when their wife was spoken of.
“And your Father? How is he? All this must be very worrying for him,” said the Doctor nicely. “Does he know about you?”
“I hope so—I am not sure. I expect Kemal Pasha would find means to send word. He countersigned my telegram to say that I could not come to Féridé’s wedding, when this push’ began.”
“Ah, you missed that, of course. What a pity!” said the Doctor. “Well, well—I must write and tell Fanny all this; how pleased she will be. I tell you, she has fretted no end because she couldn’t get letters through to Féridé, or hear from her. And now, my dear boy,” Dr. Pierce went on—“you and I have got some business to do, so we’d better get down to it, eh?” And they got down to it.
That evening he wrote and told Fanny all about it; and Fanny wrote back urging him to send Féridé a wedding-present. The Armistice of Mudros had been signed by that time, and—“Why don’t you go home via Istanbul, and see them all?” Fanny wrote. But Dr. Pierce couldn’t do that; and in due course he was put on a very uncomfortable troopship, and sent home from Alexandria.
. . . . . .
Ten days after the Pasha had stood and watched the Allied Fleet off Istanbul, and thought of his old friend, Turkish public feeling suffered a fresh humiliation when Franchet d’Esperey, the French Commander of the Allied troops, marched into the capital with full military ceremonial. Perhaps it was really necessary or salutary—certainly it aroused intense bitterness. This display the Pasha did not see himself, but he heard all about it from those who had, and reported it to his mother, sitting by the brazier in the salon. “But why the French, grand Dieu?” the old lady exclaimed. “They did not vanquish us. Why not the English?” Her son could not answer her.
These distresses, Réfiyé Hanim’s concern at them, and other reasons caused Murad Zadé Asaf to linger on at the yali, even now that there was no longer any fear of a bombardment. There his family was out of sight and sound of the foreign troops swarming in the city, the women of his household safe from molestation by the soldiers in the streets—English soldiers, French soldiers, Italian soldiers, and worst of all the Senegalese, with their black scarred faces and their cruel insolent smiles—out of sight of the watching warships, all the outward and visible signs of total and calamitous defeat, disruption, and despair.
There were other signs of all this, not so outward nor so visible, but well known to the Pasha. “The Young Turk” Cabinet was finished with—Enver, Talaat and Jemal were gone, Javid Bey, who had so often visited him, was in hiding; both in the new Cabinet and in small groups outside it, men were fumbling and arguing helplessly for a solution, or rather, for some sort of basis for the future—any future. That the Ottoman Empire was really doomed, that Mustafa Kemal’s prophecy had come true, was not yet fully clear to all. Men will always hope—and anyhow a nation must live. Could not something be saved from the wreck? What the new Sultan, Vahdeddin, and his immediate advisers sought to save was their own position; there were others, honest men—like the Pasha himself—who wished to save their country, but could not be certain how to do it. Turn to the Americans? President Wilson had already published his Fourteen Points, emphasising the principle of nationality and “self-determination”; there might be a possibility there. Or try the English, Turkey’s old friends and protectors?— reliable people really, Reshadieh or no Reshadieh. Or the French?— also in the past good friends to Turkey, in spite of Franchet d’Esperey’s recent tactless demonstration, and his abominable-black troops. But there was no certainty, no decision, above all no action. Few nations, proud and naturally courageous, can ever have passed through a more wretched and demoralising experience.
Into the middle of this confusion and uncertainty Orhan returned home. At last Féridé had her young husband with her, and began to live as a wife—with a deep and abounding joy and satisfaction. It was still strange, her own ménage, her new independence, but now with a new and deeper strangeness, and an intense personal happiness. But their happiness, hers and Orhan’s, was purely personal. The young man was in a state of deep concern over his country’s situation, and profoundly depressed. He and Fuad—who had not been made prisoner; the Pasha’s guess as to Kemal’s resourcefulness had been well-founded—discussed it for hours, sitting, as a rule, in her little salon. They went out a great deal, too. They seldom said where they were going, but Féridé soon came to know—either to the small house at Shishli in which Kemal Pasha had taken up his residence on his return from the Syrian front, ab
out a month after Mudros, or to groups of like-minded young men in their own homes. The youthful wife used to wait up, anxiously, alone or with Nilüfer, for her husband’s return from these outings, which usually took place at night—the Allied agents were active everywhere, and Kemal Pasha was suspect. Fuad and Orhan were constantly together; their uniforms had been laid away, since the Turkish Army was now demobilised; going about in neat Western suits, they were an unaccustomed sight to Féridé and Nilüfer, after four years of war.
The Pasha, too, had some inkling of where they went, and whenever he could he lured them into his study and involved them in discussions on policy, hoping to learn what they were up to, or at least what they thought. Like so many of his generation, he at once admired and distrusted Kemal Pasha—he had won a signal victory at Anafartalar, he had kept the English out of Alexandretta; but he was a firebrand, a rebel born, always at odds with his superiors, Turkish and German alike —things must be done his way, or he simply resigned. Everyone knew— everyone in the Pasha’s circles, that is—that he had been to see the Sultan, and almost everyone had expected him to be given a post in the Cabinet, probably as Minister for War. But nothing had come of it, and now he was sulking at Shishli, like Achilles in his tent—and there were some very queer goings on in that tent, if all one heard were true!
But it was hard to draw Fuad and Orhan. Both had in full measure the Turkish capacity for talking a great deal and saying absolutely nothing, which is partly what makes of that nation such excellent diplomatists. Moreover they knew perfectly well how divided the Pasha s attitude was to Mustafa Kemal—and theirs was not divided; it was single-hearted, clear, and concrete. If in war he had done what no one else could do, so he would do in this ruinous semi-peace, given the chance. Their young eyes saw far more clearly than the Pasha’s experienced ones the degree to which indecision and despair had taken hold on official and political circles; for his were to a great extent blinded by the long years, covering his whole life-time, of habitual procrastination, habitual corruption, in the Ottoman Empire. Personally incorruptible, corruption and fainéantise did not shock Murad Zadé Asaf Pasha as they shocked his nephew and son-in-law, because they had always been part of his scheme of things. And while the young men cursed the Sultan Vahdeddin in their hearts for his weakness and self-seeking, the old man felt, they knew, that the Sultanate itself was sacred, inviolable. Their faith and belief was not in the Sultanate, but in the Turkish people; all this fawning on foreign powers for the right to live a subservient existence was utterly repugnant to them. The Americans, the English, the French!—it was the Turks who mattered, the Turkish nation, its dignity and its self-respect. There came a very unpleasant moment, during that long winter of their discontent, when Orhan, after a prolonged discussion of the situation with the Pasha and Fuad, burst out—“Excellency, if it is a case of choosing between the Turkish people and the Sultanate, I choose the Turkish people.”
The Pasha was profoundly shocked.
“That is no way to speak,” he said gravely; then his anger mounted. “These are the ideas of your new friends, I suppose. But I am unwilling to have such things said in my house.”
Orhan, equally angry, rose, bowed respectfully, and left the room. He hastened up to his own suite, where, too much disturbed to contain himself, he said to Féridé—“We must leave; we must go to a house of our own, or to my Father’s house.”
Startled, dismayed, she asked him why?—he told her. When, still furious, he had gone out again—she could guess where!—she went down to the big salon to see her grandmother.
She had no need to open this difficult subject. The Pasha had been there before her, and Réfiyé Hanim knew all about it. She too was deeply shocked at the bare idea of any alternative to the Sultanate, or disloyalty to it—such a thing was unthinkable. But she was a woman, and put peace in her family above politics; somehow or other, by her intervention, it was all patched up, smoothed over, and Orhan and Féridé stayed where they were.
The winter dragged wretchedly on. Ahmet was exchanged in March, and returned home, to join Orhan and Fuad in their nocturnal visits to Shishli or, later, to the Péra Palace. The Peace Conference, which opened in Paris in January 1919, did nothing to resolve the problems which beset the minds of responsible Turks—problems of Armenians, Georgians, Daghastanis, Russians; in fact it merely bedevilled them. When the Conference opened the areas where these racial difficulties were most crucial had one stabilising element, and one only—the British occupying troops; but as the weeks and months passed, these were gradually withdrawn. Swift decisions, by those who had the power to take them, were essential—and they were not taken. President Wilson, new to the problems of the Old World, high-minded but uninformed, proud of America’s position as “the only disinterested Power” in the Near East, suggested what everyone with any local knowledge realised could only be fatal—an International Commission of Inquiry into Turkish questions, which had for its object, at least in part, to convince the world that they had sought “the most scientific basis of settlement.” This in regions where disputes were being settled, ad hoc and locally, by rifle-fire! The unfortunate idealist from another hemisphere was thinking in terms of an educated electorate; the realities were very different. (The greatest historian of this period rightly referred later to the dangers of “a peripatetic Commission of Inquiry making a roving progress in search of truth through all the powder-magazines of the Middle East, with a note book in one hand and a lighted cigarette in the other.”)
Events did not wait on the experts. Movements of insurrection, local, tribal, broke out all through Anatolia during that spring. The situation was becoming dangerous. And since those who had had the power to control these districts delayed to use it, indeed were busily employed in withdrawing the forces of control, the Ottoman Government, decrepit as it was, was forced into action, In May 1919 it sent that turbulent and difficult creature Mustafa Kemal Pasha to Anatolia, as Inspector of the Third Army, the Turkish forces on the spot. He left by boat for Samsun on the 16th of May.
The Ottoman Government little guessed that in signing the order for this appointment they were in fact signing their own death-warrant.
Part Three
Chapter Six
There was not much publicity given at the time of Kemal Pasha’s departure for Anatolia; even had there been, it would have been swamped by the outcry and public fury aroused by an event which took place the very day before. Under the guns of Allied ships, the Greeks landed in Smyrna on May the 15th, 1919.
Smyrna was one of those exasperating cities, like Danzig and Jerusalem, on which at least two nations had fairly valid claims. It had been Greek (as Jerusalem had been Jewish) from time immemorial; from long before the day when St. John the Divine, the author of the Apocalypse, writing in Greek, addressed his famous message “unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea.” But then, six hundred years or more before the twentieth century dawned the Turks had overrun all Asia Minor, including the cities of the seven churches, and thenceforward Turk and Greek had lived side by side in Smyrna, the Greeks, as was their wont, trading and prospering, the Turks taxing them, and prospering likewise. It was, indubitably, part of the modern Turkish homeland of Anatolia; it had, indubitably, a large Greek population. The Turks had not treated the Greeks overwell, and Turkey was, apparently, breaking up. In any case the Peace Conference in Paris, busy with other matters nearer home, urged by M. Venizelo, led by President Wilson and Lloyd George, agreed—despite the protests of the British Army and Foreign Office—to this Greek adventure. They, too, did not realise that a nation would arise, like the Phoenix, from the ashes of the villages in the hinterland which the Greeks so blithely set about burning that May.
At the end of the first week in June Ahmet suddenly left the yali. He told poor Nilüfer, briefly, and at the last moment, that he had to make a journey; that he lo
ved her, and would write to her—and then made good his escape. He took an even briefer farewell of Réfiyé Hanim.
“But where do you go? Is it for long?” his grandmother asked tranquilly.
“Very dear Niné, do not ask me for how long, for I do not know; and do not ask me where, for I am unwilling to say.” He gave her a slanting smile out of his grey eyes. She smiled back at him, oldly, wisely. “May God’s mercy protect you every step of the way,” she said. He kissed her—this time on her old cheek, not on her fragile blueveined hand—and went. And of his poor father the Pasha, dreading argument—even his few weeks of imprisonment had rather weakened Ahmet’s nerve—he took no farewell at all.
But he told Féridé all about it. “I am going to him. It seems there is work to do—much work. The people must be aroused; the soldiers called back to the colours. Oh, it is hard for them!—just back on their farms, after four years away. But if we are ever to be a nation again, they must come back—and be co-ordinated, become a fighting force, not carry on their foolish, wasteful feuds. This is a thing I believe I can do—and he thinks so too.”
“Where is he now?” Féridé asked.
“At Amasya. It was hopeless at Samsun—the English Intelligence Officers always prying and interfering! But of course I shall be all over the place.” He embraced her—without stooping, as he did to Nilüfer; they were both so tall. “Goodbye, my dear sister. Watch over Orhan! What he has to do is really more dangerous, with all these sacrés foreign troops and agents about.” And he went away.
Orhan of course knew all about it, and spoke to Féridé as openly as her brother had done.