Birds Without Wings (43 page)
The Exchange
A tremor of consternation ran through the town. Many of the young men felt excited, even elated, but some felt dread and foreboding rise up in the pit of the stomach. Mothers and sisters put their hands to their mouths and opened their eyes wide with anxiety. Widows in penury reflected that they had nothing left to lose, and wives foresaw the same inevitability for themselves and their children.
It was the beginning of November, a warm and gentle keşişleme breeze was blowing from Cyprus and Arabia. The people of the town had heard that some ships had been built for the Sultan by the Frankish folk called “British,” with money raised by public subscription, and then the British had gone to war and kept the ships for themselves. Everyone in the empire was furious about the betrayal, and there had been much bold and angry rhetoric in all the meydans and coffeehouses. The people had not, however, yet heard the news that the kind Frankish people called “Germans” had donated battleships of their own, and that these had opened fire on the Black Sea bases of the Russian Empire. They did not know that Enver Pasha, effectively the military dictator, had ordered the bombardment of these bases without consulting the Sultan, the Grand Vizier, or the majority of the other ministers, four of whom had consequently resigned in disgust. They did not know that Enver Pasha had a great vision to pursue, of expanding the Ottoman Empire to the east, to include all the Turkic peoples. This was the age when everyone wanted an empire and felt entitled to one, days of innocence perhaps, before the world realised, if it yet has, that empires were pointless and expensive, and their subject peoples rancorous and ungrateful. Perhaps it galled Enver Pasha that over the previous ninety years the empire had repeatedly and relentlessly been under malicious and opportunist attack from its neighbours and former territories.
Where does it all begin? History has no beginnings, for everything that
happens becomes the cause or pretext for what occurs afterwards, and this chain of cause and pretext stretches back to the palaeolithic age, when the first Cain of one tribe murdered the first Abel of another. All war is fratricide, and there is therefore an infinite chain of blame that winds its circuitous route back and forth across the path and under the feet of every people and every nation, so that a people who are the victims of one time become the victimisers a generation later, and newly liberated nations resort immediately to the means of their former oppressors. The triple contagions of nationalism, utopianism and religious absolutism effervesce together into an acid that corrodes the moral metal of a race, and it shamelessly and even proudly performs deeds that it would deem vile if they were done by any other.
There was between 1821 and 1913 a prolonged and atrocious holocaust which we have chosen to forget, and from which we have learned absolutely nothing. In 1821, between 26 March and Easter Sunday, in the name of liberty, the southern Greek Christians tortured and massacred 15,000 Greek Muslim civilians, looted their possessions, and burned their dwellings. The Greek hero Kolokotronis boasted without qualm that so many were the corpses that his horse’s hooves never had to touch the ground between the town gates of Athens and the citadel. In the Peloponnese, many thousands of Muslims, mainly women and children, were rounded up and butchered. Thousands of shrines and mosques were destroyed, so that even now there are only one or two left in the whole of Greece.
During the 1820s, as a result of war against Serbia and Russia, 20,000 Muslims were expelled from Serbia.
In 1875, Orthodox Bosnian Serb Christians began a campaign of assassination against Muslims in general and Ottoman officials in particular.
In 1876, Bulgarian Christians massacred an unknown number of peasants of Turkish origin.
In 1877, Russia attempted to impose humiliating concessions on the Ottomans, and as a result of their refusal, declared war. Using tactics invented for use against Muslims in the Caucasus, Cossacks assisted by Bulgarian revolutionaries and peasants seized all the property of Muslims. Cossacks would surround the villages to prevent any escape, disarm the inhabitants and send the Bulgarians in to slaughter them. Sometimes the villages were simply obliterated by artillery. Sometimes the inhabitants were sold into slavery. European diplomats recorded that this episode was remarkable for the systematic manner in which new ways were invented to torture women to death as slowly as possible.
As a consequence of this campaign of extermination, a vast swarm of
half a million starving Muslim refugees of one religion but of all ethnic backgrounds took to the roads, driven hither and thither without rest by bandits, guerrillas and soldiers. In Edirne one hundred of them died each day of typhus. In Istanbul’s great church of Aya Sofya, then a mosque, there huddled four thousand hopeless souls, of whom thirty died every day, only to be replaced by others. Alongside and among these Muslims, almost unnoticed by history, suffered and died the Jews, because the common cry of the liberating heroes in those days was “Jews and Turks Out!”
The Montenegrins killed or expelled their entire Muslim population.
By 1879, one-third of all the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzogovina had either emigrated or been killed.
Sir Henry Layard, British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, wrote that the policy of the Russians in the region was to eliminate the Muslims and replace them with Slavs.
In 1912, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece all declared war on the Ottoman Empire with the intention of seizing more Ottoman territory and bringing about more forced migration. To the tactics described above was added the technique of herding Muslims into coffeehouses and barns, and then burning them down. As before, civilian men were killed quickly, but women were tortured to death as slowly as possible. Captured Ottoman soldiers were treated with particular brutality. In Edirne the defeated soldiers were put on to an island and starved to death. The history books coyly declare that the details of the horrors that were perpetrated are too gruesome to report.
The main tactic was for irregular shock troops, called komitadjis, who might otherwise be described as guerrillas, bandits, brigands or liberating heroes, motivated by hatred and the desire for loot (otherwise known as patriotism), to attack the villages and force the inhabitants on to the roads. Montenegrins devastated Albania. The Turkish refugees of Thrace were driven eastwards by the Greeks, and then driven back again by the Bulgarians marching south, and back once more. Their misery and desperation is unimaginable. The Bulgarian army left behind it eighty miles of ruined villages. After their victory, the Bulgarians, Greeks and Serbians all claimed Macedonia, and the two latter went to war with the former, with Romania joining the party shortly afterwards. The Ottomans took advantage of the squabble between the Christian liberators, and retook Edirne and eastern Thrace.
It is impossible to know how many Muslim, Jewish and Turkish civilians died during the Balkan Wars, nor how many soldiers, but it is known
that the Ottomans had to take in about half a million new refugees. The constant fighting and the never-ending influx of refugees crippled the economy. Also ruined was the Ottoman Empire’s greatest achievement, the millet system which guaranteed religious liberty for all. Despite some lapses, for almost all of its history the empire had protected the different denominations, allowing them to administer their own affairs and follow their own laws, which is the reason that the Greek Orthodox Church was able to survive intact, as an arm of the Ottoman state, carrying with it the Greek language, and the culture and religion of the Byzantines, just as the sultans had taken over the administrative system of the Byzantines and left it unchanged. Now, however, the hell’s broth of religious and nationalist hatred had been stirred up by a multitude of village Hitlers, and the Balkans were irreparably changed for the worse.
It is possible that on 29 October 1914, when he either agreed or gave the order for the bombardment of those Russian bases by German sailors dressed in Turkish uniform, manning German battleships with Turkish names, Enver Pasha was thinking that he had no choice but to side with Germany.
It was very simple. Britain and France were old yet exacting friends of the empire, but they were allied with Russia, and every Turk knew that Russia wanted Turkey in its empire, preferably without any Turks left alive in it. An Allied victory would have been a sanguinary catastrophe for the Turks, and a satisfying final solution for the Russians. It must have been clear to Enver Pasha that his enemy’s enemy was his friend, and he had no choice but to gamble on a German victory. Apart from that, there was a century of disaster to make up for, and no one can know how much he was motivated by injured pride on behalf of his own people. If so, it was an irony that his own incompetence and ambition should result in yet more disaster for his country, for instead of fighting a sensible defensive war, he went straight into the attack against the Russians in north-eastern Anatolia, through impassable mountains, and snow that was sometimes twenty feet deep. Within two months 75,000 of an army of 95,000 were dead, and he had lost all his machine guns and artillery.
It was as part of this sorry concatenation of events that in November 1914 there occurred the arrival in Eskibahçe of Sergeant Osman, along with a Jewish clerk, a donkey laden with ledgers, and four dusty and disgruntled gendarmes.
Sergeant Osman was an artilleryman of long service and fierce disposition. Unlike the gendarmes, the donkey and the Jew, Osman had managed
to remain reasonably smart after the long and exhausting trek from Telmessos. He had a moustache waxed elegantly to upturn at the tips, he had blue and red epaulettes, a crimson fez, and red stripes at the bottom of his sleeves. Around his neck he wore the whistle that he once had employed for shrilling out the coded orders that took the place of shouting when in the heat of battle. Sergeant Osman had a romantic sabre scar across his left cheek, his face was dark and leathery from living a hard life in all weathers, and he was tough in the way that only Turkish soldiers can be. He was the kind of man who could march five hundred miles with a band of captives, and be genuinely puzzled at the end of it as to why all his prisoners had died on the way. He had not seen his wife and children for a year, and he had seen such terrible things in Thrace that much of the time he concentrated upon keeping his mind resolutely blank. Despite this, he could not repress one image of the Balkan War that recurred frequently and unpredictably, sometimes making him wake up at night with his eyes staring and his heart thumping painfully in his chest. It was of a field of stupendous carnage in Thrace in which only one building remained partially intact, and on the wooden door of that building hung a naked little girl who had been crucified and disembowelled. He could not forget the sweetness and innocence of that bowed little head with its tumbling shaggy locks of hair falling about its face. He could not forget that face with its open mouth and its little pink tongue and its two rows of tiny milk teeth. He could not forget reaching out and touching the child’s neck, realising as he did so that she was freshly dead. Worst of all was the crimson cavity of the stomach, disgorging its multicoloured and glistening cascade of entrails, piled up as if from the ground, that was already abuzz with flies. Sergeant Osman was not a philosophically sophisticated man, and so he was neither amazed nor outraged by the sacrilege that the retreating Greeks had perpetrated in visiting upon a child the same death as had been suffered by their own innocent Lord. In any case this crucifixion of children by Christians was quite a common thing in his experience, and the shock of it eventually wore off. What struck Osman as he touched the child’s neck was that it looked just like one of his own daughters at the same age, and so it was that in the nightmares and flashbacks of later years, it was his own child that he saw disembowelled and nailed to a door in Thrace. Sergeant Osman seldom thought of the vile things that he himself had done whilst in the baresark rage of victory or revenge, because it was all wiped out and cancelled by this one scene that overtopped and outplayed them all.
Sergeant Osman had been so repeatedly wounded that he now found himself limping from town to town and village to village, accompanied by four gendarmes, a donkey and a Jew, in order to call up the reserve and recruit new troops. It caused him much frustration and bitterness that he had thus been apparently demoted, and in every place where there was a letter-writer he caused a letter to be written to Enver Pasha and the Sultan himself, begging to be allowed back into the front line with his regiment, this being in addition to the many written on his behalf by the patient and long-suffering Jew. Osman had a sense of his destiny, and he knew that this job was not a part of it, so that occasionally he became irascible in the prosecution of it.
Upon arrival in the town Osman went for a shave, and then, refreshed and smelling of lemon cologne, he set up office under a plane tree in the meydan and sent out the gendarmes with the clerk to fetch in the empire’s new soldiers.
Thus it was that Iskander was in the shade of his tatty awning happily fashioning birdwhistles for Mr. Theodorou’s export business in Smyrna, when he became aware of the four unfamiliar gendarmes and the clerk standing by his side waiting for him to finish the particular one which he was making. His initial reaction was to wonder what he had done wrong, and he felt a pang of fear. The clerk pushed his spectacles further up his nose and asked, “You are Iskander, a potter of this town?”
“I am Iskander, yes. Peace be with you.”
“And with you,” replied the clerk drily, scratching his forehead with a pencil, and tipping back his fez, “although I fear it may not be as much peace as you might have wished.”
Iskander looked at him for a moment, and then the clerk said, “There has been a general mobilisation, and you have been called up again. I am sorry if this is an inconvenience, but there is no choice in the matter, I am afraid.”