Birds Without Wings (50 page)

My heart sinks at the thought of describing my eight years of chaos and destruction in two separate wars. How can I describe all the things I learned, and how quickly I learned them?

I was assigned to the 5th Army, and so I arrived at Maydos in the early spring, or the late winter if that is how you would prefer to say it. It is a place where the olive trees and the pines are the same size. At that time there was cistus growing in the rocks, and poppies redder than pigeon’s blood, lilac and pink mallows, little orchids, ox-eye daisies, oregano as sharp and strong as pepper, and tiny red flowers with black at the centre. There were old men and little boys in the streets, selling bread on sticks. With the other recruits I had marched for days, and now I come to think of it, I must have marched far enough in my time as a soldier to go three times round the world. There was never any transport, and we marched the length and breadth of the earth. I am surprised that my legs were not worn down to stumps from all that marching, and I cannot count the number of pairs of boots I must have used up. Anyone who has been a soldier understands the value of boots. One of the things you look forward to, when somebody is killed, is the prospect of finding a better pair of boots, and we took them equally from the dead enemy and our own comrades, but it was often enough that we were reduced to fighting with nothing on our feet at all. Sometimes if you had a special comrade with good boots, he would let it be known who was to inherit them when he was killed. I had a comrade called Fikret who was killed, but before he was wounded we had an agreement
like that. I said to him, “If I am killed first, I would like you to have my boots,” and he said, “If you are killed first, I would rather have your seventy-two virgins, so perhaps you could send them down from paradise,” and we both laughed, but it was
he
who was killed first, and I got his belt, which was better than mine, and I took what remained of his ammunition, and with it I killed fifteen Franks by sniping, and that is how I avenged him.

At first I didn’t have a proper uniform. I was wearing bits and pieces of the white summer uniform that was abolished, and I was wearing a fez on my head instead of a proper enverieh. The corporal who was my first corporal made me rub it with mud to take away the brightness of it, and laughed at me when I was reluctant, and anyway it was blown off my head in the naval bombardment, and I never found it again.

Maydos was a pretty town by the water’s side. It had rough streets paved with heavy stones, and there were soft-eyed dogs asleep on steps and in doorways. There were figs and vines, and the sparrows were very noisy in the eves. There were goats making idiot noise, and mournful cows lowing, and cockerels crowing in competition. There was a wealthy street taken up with Greek jewellers. There was an old man selling fish that were threaded on to string through the gills. I remember that we were sent almost immediately to Divrin Plain, and there I wrote a long letter to my mother, because she had managed to send one to me, and I told her of how beautiful the place was, and how my mother’s letter had given it enchantment. I think I told her that when I got home I would like to get married. I wonder what happened to the letter, because I cannot imagine that my mother would have thrown it away. After that I was not allowed to write any more, and in any case the great Frankish battleships were coming, and there was fighting to be done almost immediately.

I was sent straight away to assist the field artillery, because the big ships were coming, and it was their intention to get through the minefield so that Istanbul could be taken, but they couldn’t get their big ships through until the mines were cleared, and they couldn’t get the minesweepers in until the big ships had knocked out our guns, but the big ships couldn’t knock out our guns until the mines were cleared. So it was a difficult situation for the Franks.

I have never seen anything like those big ships. I think there were about sixteen of them. I can’t explain to you in words how vast they were. They were like islands. They filled the heavens with black smoke, and they had guns so enormous that it was impossible to imagine how these were made
by human hands. When we saw them filling the sea our hearts sank and we felt that it was all hopeless, but the officers seemed confident, and they kept us very occupied, and so we drew hope from them.

Do you know the strangest thing about being a soldier? It is that you are repeatedly ordered to commit suicide, and you obey. So it was lucky that so many of us wanted to get to paradise. Almost all of the attacks were frontal assaults on well-defended positions. This was true of the Frankish attacks and of our own, and when we saw the heaps of Frankish dead in front of our trenches, we began to feel sorry for them. I wonder if they felt sorry for us when they saw our dead heaped up in front of theirs. There were times when the dead lay three-deep, all mixed up with the wounded.

Before I arrived, the Franks had already demolished the fort at Seddülbahir with battleships, and also the fort at Kumkale, and they sent soldiers ashore to occupy them and destroy them completely, but after our soliders had withdrawn, they came back again, and drove the Franks out. This is how we did everything in that campaign. If we withdrew, we always came back. There was a soldier called Mehmet whose gun jammed, and he attacked a Frankish sailor with stones. Mustafa Kemal held him up to us as an example, and now the incident is famous all over Turkey, and that is why, I think, everyone these days refers to a soldier as a Mehmetçik. Of course, when I hear the name, I think mainly of my old friend, and I wonder where he is and if he has survived.

We still had very big guns at Çanakkale, across the other side of the water from where we were, and we had big guns at Kilitbahir, where there were forts. The Franks demolished the forts and the big guns in them, but they couldn’t do very much about our field guns and howitzers, which were mobile. We had torpedo tubes as well. I was near Kilitbahir, which is not far from Maydos, but I was glad not to be in the fort itself, because the big ships were dropping shells on it by the hundred. Imagine big holes opening up in the ground, and pieces of rock and lumps of earth hurtling past your head, and no enemy to get your hands on directly. Imagine a noise like the end of the world, like the roll of thunder and the crack of lightning, and whistling noises, and whirring noises, and pinging noises, and strange intervals of absolute silence. Imagine the groans and gurgles of the wounded, and all the different kinds of screams, from low and musical ones, to shrieks that cut the brain. Imagine being covered with filth and being so soaked in sweat that the filth clings to you and cakes on to your body. Imagine being full of cuts so that the daub of filth has dark patches of blood in it. Imagine your throat so dry with thirst that it feels as though
it has swallowed dried leaves and swollen up enough to stop the breath. Later on, when the Frankish ships bombarded our trenches, they used shrapnel which burst harmlessly, because we covered our trenches over. If they had used high explosive we would have been defeated, but they cannot have had any left. We too ran out of shells at different times. The curious thing about the Frankish high explosive was that it made you turn yellow, and you would be as yellow as a serin finch.

My particular job on the day of the great bombardment was to commit suicide by setting off smoke bombs that would draw enemy fire, hoping that the enemy would think they were real guns. I was told not to set off too many in any one place, and so I ran from rock to rock, setting off smoke bombs and waiting to be shelled. If I was shelled, this would signify my success. In the meantime, the howitzers would be dragged from place to place by their crews, and there weren’t enough horses, so they had to use teams of buffalo, and the idea was to knock out the Frankish minesweepers, and it was important to keep moving so as not to be destroyed by return fire. I had never seen such frantic activity, and neither had I ever heard such a quantity of obscenities, because the lot of the gunners was even worse than my lot. This is one of the consolations of the soldier, that when you are in shit up to the chest, there are always others who are in shit up to the neck. The gunners were clever people, because they hid their howitzers just below the crests of the hills, on the side where they could not be seen, and in such a way that the trajectory of their shells would fall on the ships, but the shells from the ships would have to pass over them without touching them. It was then that I realised that much of war depends not upon courage and strength, but upon cleverness. The Franks never had enough howitzers, or high-explosive shells, or trench mortars, or proper grenades, and without these there can be no success in the trenches. It is surprising that the Franks were not clever enough to realise this, when they were clever enough to make such big ships. Only the French Franks had proper mortars, and these dropped a bomb that we called the Black Cat, and we were appalled by them. They made a noise like a steam train, and they came vertically down out of the sky. We called the French Franks “Tangos,” and they also had the most lethal artillery.

Sometime after midday we thought we had lost, because we were exhausted and we had taken too much damage, and used up most of our ammunition, but for some reason several of the ships that had been bombarding us from close by began to withdraw, and then one of them hit a mine on the other side of the bay, and it sank in two minutes before our
unbelieving eyes. Some minesweepers came in, but they lost courage, and then, maybe two hours after the first ship sank, another two ships also struck mines, and one of them drifted so close that it was easy to shell it. Later on, both of these ships sank, and it made us sad to know of it, because those ships were magnificent, and it was like when a bull is slaughtered, and one is glad of the meat but sorry for the death of the great bull.

At the end of that day we knew we had won a victory, and no one was more surprised than us. We wandered about in the smoke and the chaos and the carnage, with a great thirst, and we smiled at each other and gave thanks to God.

All the same, we knew that we stood no chance at all when the enemy came back with his ships in the morning. Our towns were devastated completely, our forts had all but gone. We knew that soon the big ships would be in the harbours of Istanbul, and the war would be lost.

That night we ate melons and drank raki with water in it, and you know what raki does. You don’t want to go home, and you love everybody, and it gives you serenity. On that occasion it reconciled us to death in the morning.

The next day we rose up prepared for martyrdom, and we talked about the green birds that would take us to paradise, and the virgins that awaited us, and some people were elated because they would soon meet the Prophet in his own garden. We waited and waited for the ships to come back, but they did not come back either that day or in the days after.

The triumph swelled our chests and we felt like giants, and we who had believed that God was with us, believed it now even more than before, and those who had not believed it began to do so, because the fact is that the artillery at the narrows had only thirty shells left, and the Franks could have sailed straight past us in the morning.

CHAPTER 58

Karatavuk at Gallipoli: Karatavuk Remembers (2)

It was another month before the Franks returned, and in the meantime a very great deal happened.

In the first place I discovered something that confused us all, which was that some of the Franks were on our side. We were confused because of the proverb that “Unbelief is one nation,” and now it appeared that it was not, and there were some Franks who were on the side of the House of Islam, and not the House of War. These Franks were called Germans, and most surprisingly they were Christians. They had an emperor who had declared himself the protector of the Muslims, and it was they who supplied us with the new battleships that replaced the ones that were withheld by the other Franks called British. I had not been aware that the Franks were divided among themselves, and I thought it strange, as I still do, that these German Franks were fighting alongside us when our own Christians were forbidden to do so. All the more strange was that these German Franks were in positions of great power, and we were commanded by one such who was called Liman von Sanders, who was a very great general for us. Sometimes you saw him with his ADCs, walking about the lines, and sometimes he was on a horse, and often he wore a Turkish uniform and not a Frankish one. There were many other of these German Frank officers, and they gave advice and orders to our Turkish officers, and they conversed with our officers in a language which was neither German nor Turkish, but it was another Frankish language called French. I will confuse you, as we were confused, when I tell you that the French people who actually originated this language were among our enemies who invaded us, and were the ones we called “Tangos.” My lieutenant, who was called Orhan, explained to me that he spoke French with the German officers because French is the universal language of civilisation.