Birds Without Wings (71 page)

Venizelos has been warned that if he goes to war with Turkey he will get no support, but now he offers a division to help out the British, and in return he gets permission for a concerted action in the region of Smyrna.
He takes this as carte blanche to undertake a full-scale invasion, convinced that ultimately the British will support him and hoping to establish a fait accompli. Greek troops advance beyond the boundary laid down for them, and move east and north. They occupy the Aegean coast, and the southern coast of Marmara. The Turkish troops are away, suppressing rebellions elsewhere. The Greeks take Bursa and advance two hundred miles to Uşak. Far away in eastern Thrace they overrun the Ottoman garrisons, and occupy Adrianople. In Ankara, Kemal reacts to the anger of the assembly by declaring a jihad. A turbulent Circassian warlord is dispatched against the Greeks, and his irregular forces drive the Greeks from Demirici.

There is an anti-nationalist rebellion in Konya, the centre of Islamic orthodoxy. Kurdish nationalists in the south-east rise in rebellion, but are incapable of cooperating with each other. Kemal suppresses them. The Allies force the desperate Sultan to accede to a treaty at Sèvres in which he agrees to the total dismemberment of his kingdom. In order to be legal, however, the treaty has to be ratified by the Ottoman parliament, which no longer exists. It is obvious to everyone in Istanbul, including the Sultan, that the nationalists are the sole hope for Turkey, and all official action against them ceases.

Kemal has to deal with the east before he can deal with the Greeks in the west. The Soviets take Azerbaijan, and it looks as though they will take Armenia, where the Armenians have driven out the Muslims and the army is controlled by officers from the old Tsarist army.

Kemal needs to take advantage of both the Soviets and the British by pretending to be going along with them. He starts his own Bolshevik party and, much to their surprise, appoints his own friends to its offices. No communist activity is permitted except under its auspices. Simultaneously, he forestalls Soviet ambitions in Armenia by unleashing Kâzim Karabekir, who takes Kars. Two thousand Armenian troops are killed, and only nine Turkish. Ultimately, Karabekir pushes the Armenians beyond Mount Ararat, their sacred mountain, and a treaty is signed that fixes the border at the place where it still stands. Soon the remainder of Armenia will be taken by the Bolsheviks and it will sink into unendurable twilight behind the Iron Curtain, with its holy mountain in sight, but heartbreakingly out of reach. President Wilson’s arbitration concerning the extent of Armenia, issued four days later, is made ridiculous by these events, and remains unpublished. Turkish and Soviet borders now coincide, and it is considerably easier for Kemal to get his weapons, gold and medical supplies.

In the south, in Cilicia, Kemal’s men confront the French, often with great success. There is one incident when the French commander is deluded into thinking that he faces 15,000 troops, and so he surrenders five hundred soldiers to a little band of villagers armed with bird guns. The French are really interested in holding on to Syria, and they wait to see how the Kemalists will fare against the Greeks.

Before he can engage the Hellenic invaders, Kemal neutralises the bands of irregulars who are a law unto themselves, disobeying orders, taking independent action and making strategy difficult. He brings the adorable Fikriye from Istanbul to be his companion. She is twenty-three years old, a good musician, she is not in good health, but she is ladylike and uncomplaining. For the time being Mustafa Kemal remains happily unmarried to her.

It is at this point that Fritz and Moritz accidentally change the course of history.

CHAPTER 81

Fritz and Moritz Accidentally Change History

King Alexander is as handsome as a film star. He is honest-eyed and elegant. Enhanced by a military moustache, and arrayed in his military uniforms, he gazes humorously out of old photographs looking exactly like those poorly remembered great-uncles who were killed in some time-lost war, leaving behind them their fiancées, no doubt, and motorcycles that remain in the garden shed for seventeen years. It is 17 September 1920, and Greece is at war with the Ottoman Turks, taking advantage of their postwar weakness in the hope of regaining anciently Greek Constantinople and the western parts of Anatolia. Prime Minister Venizelos, ambitious on his own account, and ill-advised by the irrepressibly unwise Lloyd George, has freshly ordered the Greek army to move out of its positions in Smyrna. Included in the improvised Turkish army that faces them are Ibrahim and Karatavuk, two unfortunate nobodies in these great imperial games. The Greek attempt to expand their territory eastwards will be as disastrous as Enver Pasha’s attempts to achieve the same thing for the Ottomans during the Great War, but in the week of the young King’s death that particular nemesis is yet a long way off, and all the old dreams of the Greeks are intact. At the same time, the Turks are beginning to nurture the vision of a brand new land that will rise full-fledged out of the embers of the old empire.

King Alexander is about to die, and he will leave behind one and a half wives. His first wife is Greece, whom he loves, and his second wife is Aspasia, an upper-class Greek who is as beautiful as he is. He married her morganatically earlier in the year, against his parents’ wishes, and the state will not recognise the marriage as legitimate until two years after his death. At this moment Aspasia is five months pregnant with a child whose sex will preclude it from inheriting the throne. The child is destined to marry King Peter of Serbia, in 1944, confirming our suspicion that there is something
ineluctably and essentially tragic about being born to the blood royal. King Alexander has married Aspasia because he loves her, and anyway, he notes sourly, if he had followed his parents’ wishes and married a foreign princess, it would have made foreign policy that much more complicated to determine, since his wife would undoubtedly have wished to interfere.

King Alexander is twenty-seven years old. He is charismatic, he is high-spirited, and the war with Turkey has not yet gone disastrously wrong. Greece is warmly supported by Great Britain, who greatly approves of the new King, even though she violently disliked and distrusted his father, now exiled and deposed.

The King gets up early and exercises in his gymnasium on a day when autumn hovers at the far edge of the horizon, and the birds are still singing. He throws a ball for his favourite dog, the German shepherd, the faithful and impulsive Fritz. Not only does he love his dog, but he is also cathartically in love with the internal combustion engine, like so many young men before and since, and today he is intending to ride his motorcycle in the grounds of the Tatoi Palace, accompanied by his hounds. He has an entire morning free, but at one o’clock he is due for lunch in Kifissia with Aspasia and his friend Zalokostas.

He rides with the dogs barking behind him, and revels in the speed of his machine. He reflects on the unfortunate fact that just recently Fritz accidentally cracked a mirror, and feels a shiver at ill fortune’s apprehension. He recalls that (worse by far) he and Aspasia were yesterday on a British warship when the captain had lit all three of their cigarettes from one match. “One of us three will die,” thinks the King, with unanticipated bitterness, and he remembers saying to Aspasia, “It would have been better if the ship had sunk.”

(With the first flame of a match Charos the Huntsman, Charos dressed in black, Charos with the black horse, knows you are present, with the second he takes aim and cocks the gun, and with the third he fires.)

The King rides his motorcycle in the woods, and in the fields where the grapes are grown for Dekeleia wine. His brother Prince Christopher describes him as the unhappiest man in Greece, because he is lonely, his family is in exile, and he agonises about the legitimacy of his reign when his father has not even renounced the throne. He does not know whether he is a king or a regent, but he does know that his elder brother, George, has a better claim than he does. He wants to forget the pro- and anti-Venizelist factions that bedevil his reign, he is frustrated by his powerlessness, he worries about the progress of the new war. For a king, hope has
fewer feathers than for anyone else on earth. The dogs bark, and the motorcycle coughs. He plays with the advance and retard lever to get a better spark.

He is nearing the home of the palace vet, Herr Sturm, and remembers that Sturm has many interesting foreign magazines full of information about the latest cars. The temptation is too great, he simply must go and see if there are any new magazines, but he realises at the same time that he has managed to lose Fritz. He dismounts and calls to the dog, walking towards the villa of the vet.

Where is Fritz? The monarch calls to him, but he does not appear. The pines ring with the clear voice of the King.

Suddenly King Alexander hears barking and screaming. He breaks into a run, and finds his dog in a frenzy, attempting to devour a Barbary ape that is tied to a chain near the house of the vet. According to one account, the two Barbary apes which concern us were presented by Prince Christopher to a tavern owner who gave them to the vet. According to Prince Christopher, however, the apes belonged to a vineyard keeper whose vineyard the King happened to be passing. Thus is the impossibility of historical accuracy neatly exemplified, and one can only be certain that the grapes of the vineyard, if it was really a vineyard, and if it was really there, and if the King was really passing it, would have been producing grapes for Dekeleia wine, since in that area no other kind of grape was grown.

What is also certain is that the Barbary ape is fast, courageous, clever, and well toothed. It is the only ape that is native to Europe, so it is perhaps a comfort that the King is not to be killed by an outright outsider, from Africa perhaps, or South America.

Valiantly the young King intervenes, grabbing at the two animals in order to separate them. Unfortunately, the ape is a female, and her mate, Moritz, is nearby. Moritz gallantly hastens to defend his beloved, and charges up, shrieking. He sinks his teeth into the left calf of the King, allegorically re-enacting the fate of many a monarch at the hands and teeth of his people, and begins to savage it.

Alexander attempts to fend off the infuriated Moritz, and is bitten on the hand, at which point Sturm appears, and the four combatants are shortly separated with Teutonic firmness.

The King is in great pain, and he is helped, bleeding, into the palace, where he telephones his friend Stefanos Metaxas, saying that it is nothing serious, but asking him to bring a doctor and some bandages. He decides that there should be no publicity about the event, because he wishes to
avoid ridicule. Metaxas assumes that his friend must have tumbled from his motorcycle, and calls the eminent physician Constantinos Mermingas, instructing him to bring equipment for a broken leg. In the meantime, Alexander calls his beloved Aspasia, asking her to come to the palace.

Dr. Mermingas lays aside the splints and plaster that he has brought in vain, examines the wound, and finds that there are seven bites, with a particularly deep one at the centre. He considers the wounds to be ghastly, but not necessarily serious. He washes the wounds in alcohol, and then asks for petrol. There is none in the palace, and so Stefanos Metaxas goes outside and drains some from his car, bringing it back carefully in a bowl. The doctor declares that the muscle of the calf has been completely crushed, and he washes it in the petrol and then daubs it with iodine. One winces at the thought of the stinging pains that the King must have had to endure. Dr. Mermingas binds the wound with bandages.

Aspasia arrives with Zalokostas, with whom they had intended to take lunch, and Zalokostas tries to comfort her. She is superstitious, and she remembers with dread the lighting of the three cigarettes on the British warship. King Alexander calms her, repeating that he wishes to avoid publicity, for it is beneath the dignity of a king to have been bitten in a battle with an ape.

The King passes a bad night but feels reasonably well upon the morrow. The doctor changes the bandages and finds the wound to be inflamed. He looks for pus, finding none, but nonetheless advises the King to cancel his appointments.

After three nights the King’s temperature has reached thirty-nine degrees, but there is still no pus.

After five nights there is a great quantity of pus, and the government begins to worry. Prime Minister Venizelos, who has devoted his entire political career to attempting to frustrate the monarchy and wrest its power away, is particularly concerned. He is, after all, very fond of this king, even though he was responsible for the spectacular fall of his father, the ill-fated King Constantine. It is impossible not to be fond of the handsome young man, even if you are a republican. Venizelos orders the creation of a council of eight doctors, thus unsagely yielding to the politician’s inveterate propensity to create committees that are paralysed by the clamour of dissent and the dead hand of caution.