by Ann Bridge
“Oh Lord!” Dr. Pierce exclaimed with a groan, dropping the paper on the grass beside his garden chair. “This looks very bad. The Government going to Kayseri!—that’s miles away. They must feel that the game is up.”
Fanny was silent. She was thinking of Féridé, and of what all this must mean to her—the unknown, grown-up Féridé, whom she nevertheless felt that she knew so well. A few days later, on August the 20th, she and Dr. Pierce read that the Greeks were now only fifty miles from An gora. “Oh blast!” Fanny exclaimed—then, sitting safe and quiet in that English garden, in the tranquil misty sunshine of late summer, she threw up her yellow head defiantly.
“Whatever the Government does, I bet Féridé doesn’t run away, if she is in Angora,” she said.
Fanny was quite right; Féridé did not leave. She watched her neighbours, with agitated haste, climb into the little black wickerwork waggonettes with flowers painted on both ends, piled high with bundles and bedding, and clatter off down the street and out under the great gateway, bound for Amasia, the town inland from Samsun on the Black Sea where Kemal Pasha had had his first Anatolian Headquarters in 1919. Among them were Güli Hanim and Faik, Nilüfer’s landlord; they came up to say goodbye, and eyed the two young women curiously. “You do not go?” “No, we do not go,” Nilüfer replied. She and Féridé knew much better than their neighbours what that journey involved, and Nilüfer, whose baby was due in three months, was hardly fit to undertake it, in the conditions which a refugee exodus would certainly create. Besides neither of them wanted to leave the house to which their husbands would return—if they did return; nor had they been bidden by those same husbands to go.
Being in Ankara had one immense asset for Féridé, who was always avid for news; the Red Crescent, which was the single source of fairly reliable information, still functioned there. It had moved from its old and quite inadequate headquarters, that very small room in the Zinçirli Kami Sokak, to the Hadji Moussa quarter, where it occupied the lower part of a fair-sized house; just opposite, in a courtyard shaded by a tree which leaned out into the street a regular dispensary occupied a second house—the workers and a couple of doctors slept there. The Red Crescent, almost an embryo a few weeks before, was growing rapidly under the pressure of circumstances. The Hadji Moussa quarter was a good deal further away, but on the other hand M. Esref by now knew her well enough to tell her the truth at once, without any perambulations.
She soon found yet another reason for staying where she was for as long as possible. As the fighting increased in intensity and the front drew slowly nearer to Ankara, the flow of wounded into the city became a flood. The old houses up in the citadel shook all day long with the vibrations of gunfire, now barely fifty miles away; at an extra loud explosion the storks, alarmed, rose from their nests on the chimneys and housetops, and soared slowly up into the blue, on black-and-white wings. And night after night little Étamine returned, tired out, with miserable accounts of men in the hospital calling for water, for food, for help in their pain, in those overcrowded wards. At last Féridé could bear it no longer, and took the resolution to go and nurse herself.
It was not altogether easy to her to do this. It is true that her family background had given her a certain independence of outlook and indifference to the opinion of other people; on the other hand her upbringing had been rigidly conventional, the Pasha being what he was. To go and nurse strange soldiers with one’s face unveiled (for obviously one could not nurse in a çarşaf) meant throwing aside the tradition of centuries—centuries during which the Turkish conception of personal modesty had become inextricably entwined with the idea of the veiled face. Even the hardy Anatolian peasant women went veiled in their villages, whatever they might do at work in the fields. Féridé had to work the thing out for herself, and by herself; it would have been no good discussing it with Nilüfer. She had disliked at first that aspect of the dinner-parties at Mustafa Kemal’s; but if she had shown her face to strange men there, surely it was far more important, more right, to go and nurse the sick and wounded without a veil? In the middle of her secret arguments she remembered that Fanny had been a nurse during the War—and scrubbed floors! This idea brought a curious comfort; she made up her mind, told poor Nilüfer, was patient with her remonstrances, and went down with Étamine to nurse.
As August drew near its close the situation in Ankara became more alarming than ever. By day there was the bumping roar of artillery filling the hot air, rattling the windows, and disturbing the storks; at night, behind the ridge of hills to the west, the sky was red with the glare of burning villages, where the homes of harmless peasants were going up in flames—sitting by the open windows that looked out over the citadel wall, after supper, rolling bandages, the two girls watched the angry flares with dismay. More and more people left; the neighbours who remained observed the movements of the wives of Ahmet Bey and Orhan Bey closely and curiously—their husbands were important men, they should be well-informed; their actions might give a useful clue. Nilüfer and Féridé found this scrutiny very oppressive, but they hid their despair—Féridé, at any rate, was almost in despair—and put on a cheerful manner to go about their daily tasks. Rather to her surprise, Féridé found the nursing absorbingly interesting. Unlike Fanny she was never put to scrub floors—the palliasses on which the Turkish wounded lay were so close together that there was hardly room to walk between them, let alone to scrub; but all day she was lifting, washing, emptying, carrying, and very soon changing dressings and bandagings too. It opened an entirely new form of activity to her, and hard as the work was, she loved it, in spite of the heat, and the really overpowering smell. The medical side enthralled her, and quite overcame any dismay that she had felt at first at the sight of blood and pus; for the first time in her life she experienced, with a strange pleasure, the thrill of scientific knowledge.
. . . . . .
On a day towards the end of the month Fanny read in England— “March on Angora. Greeks follow up Victory”; the communiqué ended with the words:—“No further resistance is expected. Angora will probably be occupied in a couple of days.” She took the paper out to Dr. Pierce in the garden, and handed it to him in silence-then, completely miserable, she went indoors.
. . . . . .
Ankara, that same night, was full of rumours-the Greeks were advancing, the capital would soon be occupied. Féridé heard them in the hospital, which was a great centre for rumours, with fresh wounded coming in all the time, and the Red Crescent orderlies going to and fro. She went home to supper, sat and rolled bandages for a while, and then put Nilüfer to bed—one could almost undress now without lights by the glare in the sky from the burning villages away to the west. But when Nilüfer was tucked up, and she sat alone by the window watching that terrible red horizon, she felt suddenly that she must know the facts —the worst. And the only place where she could learn that was the Red Crescent. She put on her çarşaf and ran downstairs. In the courtyard she paused. She did not want to go out by her own door: it was early still, and her neighbours would be keeping up their ceaseless spying on her movements from behind their pierced shutters—they would notice a nocturnal sortie. But the fourth wall of the courtyard was formed by Sitaré Hanim’s own house—all the windows on that side were open to let in air, and by placing a wooden box from the storeroom under one of the lower ones it would be easy to climb in. She did this, and tiptoed out of the room which she had entered like a burglar into a long passage, which led to the main entrance. By the door stood the row of wooden shelves on which the inmates left their indoor slippers when they went out into the street, their street shoes when they returned to the house; to wear the same footgear indoors and out was to Turks an inconceivable form of dirtiness. Slipping out, unnoticed, through Sitaré’s front door, Féridé made her way down to the Hadji Moussa quarter, through lanes and alleys lit, like Nilüfer’s bedroom, by that sinister glare in the western sky.
In the Red Crescent office M. Esref, poor man, was still at his desk.
&nbs
p; “How does it go?” Féridé asked.
“We are still holding,” the weary official said, putting down his pen, “but for how long, Allah alone knows. It is truly frightful, Féridé Hanim; the losses are ghastly, theirs as well as ours. And they have such a superiority in ammunition.”
In spite of her own anxiety, Féridé felt full of pity for the sad little man. “Esref Effendi, we are bound to win!” she said with conviction. “The Greeks have no commander like Kemal Pasha.”
“No, and no women like ours! As to water, I hear that they lack it far more than our troops; the prisoners say so. What our women are doing!—right up into the front line, under fire, bringing water to the men; water and cartridges.”
When she returned to the citadel, Féridé again slipped in through Sitaré Hanim’s door; as she passed along the broad central passage she heard a low murmur of voices coming from a room on her right—the door was ajar, and peeping round it she saw a strange sight. Seven or eight women, all closely veiled, sat round on the divans like black nuns, praying. Much moved, she drew back, and listened for a moment to the low intercessory murmur. They were praying to the One True God—for succour, for their threatened country, for the safety of their men. Tears in her eyes, Féridé went on along the passage, dropped out through the window into the courtyard again, removed the tell-tale box, and returned to her own house.
Down at the yali, the news from Anatolia was followed even more anxiously than in the Cotswolds. For the moment the Pasha had rather changed his tune about Mustafa Kemal. The Greeks were now the one enemy, and the man who might conceivably beat them deserved approval. The Pasha went into the Club every evening to hear the latest news; before that, he waited impatiently in his study for Osman with the afternoon paper. On his return from the Club he always went up to the salon, where Réfiyé Hanim sat in her corner beside the unshuttered windows, wide open to let in the evening breezes off the Bosphorus after the heat of the day, and usually with Mdlle Marthe. Loneliness and anxiety had drawn these three people, whose thoughts and love were mainly centred on the same two persons, Féridé and Ahmet, very close together; and though the Frenchwoman rose courteously at the entrance of the master of the house, she did not even go through the motions of taking her departure any more, as she had used in the past.
On the evening of August the 25th the Pasha came up in a state of high indignation. After greeting his Mother and enquiring after her health as usual—“Imagine,” he said, “the impertinence of these foreign newspaper-men! They have gone so far as to suggest that we have sent agents to Europe to ask for mediation!”
“That is not true?” Réfiyé Hanim asked.
“Naturally it is not true. A démenti has been issued to say so.”
“By whom, my son?”
The Pasha hemmed a little.
“Actually, by the Anatolian Agency, the news bureau in Ankara. But it is official, of course.” He hemmed again. “I fear that Salih Pasha has been indiscreet; he is quoted as having asked for mediation.”
“He is an envoy of the Sultan, is it not so?” Réfiyé Hanim asked, with a non-committal blankness of expression.
The Pasha hemmed once more.
“Yes—that is so. But—well, it is a little complicated, but the resistance to these unspeakable Greek infidels is, after all, being furnished from Ankara, and—in fact, no one but those in command there can sue for peace on our behalf.”
Réfiyé slid over this awkward point.
“Did you learn at all how things are going up there?” she enquired.
The Pasha hesitated; the old woman watched his face anxiously. At last—
“There is talk of evacuating Ankara, Ané,” he said unhappily.
“The Government or the population?” (Neither she nor the Pasha appeared to notice her use of the word “government” for the rebel Kemalists.)
“It is said that the Cabinet is going, but nothing is known definitely. But of the civil population, large numbers have undoubtedly gone.” He paused, and then said slowly—
“We must hope that our children have left—the Greeks are now only about 80 kilometres from Ankara.”
“Juste ciel! But that is not much more than two days’ march away!” exclaimed Mdlle Marthe, who remembered the German campaign in France in 1870.
Réfiyé Hanim sat silent; her fine old hands, the colour of old ivory and veined with blue, trembled slightly on her lap. Then, like Fanny a few days before, she lifted her head and said—“I do not believe that Féridé will leave.”
“I could wish that she might,” Féridé’s father said.
“No, my son. Think of Nilüfer! She is in no state to undertake a journey. Remember what they endured on the way to Ankara—those hans! Did you learn any news of Ahmet, or of Orhan?” she pursued.
“No, nothing. Ahmet was on Ismet Pasha’s Staff—now that Kemal Pasha is acting as Commander-in-Chief, presumably he is one of his staff officers, as he was before, you remember. As for Orhan, I see no reason for him to go to the front at all; he works in Kemal Pasha’s private bureau, I understand, so presumably he will have remained in Ankara.”
“In that case, we can be quite certain that Féridé will not leave,” said Réfiyé Hanim with finality.
But that night when she went to bed in her beautiful spacious room, opening on the cool currents of the Bosphorus, she too prayed, as the women had done in that stifling enclosed apartment in the citadel at Ankara, for her country’s preservation, and for the safety of those she loved.
. . . . . .
In England, towards the end of that August, a certain impatience, tinged with disquiet, began to manifest itself. After that cheerful statement in The Times about the “March on Angora” everyone expected the capital to fall promptly. Well, the Greeks were all right, and Venizelos was a fine man, of whom Mr. Lloyd George thought very highly, it was said. But instead of Angora falling, a note of uncertainty again began to creep into the communiqués. “Another battle on Greek front,” said that of August 27th; “Turks making a stand” two days later; and on the 30th-“Turks holding on.” What did it mean? How were they holding on? The British public was thoroughly puzzled.
They held on another ten days; that saved them. The Greek army had shot its bolt; the exhausted troops could maintain a certain pressure, but could not make a fresh attack in sufficient strength to force an issue. Mustafa Kemal’s withdrawal to the Sakarya, so alarming and unpopular at the time, paid an immense dividend: that extra 70 miles of Greek communications, perpetually raided from the hills, just tipped the scale. Few men would have taken the risk, for what he risked was his capital; but he won his gamble—a proper soldier s gamble, when all is said.
But even the most gallant gamblers endure acute anxiety, and Kemal was no exception. He had broken a rib in a fall from his horse some time before, and was in constant pain—a sympathetic nervous reaction affected one leg, and made him limp; in spite of this, for hours each day he was out and walking about, watching the course of the battle through field-glasses from the top of some rocky hillock, where the stones burned the incautious hand that touched them, or down among his men, chattering with them, cheering them on, greeting the women and girls who staggered up to the lines with water and ammunition. The nights he spent in his rough Headquarters in the village of Ala Geuz, but not in sleep. Except for a few hours before sunrise he passed them pacing restlessly up and down the room, studying maps, moving flags, bending over diagrams with his Commanders, listening to reports, giving orders, drinking endless cups of coffee, half-smoking and stubbing out innumerable cigarettes. The last nights, during the lull, were the most agonizing, for the Turks, too, could just hold on, but no more, and not indefinitely. Worriedly Orhan watched his chiefs face grow greyer and greyer, noted his savage swearing at everyone and everything, always with him a sign of anxiety, of doubt. For this was a situation in which his penetration, his courage, his energy could not do it all—his personality and his dynamism were in fact holding his men to the
ir positions day after day, but no amount of dynamism could hold them so for ever. If the Greeks used this lull to re-form and attack again, he was done, and his country with him.
And then, very early in the morning on September the 9th, in that chill hour before daybreak when human vitality is at its lowest ebb, word came in to the bare dirty room, full of smoke and littered with cigarette-ends, that the Greeks were not re-forming, but were preparing for a general retreat. Orhan heard the sort of snarling shout of triumph with which Kemal greeted the news, and the change which came over his face—its very colour seemed to alter. At once all uncertainty was gone; with his old rapidity of decision he gave his orders for an immediate counterattack. Then he shouted for coffee—and when it came, instead of swearing at the men who brought it, he laughed and clapped them on the back, with a coarse friendly joke.
The Greeks resisted stoutly for two days, but Kemal with his usual deadly penetration in tactics brought his chief pressure to bear at a point which threatened their line of retreat. It was a dangerous threat, and poor King Constantine was not a man to take great risks; he was neither the soldier nor the gambler that his adversary was—as that adversary with his sixth sense about people well realised. Commanders in the field often do seem to get a curious mental or psychological intimacy with their opponents, merely from fighting them, and watching their military actions and dispositions; and Kemal had sized Constantine up very correctly. On the evening of September the 11th the whole Greek army began to retire westwards from the Sakarya, down the open marshy valley of the Porsuk; they retired in good order, slowly followed by the weary Turkish troops, but it was a fearful place in which to be caught by bullets—wholly without cover. Greek bones still lie there, white under the sky. A few days later the two armies had settled down again beside the Eski-sehir railway, in practically the same positions which they had occupied just over a month before. Neither of the two Greek objectives, to capture Ankara and to destroy the Turkish army, had succeeded—and for the attacker, failure spelt defeat.