Birds Without Wings (74 page)

Rustem Bey laughed. “I have never heard of a Turk making such a terrible sacrifice.”

“Apparently he was weeping when he handed it over, but I don’t know whether it was on account of parting with Sergeant Oliva or the backgammon set.”

“It was probably both,” said Rustem Bey, adding, “When you go back to Italy I doubt if you will be able to carry on wearing that fez.”

Lieutenant Granitola took it off his head, looked at it, and then replaced it. “I doubt it too. It isn’t yet standard issue in the army, I believe, and is unlikely to become so. Even so, I shall wear it in the evenings as I sit in my study and contemplate, and I shall feel briefly like a Turk.”

“Wait a minute,” said Rustem Bey, and he went into the house and came back bearing his waterpipe. “You must take this,” he said, holding it out. “No, please, I have another. Smoke it in the evenings with the fez on your head.”

CHAPTER 84

Mustafa Kemal (21)

Mustafa Kemal moves to a house bought for him by public subscription, and, in accordance with his long-standing determination both to be and to appear to be incorruptible, he promptly transfers the deeds to the army. He has a piano and a billiard table. He makes agreements with the Russians and the French. The latter are leaving Cilicia, but are to retain Şskenderun, and they agree to sell their abandoned military matériel for a pittance, so that Kemal can use it against the Greeks. The Turks regain their territory in the south as the French leave, taking with them those Armenians who had previously returned. The Italians also leave behind them plenty of matériel, and more is illicitly sold to Kemal by both the Italians and the French. Weapons are smuggled out of caches in Istanbul, where they are supposedly under guard.

It is at this juncture that the Greeks entirely lose the sympathy of the rest of the world. They make the mistake of committing atrocities too near to Istanbul, where everybody will notice. As they retreat they destroy everything left behind, so that towns, villages and countryside are reduced to smoking desert. Greek irregulars, calling themselves “Black Fate,” make a career of murdering Turkish civilians.

Turkish atrocities are less noticeable since they occur in places where Allied observers have left. Nurettin Pasha viciously suppresses a Kurdish rebellion. In the Pontus, on the Black Sea coast, a Greek battleship bombards Ankara’s feeder port, Inebolu. The Greek population of Pontus is enormous, swollen by Greek refugees from Russia, and to prevent an uprising Nurettin Pasha recommends that all Greek men between the ages of fifteen and fifty should be deported to the interior. Kemal accepts the idea, and what follows is an exact repetition of the death marches of Aegean Greeks in 1914, the death marches of Armenians in 1915, and the death marches of British prisoners of war after the fall of Kut. In Samsun
the Turks execute those suspected of being Greek or Armenian leaders. A notorious Turkish guerrilla leader named Lame Osman does his worst, and the Greeks make it all worse still by bombarding the port of Samsun from the sea.

For some months Mustafa Kemal devotes himself to consolidating his own power and resisting other people’s attempts to moderate it. He has to deal with the peacock pride of his own officers, who are always jostling for prestige and precedence.

The Allies propose a peace treaty, and the Greeks accept it, even though its terms are mostly favourable to the Turks. Kemal delays, however, because he realises that he is winning the war. General Papoulas has resigned and is replaced by General Hazianestis, a man widely considered to be mad, who sometimes thinks that his legs are made of glass or sugar. Hazianestis is sanguine about the chances of success, and does not even establish a second line of defence behind his army, which is stretched out almost in single file along an impossibly long front of four hundred miles. Hazianestis has his headquarters in a ship anchored in Smyrna harbour, which is about as far from the front as it is possible to be, short of going back to Greece. He moves large numbers of his men to Thrace. The Greeks have a new plan to take Thrace and occupy Istanbul, thinking that this will end the war.

When the British and the French find out, they inform Athens that they will resist any such plan by force of arms. British and French troops are sent to man the borders, and the British fleet puts to sea.

Kemal and Ismet realise that one cannot attack the Greeks along an entire front that is four hundred miles long, and so they pick one place in which to attack in force. This is the Afyon salient. Preparations are carried out in the utmost secrecy, mainly at night.

The attack is initially slow to succeed. There is one heroic but tragic commander who promises Mustafa Kemal that he will take Mount Çişiltepe within half an hour. Before long Kemal receives Colonel Reşat’s suicide note, saying, “I have decided to finish my life because I have failed to keep my word.” Colonel Reşat is an old comrade of Kemal’s from the Great War.

On the second day the Turks break through, and their cavalry appears in the rear of the Greek line. The Greek 1st Corps retreats in a hurry, leaving behind its stores. Communications break down altogether, and General Hazianestis issues an order to counterattack which he might as well have addressed to thin air.

Mustafa Kemal risks sending his men in pursuit of the fleeing Greeks, even though there are intact Greek formations elsewhere. The attack is successful, and the Greek 1st and 2nd Corps disintegrate completely. The 3rd Corps in the north, which has so far stayed out of the fighting, prepares to retreat to Marmara because it is now vulnerable from the south. Kemal issues the famous order: “Armies! Your objective is the Mediterranean. Forward!”

The Turks take thousands of captives, ambushing them as they descend from the slopes of Mount Murat. Mustafa Kemal has the delightfully ironic task of informing the captured General Trikoupis that he has just received information that the latter has been appointed commander of the entire Greek front.

The Greeks wreak havoc on their retreat, and everything is laid waste without sense or pity. The Greek army sidesteps Smyrna, and leaves it defenceless against a Turkish army that has advanced through the desolation, becoming more astonished with outrage at every pace. The Turkish soldiers heading for the city are commanded by Nurettin Pasha, its former governor, and victor against the Kurds. Mustafa Kemal has issued orders that the civilian population of Smyrna must be treated with respect, and that any soldiers violating this code will be hanged, but the Pasha is a prickly character who dislikes and envies Mustafa Kemal, and disobeys him whenever possible. He has a well-earned reputation for shameless brutality.

It is one of history’s little ironies that in one century the Greeks should have fought a war of independence against the Turks, and in the following century the Turks should have fought a war of independence against the Greeks. In the final battle of this last war, the Greeks lost 70,000 men, and the Turks 13,000.

In Smyrna the last great catastrophe of the war takes place. It is now time for the Christian population to become the mirror of the Muslim one. Having seen what the Greek troops did to Anatolia, the Turkish troops are in the mood for revenge.

Nurettin Pasha summons Archbishop Chrysostom, the hell-raising cleric who originally got the pasha dismissed from his job in Smyrna in 1919. He hands the archbishop over to the Turkish mob, who mutilate him mercilessly until finally a sympathiser puts him out of his misery and shoots him. A French patrol nearby does nothing to intervene.

The Armenian quarter is set alight, and soon the European and Greek quarters are completely destroyed. The Turks say that the Greeks did this
to prevent them from having it. After all, the Greeks burned everything else as they retreated. However, in this case the Greek army had already departed some days before. Some say that Armenians started the fire in order to prevent the Turks from having it. Some say that the fire was started because there were Armenian snipers in some of the houses, and it is common military practice to burn out snipers. Some say that Turkish soldiers started it on purpose to disguise what they had done to the Armenian civilians who lay eviscerated and raped inside the houses, or to make sure that they would have to leave and never come back. Some blame Mustafa Kemal, others Nurettin Pasha, who was a rabble-rouser and demagogue. Some blame Turkish regular troops, and others blame the uncontrollable irregulars who came along for the ride. In other words, everybody has someone else to blame and to despise for what happened to the fairest and happiest and most prosperous port on the Levant. In the end the blame really lies with Venizelos and the Allies, and in particular with David Lloyd George.

Out in the harbour the crews of Allied warships watch as the city becomes an inferno and the desperate Christian population crowds on to the quays. The ships are there to evacuate their compatriots, not to help the locals. At first both Turkish and Allied patrol boats prevent them getting out to the ships, but finally the captains and crews of the warships can take this cruelty no longer, and begin to allow them on board. In the end they save about 200,000 people, but there are many who have never forgiven them for waiting so long.

Beneath the oily water, thrown out of a boat and shot, it is too late for Georgio P. Theodorou, dealer in commodities and general merchandise, frequenter of Rosa’s cathouse, philanthropist, creator and donor of the fine neoclassical pump house at Eskibahçe.

CHAPTER 85

I Am Georgio P. Theodorou

Yes, it’s me again, Georgio P. Theodorou, at your service, merchant and philanthropist. Should you have forgotten, it was me who erected the pump house at the entrance of Eskibahçe, and it was me who regaled you with a somewhat overlong description of the town, and related to you the events surrounding the humiliation of Daskalos Leonidas, when he was made to wear a pack saddle. I wonder what happened to him; in fact, I wonder if he is even still alive. He certainly got what he was agitating for, and no doubt he was jumping up and down with glee when the Old Greeks turned up. I don’t suppose he’s so gleeful now, though, now that the Old Greeks have buggered off and left us all neck-deep in the proverbial excrement, with vengeful Turks beating down our doors.

You catch me at an awkward moment, my friends, and you may find my thoughts a little disconnected, but if you find me a little incoherent, if you detect that my discourse has come adrift, you will surely find me blameless, for I am at this very moment sinking slowly through the oily waters down to the harbour floor of this very lovely city that was Smyrna. I am, so to speak, neck-deep in the proverbial excrement only in a most metaphorical sense, as I am in reality considerably over my head in brine.

When you are not a strong swimmer, my friends, you are even less of a strong swimmer when fully dressed. This is a law of nature that no one can deny. I have been proving it empirically for the last hour or so. Sooner or later one has to give up the struggle, and the weight of one’s sodden garments, combined with the extreme exhaustion brought about by panic and physical exertion, causes one to make peace with death at last, and then begins the long, slow descent to the murky realm of crabs and flatfish, seaweed, abandoned anchors encrusted with mussels and limpets, and inexplicable offcuts of thick rope and rusty hawser.

I can’t convey to you the relief, the sheer pleasure, of abandoning the
impossible struggle, the moment when one realises that it is less horrifying to die than to continue to struggle for life. It is nice, so very nice, to breathe the cold water deeply in and let it fill the lungs. One feels comfortable and clean, and a curious wavering solidity establishes itself in the head. I have just seen a large fish, and for the first time in my life have felt a pang of envy for the fishy lot.

Not far off I can see someone else sinking to the bottom, but her skirts have floated up around her face, and I wonder if she is concerned about dying in a state of immodesty, with her white camiknickers exposed for every drowning man to see. I would say that she has excellent legs, but I don’t recognise them, so they probably don’t belong to any of my little favourites.