by Ann Bridge
As Ahmet had done shordy before, Orhan ran down the rocky rearward slope of Kocatepé, seized his horse, and galloped off towards the scene of the small action in which his brother-in-law had been so unexpectedly engaged; but unlike Ahmet he made the rational detour through the broken ground behind the actual firing-line, and galloped down the gully from the rear. Upon the crest he encountered a sergeant, sweating, exhausted and wretched, who told him that “the Staff Officer” had been killed in the charge. “He led us all, Effendim,” the man said; “he put life and soul into us, and we went forward again, when we thought we were beaten, with our officers gone, and this accursed shelling. But now he is killed.”
Orhan told the man to send out a party to bring the body in. Yes, it was Ahmet all right—long and slender, he lay all limp on the hot soil, in the trim uniform which Nilüfer had so often brushed and pressed, the dark-lashed lids closed—a soldier had done that for him—over the grey eyes that were so like Féridé’s; he might have been asleep, except that his mouth was wide open, like that of a man shouting in a loud voice. Bending over him, his throat contracted in distress, Orhan found himself wondering if that last shout had been of encouragement to the men, or of anguish when the machine-gun bullets entered his chest, drilling that close row of holes in the cloth, from which a dark spreading stain was oozing.
But his chief thought was of Féridé. “Oh my life, my darling, how are you going to endure this?” he muttered to himself. His mind turned with deepest pity to Nilüfer—first her baby gone, and now her husband! —and then to the poor old Pasha, his father-in-law, who was losing his only son. “This will finish him!” he thought. But his mind passed swiftly from Asaf Pasha to Réfiyé Hanim, with whom, from the outset, he had always been linked in a sympathy that was curiously close. It wouldn’t finish her—nothing would finish her, marvellous old woman, but Time’s inevitable processes, but it would cruelly darken her last days. Standing in the blistering heat of that Anatolian gully, with Ahmet’s body at his feet and the long file of the gaily-dressed ammunition-carriers passing him all the time in a ceaseless flow, the young man paused for a long moment, lost in sad thoughts of the imminent sorrow of his grandmother-in-law.
He was roused by the sergeant, who touched him on the arm to ask what they should do with the officer’s body? Should it remain there? He would like to go forward—the men of his platoon were following up the retreating Greeks, “and if there is no officer, I can lead them for a time.”
“Yes, go on—go and slaughter the machine-gunners!” Orhan exclaimed. “I will send for him.” He went and got his horse, and taking the bridle of Ahmet’s chestnut over his arm he rode back to the knot of Staff horses.
“Where is Ahmet Bey?” one of the soldier-grooms asked, as he dismounted.
“Dead,” the young officer replied briefly. The man broke out into loud lamentations.
Up on Kocatepé the small group of the General Staff was now watching the distant progress of the central thrust, Fevzi and Ismet mostly in silence, Kemal now and again giving vent to a brief ejaculation of satisfaction. None of them noticed Orhan’s arrival at first, but presently Kemal, without taking his field-glasses from his eyes, said—“I wonder where on earth Orhan Bey has got to? He should have been back long since.”
“Here I am, Sir,” said Orhan, stepping forward and saluting.
“Then why in the Prophet’s name don’t you say so?” Kemal snapped, looking round. “And where the devil is Ahmet?”
“He is killed, Sir.”
Kemal Pasha let his field-glasses drop from his hand—they fell the length of the strap by which they hung round his neck.
“So,” he said, slowly, almost thoughtfully. “That is bad news—very bad. Did you learn how it happened?”
“The sergeant said that he re-formed the men, and led the charge,” said Orhan stiffly. “But their machine-gunners got him from their nests —there are six holes in his tunic.”
“I wish this had not happened,” Kemal said, in that tone of complete sincerity and simplicity which was one of the things that made men glad to lay down their lives for him. “I wish I had not sent him. My dear Ahmet! But they shall pay!” he added, suddenly savage. “Yes?” he asked sharply, as another officer came up with a fresh report and some further query. “Wait!”-then to Orhan-“Have him brought in.” Orhan saluted. “Now,” Kemal said to the new arrival, and took over the direction of the battle again.
By nightfall the central thrust had completely broken the Greek front, and a general retirement began, which turned rapidly into a rout. Kemal displayed his usual generalship, and by swift moves of his cavalry and of the 4th and 6th Turkish Army Corps succeeded in cutting off and destroying a high proportion of the wretched Greek army near Çalkoi, north of Dumlupinar—six divisions were practically wiped out. Those who could, fled towards Smyrna, but retreat to the north was barred by the cavalry. Four days after the batde had begun Kemal issued this Order of the Day: “Armies! Your next objective is the Mediterranean! Forward!”—his weary troops cheered it to the echo.
Forward indeed they went, but the enemy fled with such speed that though the Turks covered a hundred miles in three days, they never caught up with the fleeing Greeks till they reached Smyrna on September the 9th; General Tricoupis, the Greek Commander-in-Chief, was captured with his entire staff on the 2nd. But swiftly as the Greeks fled, abandoning everything—tents, barbed wire, clothing, guns, stores of food, rifles—they found time to kill practically every Turk they encountered on their way, mostly old men, old women, and children, and to burn down every village, in a frenzy of wanton cruelty and destruction. Their pursuers, following hard on their heels, saw what they had done—the still-smoking ashes of ruined homesteads, the grey-haired faces turned up to the sky, the small crumpled bodies of children, with flies buzzing and settling on the darkened blood; and this explains, even if it cannot excuse, what happened to the Greek population of Smyrna when the Turkish army finally arrived there.
Some days before that Kemal, accompanied by Ismet, Fevzi, and several Staff officers, walked over the horrifying battle-field at Çalkoi, where the Greek troops who had not succeeded in escaping had been destroyed wholesale. Under the hot sun—the great vultures circling in slow sweeps overhead casting ugly shadows—the air was full of the stench of putrefying corpses, lying everywhere in heaps, mixed up with abandoned ammunition and weapons of every description. This was one of Mustafa Kemal’s great hours; his ceaseless work, his faith, and the sacrifices, courage and endurance of his people here had borne a visible, a most appalling fruit. With a cold silent pride, a sort of reserved triumph, he picked his way between the heaped bodies of his enemies, noting their numbers and the amount of war material that they had abandoned with a professional eye. And here he gave, suddenly, a curious example of his own peculiar brand of chivalry. At one point the party came on a Greek regimental standard, lying trampled in the dust; it caught KemaF’s eye.
“Pick it up!” he said curtly to a Major on the Staff, who was walking with the three Commanders.
“Sir, it is only a Greek flag,” the Major unwisely ventured to say. Kemal rounded on him furiously.
“It is the symbol of independence of a nation! I tell you to pick it up!” he stormed. The officer, abashed, obeyed, and continued to walk after his chief over the hideous field, carrying the enemy’s flag.
But there was no chivalry in Kemal’s behaviour at Smyrna, or rather in the behaviour of his troops there—which one must suppose that he permitted. An appalling massacre of the large Greek civilian population took place, and the greater part of the rich thriving mercantile city was burnt to ashes—what was left of the Greek army, from their transports lying just off the harbour, watched the town which they felt belonged to them going up in flames, and listened to the shrieks that travelled out over the water—above all to the hideous screaming of their transport mules, which they had left on the quays when they embarked; the Turkish soldiery, themselves desperately short of t
ransport, in crazy wantonness butchered these useful animals in thousands, with the same savagery with which they were busily slaughtering innocent civilians.
Altogether, Smyrna was an ugly business. And the Turkish victory raised serious issues for Europe. It was obvious that Kemal would now turn his attention—his highly victorious attention—to Istanbul, which like Smyrna had a large Greek and Armenian population; and this might well ignite afresh that troublesome area the Balkans, whose very soil seems to be composed of dynamite. Churchill, summing up his account of the Turkish struggle, uses harsh and bitter words to point the moral of the whole episode—words worth remembering, for they have a permanent truth.
“Victory over Turkey, absolute and unchallenged, had been laid by the Armies upon the council table of the Peace Conference. Four years had passed, and the talkers had turned it into defeat…. All the fine pretensions of Europe and the United States, all the eloquence of their statesmen, all the hiving and burrowing committees and commissions, had led the erstwhile masters of overwhelming power to this bitter and ignominious finish.”
“The talkers had turned it into defeat”—that is the essential phrase, the biting truth. The columnists, the politicians, the would-be statesmen pouring out platitudes, all the men of words almost inevitably do, in the end, turn the heroisms of the men of action into defeat.
. . . . . .
In Istanbul Kemal’s threat to the capital created consternation. The news of the Smyrna massacres left the Turks themselves aghast; at the Club the Pasha heard details never printed, with profound dismay. The fear of armed conflict in and around the capital, still occupied by Entente troops and watched over by units of the Entente fleets carried his mind back to his anxieties in the summer of 1914. And then he heard the news of Ahmet’s death.
The poor old man was stricken by this blow. Orhan had written him a long, respectful, and affectionate letter, giving full details of that gallant action, and stressing the military importance of its results—the Pasha read it aloud to Réfiyé Hanim, who listened in silence, the slow tears of old age stealing down her face. She was very much touched and moved by the tone in which Orhan wrote to his father-in-law, with whom he had seldom seen eye to eye about anything—and Asaf Pasha was, she saw, moved by this too. But curiously enough he was even more pleased by a brief note which arrived a day or so later from Mustafa Kemal himself, expressing courteous condolence; it ended with the words: “He was an officer whom all loved, and of whom the nation, in whose defence he died, can be proud.”
“That is well said,” the Pasha observed with some emotion to his mother, after reading it to her.
“Yes, he is clearly a person of sensibility,” the old lady said, wiping her eyes with a cambric handkerchief. “My son, I should like Dil Feripé to hear those words, if you would most kindly leave the letter with me.”
The Pasha rose and gave it to her. As he re-seated himself he said, clearing his throat with a slight elegant embarrassment—“Ané, do you perchance know this: is Nilüfer again with child?”
“Alas, my son, no,” she replied at once. The young—and the middle-aged, even—have no idea of what it is like to be between sixty and seventy, with one’s personal future so short, so short, and all expectation fixed on the next generations, one’s children and one’s grandchildren. But Réfiyé Hanim knew—she had passed through that age, and had been blessed in it with beautiful and devoted grandchildren; she understood very well what the hope of a grandson would have meant to her own aging son. But this hope was denied him, and she told him so without hesitation. She half feared that he would say something harsh about poor Nilüfer, but he simply bowed his head a little, so that the tassel of his fez drooped forward—and presendy, bent, sad, and silent, he went away to his own quarters in the great house, so empty now. Réfiyé Hanim remained alone. Some time later Dil Feripé stole in, and she read her the letter from Mustafa Kemal; the faithful old creature wept afresh for Ahmet, her beloved nursling, and Réfiyé Hanim in her corner under the window wept with her.
Chapter Seventeen
The news of Ahmet’s death came to the house on the citadel in the middle of the frenzied rejoicings at Ankara over the victory at Dumlupinar—The Battle of the Commander-in-Chief, as the Turks still call it. Féridé’s sorrow was almost speechless, while the only comfort for poor Nilüfer seemed to be to talk ceaselessly of Ahmet. But their sense of mutual obligation was very strong, and no strain or disharmony developed; they clung together, the one speaking, the other listening.
“He left no son—by my fault he left no son!” poor Nilüfer would reiterate; and Féridé, herself still childless, tried to comfort her—it had not been her fault, it was the circumstances, the goats’ milk; and then, much against the grain, but with faithful patience, she led her sister-in-law on to talk of Ahmet himself till she was soothed and calm again.
All this listening took time, however, and it was an immense relief when first Kezban, then Fatma, came back from the front and took up their household tasks once more. When Orhan returned from Smyrna —at first rather silent and oppressed—he took steps to terminate the lease of Ahmet’s house; it was an understood thing that when the railway was open again Nilüfer would return to her family, at the Eaux Douces or at Scutari. Orhan’s presence was a greater solace to Féridé at that time than it had ever been before—it broke up the feminine atmosphere of helpless mourning which was so alien to her active resilient spirit.
However, the railway was not open yet, by any means. That broken stretch where the rails had been turned into rammers and bayonets had still to be re-laid, and there was considerable military activity further down the line, round Ismid. Kemal, having triumphantly thrown the Greeks out of Anatolia, Turkey-in-Asia, now wanted possession of Istanbul, with all the prestige which attached to the ancient capital; but he also- wanted to repossess himself of Turkey-in-Europe—Eastern Thrace, which the Greeks still held. Thither he could send his troops easily enough if he could ship them across the narrow waters of the Dardanelles; but along the Asiatic shore of those waters, on both sides of the little town of Chanak, extended a thin line of English troops, and English men-of-war, with a fire-power which he could not possibly equal, patrolled the Narrows themselves. There had been French-held and Italian-held zones, too, along those flat shores; but on September the 18th the French, who for the past eleven months had maintained a curiously equivocal position—as one of the Entente Powers, but in diplomatic relations with Ankara, the enemy of those Powers—withdrew their troops. The Italians followed their example, and the thin line of English soldiers was stretched out to fill the gaps till it was thinner still; but three days before the French and Italian withdrawal the British Government telegraphed a request for reinforcements at Chanak to the Dominions—Australia, New Zealand, Canada—and the Dominions responded eagerly to the call. They would come and help the mother-country as before.
This response, which was widely publicised, gave Kemal pause. He himself had fought against the “Anzacs”—Australian and New Zealand Army Corps—on Gallipoli six or seven years before, and he knew what they were worth. Sir Charles Harington, the English Commander in Istanbul, an Irishman who combined British phlegm with Irish tact and gracefulness, informed the Ghazi that he had instructions to defend the neutral zone along the Narrows. Kemal ventured on a “try-on”—the Anzac troops could not arrive for some time, and he was well aware of the British weakness; by his order his famous cavalry, 1100 of them, entered the neutral zone. His bluff was called; the English General intimated that he would be obliged to fire on them if they failed to retire. They did retire—to return a few days later, now 2000 strong, and armed with machine-guns. But they did no more than remain, “grinning through the barbed wire,” as Harington gaily reported to London —for behind the barbed wire, and not so far behind either, lay the Fleet with its great guns; shore artillery was on the way, and aircraft-carriers were joining the men-of-war almost daily. Kemal, so sensible, so practical, was not trying c
onclusions with the British Empire just then —through the barbed wire his troops continued to grin, but did no more.
There is a sort of natural affinity between the Turks and the English, or at least between Turkish soldiers and English troops—even in war they cannot help, for the most part, respecting and even liking one another. Alec Grant, who had been sent down to Chanak from Haidar Pasha to fill a gap among the officers of the Fifth Hussars, the regiment stationed there, wrote home to Fanny describing, in phrases as clipped as his little red moustache, the relations actually existing on the spot between the opposing forces at a time when European governments were cold with anxiety lest an “incident” should occur there, and make a fresh conflict inevitable. A rather senior Turkish officer, he reported, had come in one day under a white flag, with an interpreter, to ask—of all things—whether the English would lend him some rolls of their barbed wire? They seemed to have plenty, while he, for his part, was very short of it; and important people were coming down to make an inspection of his lines—if he could borrow some English wire he could put up a good show, and save a lot of trouble. He promised to return it when the inspection was over. The English commander had agreed, and Turkish details carried back an ample supply. A few days later, when the inspection had passed off satisfactorily (in fact Orhan was present at it) the Turkish officer returned according to promise, bringing back the rolls of wire. Over whiskies, in a most genial atmosphere, he made a further request. It was very tiresome, he explained, to have to dress oneself up as a peasant or a fig-seller in order to cross the lines and come into Chanak to take one s bath in the town hammam; it would save no end of trouble if the English would let him and his brother-officers through in uniform, without the bother of this disguise. “Of course we said Yes,” Alec Grant wrote. “I will say this for the Turks, they do bathe like Christians. That hammam is top-hole —I go there all the time.”