Young Turk (18 page)

So, this is what lies ahead.

My friends, Naim, Can, Robbie and I have devised a perfect plan.

We will save all five members of my mother’s family: my aunt, Fortuna; her three children, David, Süzan and Viktorya; and my grandfather, Salvador. Initially, I had been against including my grandfather in the rescue because of his violent nature, but then decided that it would be ungallant to exclude him. Sadly, Fortuna’s husband, Zaharya, died a few months ago, after being sent to hard labour by the Nazis.

We have passports for them all: Turkish ones, which, we have been told, will be honoured by the German authorities because Turkey is still neutral in this war and, following the occupation of Greece, a neighbour to be wooed. We procured the passports by exchanging them with British ones. We got hold of the latter thanks to Robbie, who can go in and out of the British consulate because his father is a grandee there. The exchanges were made through the intermediacy of Naim’s classmate, Tomaso, a Levantine boy whose family controls all the smuggling in this region. Tomaso also introduced us to Marko, his mother’s young brother, who, although only twenty-five, has the reputation of being the best and the most daring operator in the Aegean; moreover, it is said that his boat, the
Yasemin
, can run circles round any patrol boat. So Marko will be our saviour. Originally, Naim, Can and Robbie were to have joined us. We had invented a good excuse to be away from home – the boy scouts excursion to the Hittite Archives at Boğazköy that I mentioned earlier. But, alas, Naim and Can are needed to help out in their fathers’ shops and Robbie has to stay at his mother’s side because she is not at all well.

So it will be just Marko and me. We will slip into Greece, make our way to Salonica, find Mother’s family, hand them the passports and slip out again.

We’ll be back in a week.

We sail the day after tomorrow.

God, I was hoping to say much more.

Well, another time ...

Oh, I nearly forgot. I had a strange dream last night. I don’t normally remember dreams. Only the sexy ones that wake me up all messy.

Anyway, this dream. I was in ancient times. Watching a religious rite. People were piling their troubles and wrongdoings on to the back of a
kapora
, the traditional animal of purity, the scapegoat, in effect. But in this case the animal was a monkey, like Cheetah in the Tarzan films, only sky-blue in colour. When this monkey was so loaded that it was staggering about, they dragged it to an altar where a priest stood ready to slaughter it so that in death it would take away with it all the people’s misery. As the priest prepared to cut its carotid artery, the monkey turned and looked at me.

It had my face.

Bizarre.

When I get back, I must ask Ruhiye, Uncle Jak’s maid, what it means. Like most descendants of the Yürük, the original Turkish tribes from Central Asia, she is good at explaining dreams.

So ...

TO BE CONTINUED
...

WHEN I GET BACK
...

WITH GOOD NEWS, GOD WILLING!

Most historians will tell you that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was not only a prodigious statesman, but also a soldier of genius. In support of this conclusion, they will expound on his bold and often unorthodox strategies in Tripoli, Gelibolu, Syria and the Turkish War of Independence. Some of these, I believe, are part of the curriculum in military academies across the world.

But only a historian who has survived trench warfare, who breathed the stench of decomposing bodies, who lay paralysed by fear in livid shell-craters, who, coming under fire in open terrain, ran like a headless chicken, who strove to cling to his sanity as he watched Death snatch much of his generation on fields which, only yesterday, had been adorned with poppies, daisies and marigolds, can encapsulate the qualities that made Mustafa Kemal indomitable in warfare.

I met such a man. Nikos Vassilikos. At the time, a Greek colonel. We captured him in August 1921, during the battle of Sakarya when the Hellenes were pushing towards Ankara. As I was the only one in the regiment who spoke some Greek, my Paşa had asked me to conduct the interrogation.

If I may, I will refer to Mustafa Kemal as my Paşa. That is how he lives in my heart. Paşa, incidentally, is the rank of seraskier; its European equivalent is Field Marshal.

During the interrogation, Vassilikos repeatedly informed me that, in his efforts to become a diligent officer, he had applied himself to analysing my Paşa’s strategies in previous campaigns; consequently, he could construe why – and how – my Paşa invariably obtained the advantage over his adversaries. In fact, Vassilikos had sent a detailed report to his General Staff on my Paşa’s martial acumen, but they had dismissed it as a defeatist tract – a stupidity that had confirmed Vassilikos’ conviction that most General Staff officers were textbook soldiers, therefore buffoons. (Vassilikos is now a respected historian. His even-handed study of the Turkish–Greek conflict has become a standard work – except for the die-hard xenophobes of his country.)

Vassilikos maintained that what the High Command could not see – or did not want to see – was that my Paşa was, quite simply, way ahead of his time. Like Alexander the Great. Tomorrow’s man today. An astute rationalist who had soon perceived that accurate information on the enemy’s morale, disposition, capabilities and the manner of its deployment was the principal weapon for victory rather than, as his peers obdurately claimed, a standard item of an army’s ordnance. My Paşa was a visionary who saw the military potential, particularly for gathering intelligence, of every new invention, long before the desk runners in any defence establishment.

Vassilikos supported this assertion with numerous examples. Not being of a military mind, I have forgotten most of them. But I can never forget a specific strategy because, as Fate decreed it, I had been a cog in the wheel.

One of the innovations that my Paşa had speedily espoused was the field telephone. According to Vassilikos, the Gelibolu victory could be attributed, in the main, to my Paşa’s exceptional use of this device. Today, many military historians agree with this appraisal.

By deploying countless look-outs on and in the periphery of the battleground, with emphatic orders that they should provide continuous reports, my Paşa could not only determine the foe’s weak positions and strike accordingly, but also ascertain, often far better than the enemy’s own officers, the state and morale of its troops. He was particularly interested in what most commanders-in-chief would have dismissed as irrelevant. How well turned-out was the adversary? What was the state of their uniforms and boots? How often did the soldiers eat? What did they eat? How often were they given a break? Did they smoke heavily? Did they sing? If so, what sort of songs – sad or rousing? How regularly did they wash and shave? How often did they relieve themselves? And so on ...

My Paşa drummed it into us that very important deductions could be made from these seemingly unimportant details. How well the soldiers were turned out, the state of their uniforms and boots and what they ate would give an indication of how well the enemy was supplied. How often they ate and smoked, the kind of songs they sang and how frequently they washed and shaved would be excellent pointers to their morale. Moreover, a detail as banal as the number of times they relieved themselves could make the difference between victory and defeat. Too many men relieving themselves too many times would suggest that the enemy had been stricken with diarrhoea, maybe even dysentery, and that it was likely to be too weak or too exhausted to defend itself against a full-scale attack.

In 1921 I was one of the signalmen who gathered these reports for my Paşa.

How come?

Well, a number of recruits from the minorities – Jews like myself, Armenians, Levantines, Pontos, etc – had been chosen for the Signals Corps and speedily trained. We had been favoured because the Ottoman authorities’ negligence of their people, particularly in terms of education, had been so ignominious that a large percentage of our comrades-in-arms had remained illiterate. Against that, most of the minorities – allowed to have their own schools and maintain their own cultures or, should they wish it, to undertake a European education in one of a number of foreign schools that had opened in the principal cities – had attained high levels of literacy. The majority of these schools had sprouted in the 19th century as an extension of the Capitulations that had been granted to some European nations by the Ottoman empire. Since literacy and the ability to speak languages were of primary importance in intelligence work, most of the conscripts from the minorities had been assigned to that corps.

Given the atrocities suffered by the Armenians at the hands of Enver and Talat Paşas, given also the Armenian nationalist movement that led to the creation, under the treaty of Sèvres, of an Armenian Socialist Republic in August 1920, you may well be surprised to hear that there were some Armenian recruits in the Turkish army during the War of Independence – as, indeed, there had been during the First World War. Notwithstanding the fact that the Armenian Socialist Republic collapsed within months of its birth and was subsumed by the Russians, the presence of Armenian soldiers in the Turkish army is a clear example of the paradox that was the Ottoman empire and, to a lesser extent, the paradox that is the new Turkey. It is also an indication of my Paşa’s esteem for non-Muslim minorities.

Back to my story. Me, Pepo, as the terminal for vital intelligence reports.

There I was, barely nineteen, a city boy with some education who, inspired by my Paşa’s call to join the struggle for Turkey’s very existence, had readily volunteered. A boy who had never seen a weapon in his life, let alone used one. A boy as enthusiastic as a boy can be, but also scared out of his wits. A boy who, no sooner had he reached the Turkish lines – an arduous trek for those, like me, coming from Izmir or the Aegean provinces which, at the time, were under Greek occupation – finds himself in the Gehenna of war. A boy either petrified as he relaid countless metres of telephone lines under intense artillery fire or frantic as he manned, a breath away from the front, both the telegraph receiver and the cumbersome switchboards connected to look-outs with field telephones. A boy with more lives than a thousand cats, particularly when mending the communication wires that had been either clipped by enemy scouts or blown out of existence by the relentless bombardment. A boy who, instead of day-dreaming about girls or masturbating spiritedly as if aiming for a world record, had to learn not only the Morse code but all the advances in cryptography.

I am embarrassed – but also proud – to admit it, but I became an expert – the best, according to my instructors. I could receive and speedily transcribe several messages at the same time. I even managed to become ambidextrous. Consequently, I was sent from one battlefield to another until I ended up at my Paşa’s command post, at Sakarya, in centre-west Anatolia.

The battle of Sakarya, as we all know, became a turning-point in the War of Independence. It lasted some twenty-one days and saw fierce fighting on both sides. The front, sometimes twenty kilometres deep, stretched over 100 kilometres, almost the full length of the terrain where the Sakarya river forms a wide loop before snaking its way north to the Black Sea. The Greek army, well equipped and well provisioned from the Aegean, had started its offensive on 14 August from its positions around Eskişehir and Kütahya, which it had conquered in July. Its main objective was to push towards Ankara, the seat of the Turkish Nationalists, and thus put an end to my Paşa’s dreams of creating a new Turkey from the ruins of the Ottoman empire. Following the Greek gains in July, Ísmet Paşa, my Paşa’s ablest commander – and now, since my Paşa’s death, president of Turkey – had pulled the Turkish army back to the Haymana plateau, east of the Sakarya river, where the terrain, about 900 metres high, was not only easier to defend but also provided unimpeded views of the Greek forces from a number of hills. Beyond lay the portals of Ankara, destined to be the nation’s capital.

On 17 August my Paşa, just five days after having broken a rib during the preparations for battle, took overall command of the Turkish forces and set up his headquarters at Alagöz.

The Greek army, positioning one corps at the confluence of the Sakarya and its tributary, the Ilιca, unleashed its main assault from the south, skirting round the river’s loop. By so doing, it not only avoided the tribulations of a river crossing, but also sought to strike at the Turkish army’s soft underbelly.

Bitter and relentless fighting ensued. The Greeks advanced forcefully and captured a few hills. Some Turkish commanders advised a retreat towards Ankara, but my Paşa forbade it. This battle was not one where we were defending an expendable military position; here we were defending the very heart of the Motherland. Consequently, not even a millimetre of the battlefield could be yielded to the enemy. ‘Make your peace with your God,’ my Paşa exhorted us, ‘for here we might be judged by Him.’