Birds Without Wings (54 page)

CHAPTER 63

Karatavuk at Gallipoli: Karatavuk Remembers (4)

Every soldier has a comrade who stands out above the others. If your comrade is killed, you find another after a while, but there is still only one comrade that you remember in particular, and you think of him as being above all other comrades. This is because, after the great comrade has been killed, the wound in your heart makes it impossible to have such a comrade again.

I will write of Fikret. He was from Pera, and his slogan was “I am from Pera, so I don’t give a shit.” He was built like a stevedore, and the reason for this is that he had been working as a stevedore in the docks at Istanbul. I am not saying that he was big, because he was no taller than I am, but he had the powerful deep chest, and the thick, strong arms and legs of a man who has learned to lift and carry the heaviest things. I know personally that he was very strong, because he was the one who lifted the beams into place when we were making covered trenches, and he was stronger than anyone when we were collecting the wounded during the ceasefires. He could make us laugh by clenching the muscles of his neck, and they would all stand out and make him look grotesque. If you bumped into him accidentally, it was like walking into a tree.

Fikret was ugly. He had the hooked nose of an Arab, and a loose lower lip. His eyes were not set equally on his face, he had a moustache like the frayed end of a wire hawser, and he was covered with a thick stubble only a couple of hours after shaving. He smelled like a goat much of the time, as did we all, but the goatishness of his smell was on a greater scale than any of the rest of us could manage even after days of furious fighting in the trenches. In the trenches, what you smell is in this order: corpses, cordite, shit, piss, sweat. After a couple of days in action, Fikret’s smell came in between the cordite and the shit.

What was good about Fikret was the honesty of his badness. To begin
with he was always in trouble. He told the imam that he didn’t give a shit about God, and he didn’t give a shit if the war was holy or not, because all that mattered was that it needed fighting, and all of us were outraged by what he said, and the imam reported him so that he was in trouble for conduct likely to demoralise his comrades and undermine the state. He was given extra labour fatigues, and he said afterwards, “I don’t give a shit; I am from Pera.” If Lieutenant Orhan had not intervened, I think he would have been shot. Lieutenant Orhan told him to keep his opinions to himself, and fortunately he had more respect for the lieutenant than he did for the imam or even God Himself, so he confined himself to all the other topics he didn’t give a shit about.

Fikret was dependably foul-mouthed as well. If you asked him where to put something, or if he knew where someone was, he would always reply, “Up your mother’s cunt.” Normally anyone who said this would expect to get a knife in the throat, but he would say it in a very friendly manner, just as if he were being genuinely helpful, and in any case soldiers quickly adapt to the worst behaviour of their friends. “I am from Pera, so I don’t give a shit” became the slogan of all of us, even though Fikret was the only one who was really from Pera, and soon even the most pious of us was replying “Up your mother’s cunt” when anyone asked where anything was. To this day I still have to catch myself out, and prevent myself from saying it.

Fikret liked to put on the appearance of being very lazy and apathetic, but when there was something to be done he worked very methodically. He didn’t work fast, but he never needed a rest. He always fought at my side, and we looked out for each other. I don’t know why this happened, because there was no reason for us to be friends.

I first got to know him because he showed me how to delouse my clothing. It didn’t get washed very often anyway, but even a good washing does not kill the lice. One day when I was itching, Fikret told me to take off my uniform, and not be modest about it, because no one has to be modest in the presence of lice. We sat in the sun and he showed me how to get the lice out of the seams of the uniform, and crack them with the thumbnail against the side of the first finger. Fikret knew a lot about lice, because he said the louse was the number-one animal in Pera. There are three kinds of lice. One of them is the parting keepsake of a whore, one is on the head, so that you have to shave it, and the third is the kind that puts pinpricks in your armpits and thighs and belly, and makes you itch so much that you scratch its shit into your skin with your dirty nails, and that’s how you
make yourself ill. It is worse if you are hairy, because the eggs are laid on to the hairs. At Çanakkale we had lice in two sizes, and they were grey or white, unless they were purple from drinking blood. When we went for our relief days behind the lines, we always deloused, except for the kind of ignorant peasant who has always had them anyway. When I first made friends with Fikret, he took my jacket and showed me how to search through the seams, looking on both sides. Up until then I had avoided him, because the things he said were shocking to me, but it was this concern of his about my lice that made me realise that he was not entirely a bad man.

One day when we were behind the lines at the resting point, Lieutenant Orhan came up to me and ordered me to put my shirt on an anthill that was nearby. I didn’t dare to question the order, and so I did it, and a few hours later Lieutenant Orhan returned, and he picked up the shirt carefully, and shook all the ants off, and he showed the shirt to me, and he said, “Just as I thought. Check this shirt for lice, Abdul Nefer.” There weren’t any lice at all. It turned out that he had been watching the Franks through his binoculars, and had seen them doing this trick with anthills. I don’t know if the ants eat the lice, or kill them, or just drive them away, but my hint for all soldiers who try this is to make sure you get all the ants off before you put the shirt on, because the sting of an ant is very much more painful than the bite of a louse. I also advise all soldiers never to put up their head suddenly over the parapet of a trench, because the sudden movement attracts attention. Always put your head up as slowly as you can possibly manage, even though this takes a lot of nerve. My advice to snipers is that you can cause machine-gun emplacements to collapse by careful shooting. What you do is stitch a row of shots side by side vertically down the sides of the supporting sandbags. This causes the bags to break in half and lose their sand, and the emplacements can sometimes collapse quite suddenly. You do this mainly for entertainment, and the enemy always rebuilds the emplacement during the night.

One day Fikret had the idea that we should collect all our lice into tins, without killing them, and toss these tins into the Frankish trenches. We had the opportunity to do this, because our trenches at one time were only five paces apart. We were laughing about this, when we heard a Frank shouting, “Hey, Abdul,” and the tin came back with a turd in it. The Franks always called us “Abdul,” which was strange to me, as it is my real name and Karatavuk is only a nickname, and sometimes they threw over chocolate, which I had never had before and which I liked a great deal, and we would throw back sweets and cigarettes, which were much better than
theirs, and sometimes grapes. We shouted “Haydi, Johnny” when we threw things. The Franks were living off small round hard pieces of unleavened bread that were called biscuit, and also a kind of meat in tins that was called bully beef. After a time they were fed up with eating it, and they would throw it into our trenches. One time I was hit on the head by a can and I had a big bruise. We opened the tins with our bayonets. There came a time when we were fed up with eating it ourselves, because in the hot weather the fat in it melted and it poured out of the tin like slime, and we got Lieutenant Orhan to write a note in French and we tied it to a can and we threw the can back. The note said: “No more bully beef, please, but milk yes.” As for us, when we were in the trench we lived on bulghur wheat and olives and bits of bread. The Franks were lucky, because Greek traders arrived and set up stalls on their beaches, and didn’t care about the shrapnel shells bursting all around them. We had very few Greek traders coming to us, because we had no money anyway. This trading with the Franks made many of us hate the Greeks, because we were sure that many of them were from Ottoman lands. Greeks will trade with anyone, even the murderers of their own mothers.

People would be surprised if they knew that we and the Franks threw each other gifts, as well as bombs. It came about because we got to know our enemies. To begin with we did not take prisoners at all. We hated them, and they hated us, and we bayoneted them because the extra merit in killing infidels would get us to paradise more easily. Lieutenant Orhan always told us not to kill prisoners or the wounded, because they might have useful information, and, in addition, troops who know they will be killed are much less inclined to surrender, but sometimes we killed them anyway when he wasn’t looking or when the killing lust was up.

There comes a time when you are satiated with killing, however, and you get lazy about it, and it starts to disgust you. You look into the eyes of the enemy and you don’t see an infidel any more, and there is no more hatred. In any case, something happened that changed everything.

It was early on in the campaign, no more than a month after the beginning. The days were getting hot, but the nights were still very cold. We were facing the Franks who were called Australian and New Zealander. They were tall and proud men who fought as fiercely as the little men called Gurkhas, and they had fought their way up a steep slope from the beach, and we couldn’t dislodge them from the gullies. Later we found that the best way to destroy them was to let them attack. Generally, they were very big indeed and made easy targets. They would be uncontrollably
enthusiastic and they would carry on too far, and then we could isolate them in little groups, and slaughter them. We found out that they called themselves Anzac, which was very puzzling to us. When the weather grew hot these soldiers fought only in their boots and shorts, and their bodies grew dark, and they had tattoos on their bodies which were pictures of monsters, and women with almost no clothes on. They had a strange war cry which was “Imshi yallah” and we thought it was perhaps “inshallah” in their language.

We put in the biggest attack that it is possible to imagine. We were 40,000 and we attacked them at dawn. We were so closely packed and there were so many of us, that every bullet must have killed several men. I think that most people do not know that bullets normally go right through a body. I was fighting with Fikret at my side, and I could smell him. The Franks had many machine guns that cut us down like grass.

By midday 10,000 of us were dead, and I doubt if we killed many of the Franks. The attack was called off, and Fikret and I crawled back to our trench.

By the next noonday, the stink of the 10,000 in the hot sun was so bad that we couldn’t bear it. It was sweet and loathsome. What was worse was that none of the wounded had been collected, and they were dying of thirst and agony, crying out and whimpering between the lines. Fikret wept to hear it, and all of us were utterly grief-stricken by it, because the pity had risen up in our hearts. We were saying to God, “Please let there be a ceasefire.”

From the Frankish trench a Red Cross flag was sent up, and we had a burst of hope. But straight away one of our snipers shot the flag down, and the hope sank. But then Lieutenant Orhan said, “Wish me luck,” and climbed out of the trench. He ran out towards the enemy with his hands raised, and quickly our own men raised the Red Crescent flag. Lieutenant Orhan had gone to apologise to the Franks for the shooting down of the Red Cross flag.

We came out of the trenches with our stretchers, and collected the wounded, working alongside the Australian and New Zealander Franks. They nodded to us and looked down from their great height, and said, “Good day, Abdul.” It was strange to be working peacefully at a merciful task alongside those who had been killing us. Some of us swapped badges and cigarettes with the Franks.

It was arranged that the dead would be buried four days later, by which time the air was so vile that it was making us vomit. Our chief prayer after
such battles was for the wind to blow westward and let the stench carry over the enemy’s lines instead of our own.

It was when we were burying the dead that everything changed between us and the Australian and New Zealander Franks. The British Franks sent a special officer who spoke Turkish and Arabic, and his name was Honourable Herbert. This officer was the only one who could coordinate what all of us were doing, and so we Turks took orders from him, and so did the Australian and New Zealander Franks. Honourable Herbert gave us receipts for money and other things that were found on the dead.

I will tell you about the dead. There had been fighting for one month, and the dead had never been collected. The bodies were of different ages, and so they were all in different stages of decomposition. Some bodies were swollen up, and some were black, and they were seething with maggots, and others were turning to green slime, and others were fully rotted and shrivelling up so that the bones stuck out through the skin. A lot of them were built into the parapets and fortifications, so that you might say they were being employed as sandbags. Most of the dead at that time were ours.