by Ann Bridge
All these different places to work in made things rather difficult for Orhan. He had to be with his master wherever that master was: whether at the Assembly Building, where he interviewed such deputies as Mustafa Kemal had not time to see personally; or at the Vali’s Bureau, where Ministers, coming from their one-room departments, had to have time allocated to them for interviews—or, worst of all, out at Kalaba. Horses were in as short supply as everything else at Ankara, and when the Commander-in-Chief stopped being Prime Minister or President of the Assembly for a few hours, and rode out to his distant Headquarters, the wretched Orhan had to trudge after him on foot, unless he managed to borrow a horse, or unless Kemal Pasha—this often happened— said with brusque courtesy to some officer: “Please lend Orhan Bey your horse; he accompanies me. Mount, my son; quickly!”—and they would clatter off together. But it was quite a walk from Orhan’s and Féridé’s eyrie, perched up on the citadel wall, even down to the Vali’s Bureau or the Assembly Building; and it was even worse when the young man had to plod through the deep dust or mud along the unmade road to that hideous villa by the station, where he frequently stayed, toiling with his chief over papers and reports, till the small hours—and then plodded home again, arriving all too often mud almost to the knees. “Do clean my trousers before the morning, Light of my Eyes,” he would mutter, as he toppled, completely exhausted, into bed—and long after her husband slept poor Féridé’s narrow hands would wrestle with the thick dirty material, washing out the trouser-legs, and then pressing them, instructed by Nilüfer, as best she could. She did manage to get an iron at last, smuggled up from Istanbul; but this was a job she could not trust to Kezban, so she did it herself, and it meant keeping the fire going in that courtyard kitchen half the night.
She had to be up early too, to see to her husband’s breakfast of coffee, coarse bread, butter, and conserves. How they both longed for the French rolls of Istanbul—Ankara afforded nothing of the sort. But he was safe! Féridé often remembered those raids at night on the yali, and her terror then, and felt the hard work as a small thing in exchange for this new security.
Nilüfer really had an easier life than her sister-in-law; partly because she had this genius for cooking, partly because Fatma was a better maid than Kezban; but mainly because Ahmet was away a great deal—and as every woman knows, things are much simpler for the housewife with the man out of the house! Ahmet was absent from Ankara at least two-thirds of the time, employed on most congenial jobs. Sometimes he was far off in the provinces, getting hold of the many irregular bands who were fighting desultorily against the Kurds and Armenians, or the French, or the Greeks, and persuading them and their leaders to enrol in the new regular army; sometimes he was down at some port like Sam-sun or Inebolu, checking the identity of those who arrived by boat, and turning back undesirables—for spies, whether Allied or from the Ottoman Government, were always trying to make their way into the interior, and even to the new capital itself.
. . . . . .
In Europe and America the creation of a rival Government up at Ankara was received with irritated incredulity. What was it all about, anyhow? It was ridiculous, and most upsetting and inconvenient. And on June the 20th, 1920, the Greeks were told by the Allies that since they had troops on the spot they could go to it, and force the Turks into submission. The Greeks lost no time. They moved forward quickly, and by July the 8th, after other successes, they occupied Broussa.
It was a curious political play and counter-play on all sides, at that time. In May the French, always realists, had concluded an armistice with Kemal Pasha’s forces; this they broke in June by occupying another town. In June, also, the National Assembly passed a resolution declaring null and void any convention or treaty concluded by the Istanbul Government with any Power, since it was made under duress; but in July that same Government accepted the phantasmagorial clauses of the Treaty of Sèvres, and signed it the following month. From the outset that treaty was wholly unreal, and the only effect of the harsh and humiliating conditions to which the Sultan’s Government set its hand—the Army to be disbanded, foreign Commissions to supervise the police force and to regulate taxes, customs, indeed every aspect of Turkish life—was to bring the waverers whole-heartedly into the Kemalist camp. The nation became defiant, and all through that autumn the “rebel” forces brought off a series of victories in the East over the Armenians, President Wilson’s protégés and pets—victories marred, one must regretfully admit, by certain massacres. To add to the farcical element, a fortnight after the Ottoman Government had signed the Treaty of Sèvres the Ankara Government in its turn signed what was called ‘The Moscow Agreement” with the Soviet Union (against which the Allies were still fighting desultorily), thus securing peace on their eastern frontiers, apart from the Kurds and Armenians, who were being dealt with—according to Turkish ideas—very satisfactorily by old Kiazim Kara Bekir. This Russian agreement was Mustafa Kemal’s first serious achievement in external diplomacy; but it also put an end to the last hope of the Armenians as a nation —and none of the Allied Great Powers, for all their pro-Armenian feeling, was in a position to prevent this small-scale but cruel catastrophe.
The play and counter-play received an even more fantastic twist during the autumn of 1920, when a male monkey took a hand in international affairs. The story of all the animals who have changed the course of history remains to be written. Everyone knows how the cackling of geese saved the Capitol of Rome from the barbarians; few know that Charles the Second’s pet fox, leaping on his wife’s bed, caused the miscarriage of her only male child, and by extinguishing the Stuart succession brought the House of Hanover to the English throne. But among these geese and foxes, the monkey of Tatoi must also take a worthy place. Winston Churchill said that a quarter of a million men died of that monkey’s bite; and it is probably also true to say that the modern Turkish State owes its existence to the deplorable little animal.
The individual it actually bit, as he walked in his palace gardens on a bright October morning, was King Alexander of Greece, who had been set on the throne by the Allies after the removal of his father King Constantine; the latter, as the Kaiser’s brother-in-law, had pursued an inconveniently and dangerously pro-German policy. But the young King’s death from blood-poisoning threw the succession open again. Prince Paul, a younger brother, said that he would only accept the throne if the Greek people decided unmistakably against his father, the ex-King; an election had therefore to be held. Everyone fully expected that Venizelos and his party, who championed Prince Paul, would come in with a large majority; on the contrary, they were heavily defeated, and King Constantine’s pro-German supporters returned to power.
One can hardly Hame the Allies for what followed. A Venizelist, pro-Ally Greece they were prepared to support with money, munitions and diplomatic aid; to support a Greece led by King Constantine was tantamount to supporting the exiled Kaiser himself. In England all public sympathy for Greece died away, and with it all feeling of obligation to help her in her Turkish adventure. The French reaction was even more positive—it was shrewdly suspected that Kemal Pasha and his new government might really have come to stay, and French interests in the Levant would be best served, therefore, by peaceful relations with the new régime; there was no point in exacerbating the Kemalists by helping the Greeks any more. On December the 4th the Allies brusquely informed the Greek Government that if Constantine returned to the throne, Greece would receive no further financial assistance of any kind from them. However, he did return.
The pause in Greek pressure caused by all these events probably just saved the Kemalist régime, which that autumn, as well as waging war on three fronts, East, West, and South, was struggling with by far the most dangerous internal crisis which had yet threatened it. It was some time in August that Féridé and Nilüfer, over the evening meals which, because she cooked so well, they often ate in Nilüfer’s house, began to hear talk on their husbands’ lips of one Edhem the Circassian and his “Green Ar
my.” Edhem was the most successful and powerful of the leaders of those bands of irregulars which Ahmet was trying to bring into the new army—bands which had, so far, borne the brunt of the fighting, whether against the Sultan’s troops, the French in the South, or the Kurds in the East. He hailed from what had been a Russian province, and was possibly infected with Communist ideas; and he was now showing himself haughty and truculent, and refusing to obey orders. Kemal Pasha had transferred him to the western front, hoping thus to diminish his influence; but this was not successful. As the hot summer evenings—when they sat sipping coffee on the divans under the windows to catch the last breeze—merged slowly into the cooler dusks of autumn, and the slopes of the long whale-backed ridge across the valley grew more and more golden in the rich evening light as the vines which clothed them turned colour, the tone of concern and dismay about Edhem’s activities deepened in the young men’s talk. The new regular army under Ismet Bey and Fevzi Pasha was growing fast, and becoming capable of absorbing all the irregular bands, but—
“So far from our getting their men into our forces, they are seducing our own men away from us!” Ahmet burst out bitterly one night.
Féridé, who was leaning her elbow on the window sill, looking out over the shadowy valley and the still glowing slopes above it, turned her head into the room, her brows drawn down over her grey eyes.
“But why, Ahmet? Why do they go to this Edhem rather than to you?—to our proper army?”
“Because we have disciplinel” her brother replied, proudly and yet angrily. “Our men must obey orders, be tidy, and above all not loot! But Edhem allows his men to dress anyhow, and loot as they will, even from our own people!—and they like that, dastards that they are!” He was trembling with anger.
“But cannot he control this?” the girl asked. “Surely they listen to him?”
Orhan answered; answered Ahmet rather than her. Nine months of responsible work had given weight and substance to the wild willow-slim young man who a year ago had been raiding arms dumps and jumping out of windows to escape the police; he had been close to Kemal Pasha and had learned much.
“It is grave,” he said. “There is support for Edhem even in the Assembly—I hear them, these deputies! Our people do not like discipline, and are too stupid and ignorant—what cattle!—to understand the need for it. They dislike a military government—which we must have, if we are to survive. Only today I heard two or three of them saying—‘Mustafa Kemal makes us button up our tunics. Ah, we would rather wear the Green Uniform!’ What can you do with people like that?”
“Sales types!” Ahmet exploded. “Did they really say that, Orhan?”
“Indeed they did. It is the new catch-word—We won’t button up our tunics.’”
“We will beat them, that is all,” Ahmet said stubbornly. “May Allah’s curse rest on Edhem and his brothers, and on all who support him.”
Towards the end of that October—in fact a few days after the youthful Greek King succumbed in agony to the blood-poisoning which set in after the monkey’s bite—Féridé, for the first time, was invited with Orhan to one of the little dinners which Kemal Pasha had begun giving to his intimates. Féridé drew her eyebrows together over this, her first invitation to a party in Ankara. “My husband, what shall I wear to this dinner?”
“But—some quiet afternoon dress; simple. And no peçé, remember— he does not like it.”
“But I must wear something on my head!” the girl said, looking at him with large eyes.
“Halideh Edib does not,” Orhan replied.
Féridé frowned a little: she had heard much about Halideh Edib, the intellectual, emancipated woman who dressed like a man, and galloped about the country rallying men and women to Mustafa KemaFs cause. (She was in fact a sort of La Passionaria of the War of Independence.) It was all very wonderful, but not quite in Féridé’s line. In the end she hit on a compromise: she put on a high plain dress of sea-green silk—one of her trousseau dresses, so little worn!—and fastened some sea-green veiling that matched it over her dark hair with two diamond stars; the effect was charming.
“Yes, chérie—it is very pretty,” observed Nilüfer, who had come up to help her dress, a task at which poor Kezban was not much good— “but what would Niné say?”
“That I must obey my husband!” Féridé retorted. “Niné is a realist, ma chère, above all things—if she were here, she would grasp at once that we are living in another world to hers.”
“And what a strange world!” Nilüfer murmured, regretfully. “For me, I prefer the old,”
Féridé was all muffled up in her çarşaf when Orhan came to fetch her with one of the little barrel-shaped Anatolian two-horse waggonettes, made of wicker, with bright pale flowers painted on the black wooden ends. He hurried in, made Temel brush his uniform while he changed his collar—all he could do in the way of dressing for dinner—and they clattered off down the steep cobbled street in the clear autumn dusk, big with the first stars; past the Assembly Building, and along the dusty road to the station. In the bare lobby of that ugly house Féridé took off her çarşaf—Orhan took in her head with a smile of approval. “Very discreet—very clever,” he murmured; and then they walked into a room with a few people standing about in it, and Féridé for the first time came face to face with the being who for the last six years had been the idol of both her brother and her husband.
She saw a man not tall, but well-made; square-set, especially about the shoulders, and impeccably neat and trim in his civilian suit—tiré à quatre épingles, she told Nilüfer afterwards. She saw that strange bony face, all angles—an Epstein face as to structure, and a curious greyish pallor, and those pale light eyes under the fierce bushy eyebrows, which rested on her with a disconcertingly penetrating gaze for an instant; but she also noted with surprise an unexpected possibility of sweetness about the mouth. He made himself very charming—“Ah, so at last I meet Or han Bey’s wife! It was good of you to bring her, mon enfant”—with a hand on Orhan’s shoulder. “And how does Ankara please you, Féridé Hanim?”
“Your Excellency, I like it very much. The air is wonderful.” Young as she was, Féridé registered the quality of the charm clearly, and rather enjoyed playing up to it.
“You do not regret Istanbul?—the lights, the life?”
“Your Excellency, I regret only the servants down there—my cook and my maid, chiefly!”
He gave his sharp infrequent laugh, and turned to Orhan, while the other guests turned to stare at the young woman who made Mustafa Kemal Pasha laugh.
“Féridé Hanim has frankness—I like this!” he said, again with a hand on the young man’s arm.
They went in to dinner, where the conversation was general. Halfway through the meal an officer came in and beckoned to Orhan; excusing himself, he rose and went out, while Mustafa Kemal continued to discuss military matters with the other men. In a few minutes Orhan returned, and leaning over his host’s shoulder waited to speak to him—with polite excuses, Kemal turned to listen. At what he heard his face changed; the charm vanished, as if wiped off a slate by a sponge, so did all hint of sweetness anywhere; the tufted eyebrows came down over the ice-blue eyes, and a sudden anger flared out of the whole man, startling and terrifying. Féridé was really terrified for a second—what had Orhan said or done? But it was the news he brought, not Orhan himself, who caused the anger—which was quickly mastered. After a moment or two Kemal Pasha told the company, in calm tones, what had happened. Under Edhem’s influence Ali Fuat, a commander on the western front, had made an attack on the Greeks without the authorisation of Ismet Bey, now the Commander-in-Chief, and had been soundly defeated. The dinner went on—when they rose from table Mustafa Kemal, with brief courteous excuses, left the room for a little while with Orhan; presently he returned, and pursued one of those long catechising conversations, in which he delighted, with the men present; they formed his main relaxation. The women sat and chatted in a group apart. European women would have f
ound this tedious, probably, but Turkish ladies had a centuries-old habit of amusing themselves without male conversation. Indeed, that evening was the first time in her life, except once or twice with Hassan on their journey, that Féridé had sat and eaten, unveiled, in the presence of men who were not blood relations. She never forgot that night—partly for that reason, but chiefly because of the light it had thrown for her on the country’s leader. As she and Orhan clattered slowly homewards up the steep hill in their little waggonette, she assessed this strange creature to her husband in French: “Il a énormément de charme, mais il peut être méchant, je pense.” Orhan laughed. “You are right, my treasure; but he is only méchant to evil-doers. This affair is the end of Edhem—you will see.”
It was the end of Edhem, as all Turkey soon saw. At considerable risk troops were called off the Greek front to deal with the Green Army— and dealt with it. Edhem and his brothers finally fled and took refuge with the Greek forces; the Green Army was incorporated in Ismet’s new formations, and the danger—that danger—was over. But it was the monkey of Tatoi that had afforded the breathing-space that made it possible to repress Edhem—and the monkey must be held responsible for what followed.
One must really pity the Greeks at this juncture. Only in June the Allies had encouraged them to go in and finish Mustafa Kemal; by December, as a result of Constantine s return, France and England abandoned them. Venizelos was gone; the French were opening pourparlers with Ankara, In these circumstances the faintest prudence, the smallest degree of common sense would have indicated a withdrawal from the Anatolian adventure, which was employing 200,000 men, and costing the impoverished little country a quarter of a million sterling a week. But the new anti-Venizelist Greek Government was more wildly expansionist than the shrewd Cretan, with all his patriotic ambitions, had ever allowed his party to be; they pressed on in Anatolia, and at home raised the war-cry “To Constantinople!” They should have been warned by their minor defeat at the first battle of Inonü, in January of the new year, 1921. But they were not warned. They marched on their fate.