The Dark Moment

by Ann Bridge

  Étamine was one of these amateur nurses. Her bas-ortü flying out behind her, she scudded down every morning to the school to which Féridé had sent blankets and bedding, and there she helped the doctors to change dressings, made beds, emptied slops, and served to the wounded men the meals that her mother, Féridé, and hundreds like them had cooked. The food was not proper invalid food, it was whatever they could get in the market and cook on their primitive stoves; they carried it down and dumped it at the doors. For the worst cases and those with high fever there was soup—in saucepans, in big hammered pewter vessels, even in slop-pails; or yoghurt, the delicious sour milk, set firmer than a junket and so fresh and sharp on the tongue, in shallow vessels of every sort; for the less seriously wounded there was bulgur—wheat first boiled and then browned in butter, and kavurma, meat roasted in the fire-clay ovens, sliced, and packed into earthenware jars filled solidly with melted butter, as the French make confit d’oie: the bits of meat flavoured the browned wheat, or the rice. All these things Féridé and Sitaré Hanim and the rest prepared and took down, banging on the doors to notify their arrival—and the little Étamines would come out, smiling, and carry the great pots inside in their immature skinny little arms. But Féridé and Sitaré did not climb the hill again empty-handed—no, they swung between them great baskets of dirty bed-linen or soiled dressings, which they then proceeded to wash out at home; not in water flowing freely from a tap, it must be remembered, but every drop hauled up in buckets from the well-heads in their airless courtyards.

  It was a gruelling job. The extraordinary thing was that though there was little or no real organisation—Turks don’t organise, or did not then—it worked. The thousands of wounded were fed, tended, and washed for, by a miracle of improvisation and voluntary help—though at a cost in physical fatigue that can hardly be measured. Even Nilüfer, sick, heavy with child and hardly able to stand, spent hours and hours every day in the stifling kitchen, standing at a table with the precious Istanbul flat-iron, pressing the sheets and bandages which Féridé had washed; and at night, after supper, the two sat by the windows in the sultry heat, looking out over the parched yellow plain, rolling the bandages up tight and neat, to be carried down next morning, tied up in a cloth, along with the soup and rice and all the rest. Every house had lent plates, cups, and bowls, of course, for there was hardly any hospital crockery available; the women even lent their stockings to cover the legs of the men resdess with high fever.

  If the deputies had displayed the same ready co-operation as the women, things would have been much easier then for Mustafa Kemal. But they did not. There were first murmurings in the Assembly, then open complaints against those responsible for the defeat; there ensued angry and embittered debates, coloured by ignorance and fear, as to what to do next. This was hopeless. Ignorant and frightened men always have poor judgement; the instrument which Mustafa Kemal had forged to express the national will seemed likely not only to cut the hand that forged it, but to destroy the nation itself.

  One of his closest friends always said of Mustafa Kemal—“If he saw a fire, he did not send for a fire-engine; he went straight up to it, and stamped it out with his own feet.” He did so now, in effect; but what he stamped on was the Assembly. He demanded outright to be made Commander-in-Chief himself, with extraordinary powers—complete power, that is, to control and organise every aspect of national defence. Cowed by that erect figure on the curved tribune, battered by that rasping voice pouring out a torrent of eloquent common sense, the deputies agreed, and voted him Commander-in-Chief, with all the special powers he asked for. Having gained his point, this astonishing man then turned round and himself presented a motion that he should only hold that office, and have those powers, for the space of three months, since he was merely “the faithful servant of the nation’s sovereignty.” This also was agreed to, and a week later, on August the 5th, the new Commander-in-Chief left to organise the new front.

  He left amid a storm of popular acclamation and relief. Unlike the deputies, the common people understood well enough who, alone, was likely to be their saviour, and sent him on his way with cheers, prayers, and tears. Orhan went with him. His unexplained departure three weeks before had in fact been to the front—sent in advance, he had returned when his chief returned. He was still full of confidence and buoyant optimism. “Ah, you should have seen how everything changed, immediately, down there at Eski-sehir, when he arrived,” he said to Féridé before he went. “Until then, all was discouragement, gloom; even Ismet Pasha was at his wits’ end. Such a good man, and a fine soldier—but he is not Mustafa Kemal! But when he came, and walked among the men, and spoke with them, all were filled with a new spirit, were content, cheerful. Mind you, a soldier hates to retreat; you could not ask a harder thing of them than that—and leaving our people to these Greek devils! But even that, they have done for him with a good heart. Ahmet spoke so much of that—how he kindled, inspired the men.”

  Féridé listened to all this, her brows drawn down, thoughtful. She was less of an optimist than Orhan, and looked always to the practical side of things. “All the same, it is a fearful risk to take, this withdrawal,” she said slowly. “I wish they could have stood on the old line. The Greeks are now only eighty kilometres away, I hear.”

  “Who told you that?” Orhan asked, sharply.

  “Sitaré Hanim. Ibrahim, her husband, hears these things down at the Bureau.”

  “And tells them to his wife, to spread all through the town!” he exclaimed angrily.

  “But Orhan, is it not true?”

  The calm query sobered him.

  “Yes, it is true,” he said, rather reluctantly. “My Life, you are right-it is grave. I wish I need not leave you—and you look so exhausted! But—” his face was suddenly illuminated—“Trust him! He knows what is best,” he said. “Trust him!” he repeated. He spoke as a man might speak of trust in God.

  At the last she had clung to him. “Oh my dear love, may Allah preserve you! And Ahmet! Shall you see Ahmet?”

  “Probably—I did, as you know, last time.”

  “Give him my love,” she said.

  Next day he went away—and she went down and stood humble and anonymous in her black çarşaf among the crowd that cheered their new Commander-in-Chief on his way; she saw her tall slender husband, gallant and trim in his uniform, his fair hair gleaming under the kalpak, the high brimless cap of black caracul, and prayed silently for his safety. When the procession had passed she turned away and climbed the hill again, perspiring under those muffling black folds, and at home told Nilüfer about that brave departure: the soldierly figure of Kemal Pasha, with his set resolute face; the praying, cheering, weeping crowds. Then she rolled up her sleeves and began to wash and wring out soiled and blood-stained sheets and shirts.

  The Greek Army began to move forward from its positions near the Eski-sehir railway five days later, on August the 10th. Their movement was up the open marshy valley of the Porsuk, a tributary of the Sakarya; by the 23rd they had reached the Sakarya itself near Beylikoprü, while another group was approaching Haymana, slightly to the south-east. At dawn the next day, under a tremendous artillery bombardment, they attacked, and for the next ten days the Greeks—too often derided as soldiers in modern times—fought with a heroism worthy of their classic exploits in the heroic age, at Thermopylae or Salamis. The conditions were gruelling beyond belief. No one who has not experienced an August in Anatolia can imagine them: the pitiless heat, a difference of 20 degrees Fahrenheit between sun and shade, most dangerous to the bodies of sweat-soaked men, the suffocating dust. In addition to all this Turkish bands, with devilish shrewdness and skill (inspired of course by Kemal Pasha, who had made himself familiar with every yard of the ground) constandy raided their lines of communication, slipping out from the narrow strip of wild hilly country lying between the Porsuk and the Sakarya, which run roughly parallel for many miles before they join near Beylikoprü, harrying the supply-trains, and slipping back into t
he hills again—so that the wretched Greek troops suffered from lack of food, of ammunition, and—most desperate of all—of water. Nevertheless, slowly, slowly, they succeeded in pressing the Turks—who were fighting with an equal savage courage—backwards for a distance of ten miles. Ten miles in ten days! And still they fought on, on both sides. The Turks were even worse supplied than the Greeks, who had managed in the interval between the Turkish retreat and the Battle of the Sakarya to amass lorries by the hundred and camels by the thousand; whereas Kemal’s men had to rely on slow ox-drawn cagnés and on their women—their sisters, their wives, and their sweethearts, who did the work of machines and beasts, toiling forward in the heat under back-breaking loads of shells, ammunition, food, and water, their stifling veils flung back, strange men or no strange men, from their streaming faces. By September the 4th, both armies had fought themselves to a standstill, and still the issue hung in the balance: Ankara, the Greek objective, was only forty miles away, but it was not yet taken; the Greek Army was exhausted, but not defeated.

  . . . . . .

  Away in England, Dr. Pierce and Fanny learned the news with mounting anxiety. It was still strange to the Doctor to be in England in July and August—for twenty years his summers had all been spent in Turkey, and thither his thoughts always turned nostalgically at that time of the year. To escape the stuffiness of empty Oxford, choked with trippers, he had taken a little cottage in the Cotswolds, within reach of the libraries, but fresher and cooler, where Fanny, helped by a woman from the village, looked after him. His book on Turkish folklore had come out, and had had a great success—for once Dr. Pierce had made some money. Captain Grant, the Scottish officer whose general redness of aspect had so impressed the Pasha a year or more ago, was home on leave, and was making them a prolonged visit; technically, he and Fanny were still not engaged, but there was what the English so elastically call “an understanding” between them, and this gave him a sort of licenced position in the house.

  Dr. Pierce of course read The Times, which got to the village from Moreton-in-the-Marsh at about 11. One day in the middle of July, sitting out in the garden, his eye was caught by a paragraph headed, in smallish type—“The Greek Offensive. Considerable Advance.” It gave two communiqués from Athens, and the last sentence read: “The enemy has fallen back to strongly entrenched positions to the north-west of Eski-sehir and the southwest of Kutehia.”

  “Good God!” Dr. Pierce exclaimed—“Those wretched Greeks!”

  “What about them?” Captain Grant asked, without much real interest—he was taking Fanny in later to lunch at the Mitre, and his thoughts were on whether he should propose or not.

  “They’re advancing—it looks as if they meant to have a try for Angora.” (Ankara was still called Angora in England in those days.)

  At that moment Fanny came out, and caught his last words.

  “Who’s going to have a try for Angora?” she asked.

  “The Greeks. Look—” and he handed her the paper. As Fanny studied it a look of concern came over her face. Still small, her nose still slightly beaky, Fanny had nevertheless become quite pretty; her complexion was clear and pink, her blue eyes had an eager animated expression, her yellow hair was cleverly and becomingly arranged; she no longer tore her clothes, and her cool cotton frock was fresh and trim.

  “Oh!” she said now, on a distressful note, “how horrible! I wonder where Féridé is, and what she is doing? I hope she isn’t in Angora.”

  “I should think she was bound to be, by now,” Captain Grant observed. “She told you in that letter that her husband had gone there.”

  “But Alec, she didn’t say that she was going.”

  “Ah, but that was eighteen months ago, or going on for.”

  “Conditions in Angora must still be pretty primitive,” Dr. Pierce observed—“hardly suitable for anyone brought up as Féridé has been. Those girls led extraordinarily sheltered lives.”

  “Goodness yes. The yali—what luxury!” Fanny said. “And the old Pasha was such a lamb.”

  “My dear, that is hardly the word I should have used for him,” Dr. Pierce said mildly.

  “No, Uncle darling, but you know what I mean. Alec, I do envy you, having been there. Isn’t the yali a lovely place?”

  “Seemed all right to me,” said Captain Grant.

  “Oh Alec—all right!’ It’s one of the most exquisite houses in the world.”

  Captain Grant chewed a little on his small red moustache. “Well my dear Fanny, I know you have this passion for the Turks, but personally I don’t quite get it. I thought a lot of their buildings awfully flimsy, as a matter of fact. Though mind you, I found the Pasha a perfectly decent old boy.”

  “I don’t know why you’re always so beastly about the Turks,” said Fanny.

  “Kut,” Captain Grant responded briefly.

  “Oh well—” Fanny could not defend the treatment meted out by the Turks to the surrendered garrison of Kut-el-Amara; no one could, she knew.

  But Alec Grant had no desire to quarrel with her.

  “As for this fellow Kemal,” he went on, placatorily, “I will say he seems to be a first-class soldier. He did frightfully well at the Dardanelles, and he managed that retreat from Palestine superbly too, I heard. But I didn’t gather that the old Pasha thought an awful lot of him.”

  “Did you talk to the Pasha about him?”

  “Lord, yes. He seemed rather anti-him, if anything.”

  “He would be, necessarily,” said Dr. Pierce, who was often rather troubled by the extreme Anglo-British simplicity of his probable nephew-in-law’s views on all subjects relating to foreigners. “The Pasha supports the Sultan and the actual régime—men of his generation all do.”

  “Oh well, I don’t know about all that,” Alec Grant said, blithely dismissing the complexities of Turkish politics. “He was a very fine old boy, the Pasha, but he didn’t think much of Kemal.” He glanced at his left wrist, and turned to Fanny. “Now, what about this lunch? It’s nearly twelve—do you want to change or anything?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Well, hadn’t you better get a move on?”

  When Fanny came down ten minutes later into the little sitting-room where he was waiting, he glanced with a sort of hungry appreciation at her. “Darling, you look divine!” He went over to where she stood, minute, almost elegant, and oddly forcible for anything so small; she had put on a yellow silk dress which increased her resemblance to the familiar cage-bird. “That damned old Pasha said they called you The Canary,’” he muttered as he put an arm round her. “Oh darling, yes-just one!”

  But he didn’t propose to Fanny that day. Over the excellent lunch at the Mitre, which he had ordered in advance by telephone from the village post-office, rather to his annoyance Fanny persisted in her speculations about Féridé, and what might be happening to her in these new circumstances.

  “Now look, Fanny,” he protested at last, “I can’t think why you go on and on about this girl. You haven’t seen her for seven years, and you were both children then, after all.”

  “Yes, it is a long time,” said Fanny thoughtfully; “but she was a wonderful person, Alec; one couldn’t just forget about her.”

  “Oh darling, rubbish!—A child can’t be a wonderful person—not really a person at all, you know.”

  “She was. And I was, too,” Fanny added slowly. “1 can’t explain to you, Alec; you somehow don’t seem to have got the Turks at all, although you’ve been there all those months. But they are wonderful people—not a bit like us, not efficient or anything, at least they weren’t then; but they have a sort of quality.”

  “This Kemal fellow is efficient enough,” the soldier in Alec Grant protested. “He’s terrific at his job, by all accounts.”

  “Oh well, I don’t know him, or anything about him,” Fanny said calmly. She could not know, there in Oxford, how time was to rectify this statement.

  During those summer days at the cottage Fanny and Dr. Pierc
e, among the roses and sweet peas in the little garden, under the tall English elms standing between the green English fields full of quiet grazing cattle, followed the course of that conflict away on the burning uplands of Anatolia. On the 20th of July they read that Kutaya had fallen, on the 22nd that the Greeks had captured Eski-sehir, on the 23rd the caption ran—“Greek Victory. Advance towards Angora”; and two days later “The Story of the Greek Victory. Turks Outmanoeuvred.” But after that a note of caution, almost of doubt, crept into the communiqués. “Prospect of guerilla fighting,” said one. “Fresh stand to be made,” said another. And then The Times switched over, suddenly, from Anatolia’s front to the ill-starred Greek attempt to form a Hellenic state on the southern shores of the Black Sea. Massacres of Pontine Greeks were reported. But on the main front there seemed to be a sort of pause.

  In the middle of August, however, Turkey sprang into the headlines again with—“Greek Offensive Resumed,” and next day Fanny and the Doctor read the words—to them so ominous—“New Advance on Angora. Turks Leaving.” This communiqué for the first time mentioned the Sakarya River, and added—“There is no longer any doubt that the Nationalist Civil Government is removing to Kaisarieh”; it further stated that Mustafa Kemal was retiring, “as he appears to be unable or unwilling to make a stand.”