by Ann Bridge
. . . . . .
On the morning of September the 13th Fanny was upstairs in her little diamond-paned bedroom at the cottage, packing for their return to Oxford. Actually for once she was not thinking about Féridé and the struggle in Anatolia. During the last week the headlines had all seemed to point to a foregone conclusion: “Fierce fight for Angora,” “Fate of Angora,” “Struggle for Angora,” “Before Angora” and she had rather given that up in despair—the Kemalists were obviously doomed, and Féridé would be involved in the wretchedness of their defeat; she could not bear to think about it, and tried to put it out of her mind. No, she was thinking about Alec, who had left yesterday to return to Istanbul —or rather about herself and Alec. Fanny was a person who tried very hard to be honest with herself, at a time when private honesty about one’s feelings was not so fashionable as it has since become, and she was asking herself now, as she stuffed her stockings into corners and folded her dresses, just why she had refused Alec again two days ago. She did like him, very much; she trusted him, one would be safe with him— moreover he stirred her. And yet—somehow she could not bring herself to the point of agreeing to become his wife; some part of her was not satisfied. It was more than that—something in her seemed to protest against something in him, and she was trying to get clear as to what that was. Curiously, when she did so she found her mind coming back, again and again, to his attitude towards Turkey, and towards her friends there. He had called the yali, to her a lost paradise, “all right.” But that seemed so silly, in a way; she was English, she would have to live in England—or at least in Scotland; why worry about what one’s husband thought about people so far away, whom she would probably never see again? “No!” she said to herself then—“no, I must go back some time; I promised.” And there are some things, she thought, that people who are married must see in the same way, see together—or nothing is any good.
She lifted three more dresses down from where they hung on the end of the old press—it was too low even for her short ones inside it—threw them on the bed, took out the hangers, and made a neat layer of the pretty stuffed things across her case. Taking up one of the frocks to fold it, she found herself humming the tune of the Falcon Song. And with a rush of memory there came back to her a recollection of the day she heard it first, in the salon at the yali, with Ahmet at the piano, Féridé hanging over the instrument, and Réfiyé Hanim in her corner under the wide window. The English girl stood suspended, the dress hanging limply from her hands; a strange chill stole round her heart. What had Réfiyé Hanim said then? Oh, she remembered it all too well —“the heart does not come back.”
That was somehow rather frightening. With a little shiver, she forced herself into activity; folded the dress and laid it in the case. And then she heard Dr. Pierce’s voice, uplifted below—“Fanny? Are you up there? Come down a minute, child.”
Glad of the interruption, she ran down. Dr. Pierce stood in the tiny parlour, The Times in his hand. “Look at this!” he said; his face was all aglow. Fanny took the paper he held out, and read:
ANGORA BATTLE ENDED.
GREEKS WITHDRAW.
HEAVY CASUALTIES.
She stood silent for a moment, thinking of what this news would mean—at the yali to the Pasha and still more to Réfiyé Hanim; to Féridé, wherever she was.
“Splendid, isn’t it?” said Dr. Pierce.
“Yes, it is. Thank you, Uncle. Goodness, what a mercy! Well, that’s that.” She paused. “Ahmet always did say that Mustafa Kemal was the goods,” said Fanny, handing back the paper—and went upstairs to her packing again.
Chapter Fifteen
The news reached Ankara first in the form of rumour. Going into her “ward” in the hospital one morning—late, because Nilüfer was unwell again, and she had to finish the ironing that her sister-in-law should have done-Féridé found all the men with loud red handkerchiefs on their heads. “But what is this?” she asked, cheerfully-some charitable merchant had sent a consignment of red handkerchiefs to the hospital for nose-blowing purposes, and she had doled them out herself, one per man, only the day before.
“For the victory!” die men chorused.
“What victory?”
“On the Sakarya. We have won—the Greeks are running away.”
Féridé went on with her work at the time, but when she had a chance she asked the chief surgeon, with whom she was by now on good terms, if the news was true? As usual, he was impatient. “Féridé Hanim, how should I know? If it is, we shall have fewer cases, and for that I shall praise Allah! But victory or no victory, we must tend the ones we have.” He turned away, and Féridé, heavily snubbed, went back to her bandanaed jolly men.
But on her way home she decided to go round by the Red Crescent, and try to find out if there was anything in the tale. It was some distance out of her way, she would be late, Nilüfer would be worrying-she was so nervous always now, quite unlike her old tranquil self—but she must know. She sped through the hot narrow lanes on the slope below the citadel, her çarşaf floating out behind with her haste; turned right downhill, turned left, and darted along the familiar street towards the spot where the tree in the dispensary garden showed green over the wall. As she approached she saw that the door of the office stood open— M. Esref, at the top of the steps that led up to it, was talking direcdy to one or two of the doctors from the dispensary, standing in the street below. She ran up to them.
“Is it true?” she panted out.
“Yes, Féridé Hanim, it is true. The news has just come. But how did you hear?”
“In the hospital.” She told about the red bandanas, and the men all laughed, with the ready laughter of overwhelming relief.
“They are really in retreat?” she pursued; “it is victory?”
“Their whole line is withdrawing, and our men are in pursuit,” M. Esref said.
“Oh, may Allah be praised!” the girl said fervendy. “I thank you.” She hurried home.
On that night and on the two or three succeeding ones the mutter of guns grew fainter and fainter, receding into the distance, till finally it died away altogether; sitting at the window, after supper, Féridé and Nilüfer heard instead the singing and shouting of the triumphant populace coming up from the streets below, and saw the sky behind the Etlik Bagh, the vine-clad ridge of hills beyond which lay Sakarya, no longer red with the glare of burning villages, but calm with stars. The burning was still going on—the Greeks left a trail of devastation behind them—but it was now far away, too far to light the sky.
. . . . . .
When Kemal Pasha returned from the front Orhan came with him— and also, to Féridé’s infinite relief, Temel, the batman, who at once resumed the heavier household tasks. Féridé was at the hospital when Orhan arrived, and Nilüfer, who had taken to bolting the great door of the courtyard when she was alone in the house, kept him waiting while she got up from resting on her bed, and dressed herself to go and open the door; by the time she reached it the impatient young man was in a fever of anxiety. When she apologised to him—“But why do you have to open the door?” he asked.
“Who else is there? Fatma and Kezban are both at the front,” she said simply; and he realised at last on what terms his household had been carried on during his absence. He was rather aghast to learn that Féridé was nursing, and sent Temel to the hospital to fetch her home. That night when they were alone—“My Life, this has been hard for you,” he said. “I did not realise how hard. You have equalled the labours of those women at the front! But I think you should cease this nursing. You are tired—you are thin,” he said, looking at her with concern.
“I am in good health, my husband, by the goodness of God,” Féridé said—and suddenly remembering her grandmother, on whose lips that phrase so often was, she most unwontedly burst into tears. “Oh, sometimes I do so wish for Nine!” she explained to Orhan, when with distracted tenderness he consoled her. “It is nothing—that is all. I am not really tired. Do not think of it.”
But she stopped nursing.
. . . . . .
At the yali the news of the victory of Sakarya was received by the Pasha with unconcealed triumph. However loyal one might be to the Sultan, the Greeks were the Greeks, the ancient enemy, and Mustafa Kemal had beaten them. “He is a good general—this one must say of him,” he told Réfiyé Hanim and Mdlle Marthe, sitting in the salon in his fez, his legs as usual stuck out in front of him.
“My son, in my opinion we may thank God for him,” said the old lady solemnly. “But tell me—does this victory mean peace, real Peace? Could our children now come home?”
“Ah, I fear not that, Ané. The Greeks are thrown back, but they are still in the country; they hold Ismir. There can be no peace till they are gone, the last man of them!” he said with energy. “And the Entente forces from here, also,” he added.
The old lady sighed. “I hope peace comes soon,” she said, half to herself. It was eighteen months now since Féridé had gone away, and in all her nearly ninety years of life, never had any eighteen months seemed so long as these, without her treasure, her darling. Old Marthe glanced at her with sympathy; she could read her thoughts. Réfiyé Hanim desired above all things to see her grandchild once more before she closed her eyes on this world.
“Féridé, at least, might come down on a visit, I suppose,” the Frenchwoman said.
“Impossible!” the Pasha said brusquely. “The Greeks are still astride the railway near Eski-sehir—indeed, I believe they have torn up much of the line. And my good Mdlle Marthe, you would not wish my daughter to repeat this journey by Inebolu, I imagine? No, we must have patience. Peace will come in time.” And he rose, bowed over his mother’s hand, and stalked away to the selamlik on his long scissor-like legs. Did he, too, not wish to see Féridé again? he thought as he went. But one must not be unreasonable, as women so often were.
. . . . . .
On September the 19th the Assembly met in Ankara, and the deputies, once more enthusiastic, conferred on Mustafa Kemal, by acclamation, the titles of Marshal and Ghazi—“the Victorious.” The Turks like resounding names, and if anything could have added to the public rejoicing and excitement, it was this. “The Ghazi!”—so they call him still, and always with an exclamation-mark in the voice. Orhan of course was in the Chamber, and heard it all; in the evening he came rushing up to the citadel and described the scene to Féridé and Nilüfer—how the black cloth which had draped the Presidential desk on the curved tribune ever since the Greeks captured Broussa over a year before had been solemnly removed, and of the emotion visible, for once, even on the leader’s stone-hewn face. Small wonder. The man whom the Sultan’s Government had cashiered from the Army with ignominy two years before was now raised to the highest known military rank, that of Marshal.
“I must go and change a little—I dine with him,” Orhan exclaimed at length. Féridé, unable to contain her excitement, ran out into the street, where people were greeting and embracing one another, and mouthing the new title:—“Ghazi! The Ghazi!” Ibrahim and Sitaré Hanim were there, laughing and weeping at once, along with all the neighbours; the rejoicings went on till late into the night—as for Orhan, day was breaking by the time he got home, after one of Kemal’s rowdier and more prolonged parties.
But even before the rejoicings were over, Kemal settled down at once to the next task. Ankara and the Turkish army were saved—by the skin of their teeth—but the Greek forces were still more or less intact, Greeks held a large block of Turkish soil; there could be no security, no lasting peace till, as the Pasha had told Réfiyé Hanim, the last man of them was thrown out. Kemal’s own army, crippled by their recent efforts, must be reorganised throughout; fresh supplies must be arranged, more men must be raised—above all, they must have more heavy guns, and those essential bayonets must be produced somehow. [This in a blockaded country, without any home steel production to mention.]
Here the well-known realism of the French came to his assistance. That shrewd nation was quick—quicker than any of the other Entente Powers—to read the lesson of the Sakarya. M. Franklin-Bouillon, a former Minister, plausible and skilful, promptly turned up in Ankara to negotiate a treaty with the newly-victorious regime, and signed it exactly a month after Kemal Pasha was made a Marshal. The state of war between France and Turkey was brought to an end—incidentally without a with-your-leave or a by-your-leave to the Sultan’s Government at Istanbul—and the French undertook to evacuate Cilicia, down in the south, which released nearly 80,000 Turkish troops from the Syrian front for use against the Greeks; the French also handed over equipment for 40,000 men, and agreed to sell the Turks a few big guns and some aeroplanes. It was a signal diplomatic triumph—and not least because it represented the first breach in the united front of the Entente Powers against the rebellious and successful Kemalist Turkey. Orhan went about effervescing with glee for days. “Now we have only one front to concern ourselves with,” he told Féridé triumphantly.
There, then, were the extra men, 80,000 of them. The problem of the heavy guns and the bayonets was solved by means so drastic as to be almost sublime. On their retreat from the Sakarya the Greeks had blown up, or torn up, a considerable stretch of line between Eski-sehir and Ankara. This was a section of the Taurus Railway from Istanbul, a continuation of that blue line of rails which ran glittering along the valley, past the station at Ankara with its six paraffin lamps. If the Greeks could be dislodged from it and the damaged sections repaired, the principal life-line for supplies to the new capital would be open again. But no attempt was made to repair it. No—here, in those bent rails flung in all directions, was steel, good hard steel, quite suitable for forging and hammering into bayonets, and still more for making rammers for cannon. A fair number of pieces of artillery had been captured from the Greeks, others seized earlier in raids on the Allied arms dumps; but most had been temporarily put out of commission when their former owners either removed the breech-blocks or, more usually, carried off the rammers by means of which the shells were pushed home far enough to engage with the rifling and leave the correct space for the one, two, or three bags of lyddite or cordite which formed the charge. For in World War One fixed ammunition, shell and charge combined in one unit, hardly existed, even for the smaller calibres.
Where the breech-block had been removed there was nothing to be done; ordinary smiths were quite incapable of making new ones with sufficient precision. But steel rails were eminently suited to being cut into lengths, rounded to give a comfortable grip to the hands of a guncrew, and having a flattened end hammered down to fit the diameter of a gun-chamber. So now the forges in Anatolia rang and resounded night and day, making the long rammers to bring the big guns into commission again, and forging wicked bright bayonets for the close fighting beloved of the Turks. The smiths laughed and shouted over their work—“This for a Greek, and this for a Greek,” they cried, as they hammered away.
Kemal next flung himself into the task of military reorganization and supply, working like a demon, and driving his already over-driven people harder still. A week before the signature of the Franklin-Bouillon Accord, as it was called, the Treaty of Kars had been signed with the Russians, which finally settled all problems on the eastern frontiers; and now the Bolsheviks began shipping arms and ammunition to the Anatolian ports along the Black Sea in a big way. Once more those long files of women trudged over the Kuré Dagh, bending under their loads, to Seydiler Köy; once more the convoys of cagnés toiled slowly across the plateau to Ankara and beyond. Féridé had hoped that now Kezban and Fatma would return—for Nilüfer could do less and less, as her confinement approached, and Orhan’s presence in the house made a lot of extra work. But not a bit of it; they and all the other able-bodied women were plying to and fro behind the front, bringing up supplies and ammunition, working almost as hard as during the battle of Sakarya itself.
In the great “Discourse,” lasting six whole days, which Mustafa Kemal pronounced to his listening people in October 1927, he used the
se words about this particular phase of his country’s struggle for independence:
“You understand perfectly well that whoever says ‘War,’ speaks of a struggle, not merely between two armies, but between two nations, who risk their whole existence and throw in all their resources, all their goods, all their material and moral strength. It was therefore my duty at that time to bring the entire Turkish nation into the war, physically and morally, just as much as the army at the front. Not only those who stood face to face with the enemy, but every individual—in the village, in the home, or tilling the fields—had to recognise himself as being invested with a mission equal in importance to that of the actual combatants, and to dedicate himself wholly to the struggle…. This was the aim which we worked to realise.”
But this early demonstration of “Total War,” though possible and even stimulating for the robust, was very hard on the fragile or sickly. “Woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days.” That time of stress bore hardly on Nilüfer. By the second half of October, when M. Franklin-Bouillon was signing his treaty, and Orhan was fizzing with jubilation, the cold was already beginning to creep into the old house again; the evenings drew in, the shortage of paraffin was worse than ever, and if Nilüfer—as she mostly did—felt too unwell and exhausted to remain in the draughty sitting-room after supper, she had to lie in bed in the dark, since her brother-in-law needed the one lamp or candle for his work; he fidgeted about impatiently while Féridé carried it off to put the poor creature to bed. Ahmet was away, training the regiments newly recalled from Syria, and amalgamating them with the seasoned troops who had fought in the battles of Inonii and Sakarya. Now and again he dashed home on two or three days’ leave, and of course stayed in the house on the city wall; friends came in to see him, and Féridé had to cook more diligently than ever in her uncouth cavern of a kitchen—there was no longer any question of Nilüfer doing anything at all. Temel chopped the wood and drew the water—really life was very biblical in Ankara then—and fetched the charcoal and swept the yard and the downstairs rooms; when Orhan did not need him he also went with his young mistress to carry things home from the market, but if he was not available Féridé had to drag food for five people up the hill herself, unless she could get hold of Étamine, who had been released from her hospital work when more nurses and orderlies returned from the front.