Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  Rustem Bey nodded seriously.

  “So wrongdoing must be understood by standing it against righteousness,” explained Abdulhamid, holding out his hands, “like right against left.” He turned one hand over and then the other.

  He paused to take note of whether Rustem Bey was still with him. “Righteousness is good morality, but it is also that about which the soul feels tranquil and the heart feels tranquil. This is what the Prophet said to Wabisa ibn Mabad.

  “As for wrongdoing, Nawwas ibn Saman said that he overheard the Prophet saying that wrongdoing is that which wavers in the soul and which you dislike people finding out about, and Wabisa ibn Mabad said that he heard the Prophet say that wrongdoing is that which wavers in the soul and moves to and fro in the breast, even though people again and again have given you their legal opinion in its favour.

  “Both of these traditions came from imams with a good chain of authorities, one from Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal, and the other from Imam ad-Darimi, may God be pleased with them both, so no doubt these things are what was said by the Prophet, peace be upon him.”

  Abdulhamid, initially pleased by this impressive display of erudition, then looked Rustem Bey in the face and saw the trouble and distress in his dark eyes. He placed his hand on the aga’s forearm, shook it gently, and in a voice full of compassion enquired, “Rustem Beyefendi, do you feel a wavering in your soul? Let us say, even though everyone agrees you were in the right?”

  Rustem Bey looked away, as if expecting something to appear on the horizon, and then cast his eyes down to the ground, scuffing at a stone with the toe of his boot. He hung his head, and said, “I feel a terrible wavering in my soul.”

  CHAPTER 49

  Mustafa Kemal (11)

  It is November 1913, and it is the first time that Mustafa Kemal has lived in a European capital, and he is enchanted. In Sofia there are wide boulevards, and parks. Life is orderly, there are dinners and salons, there is sparkling conversation with intelligent and cultivated ladies. Sofia is like Vienna on a more intimate scale.

  It takes time for Mustafa Kemal to adapt. He has to learn to become a European, he has to acquire the nuances of manners, he has to bring himself to make small talk, he has to drink his alcohol with a little less virile gusto. He becomes adept at the tango and the waltz, and the ladies find him intriguingly attractive. He goes to the opera, is introduced to King “Foxy” Ferdinand, and afterwards, enthused by the opera rather than the monarch, is too excited to go to sleep.

  He writes frequently to Corinne, sometimes in clumsy French, and sometimes in Turkish written in Roman letters. He likes to assure her that there are no beautiful or attractive women that have caught his attention.

  He has the Justice Minister to dinner, and this leads to a dinner with his erstwhile enemy, the Bulgarian Minister of War, General Kovatchev, who had fought against Kemal in the second Balkan War. He and Kemal become close friends, and talk the nights away in reminiscence and in discussion of military affairs. The general has a pretty daughter, Dimitrina, and Kemal begins to notice her.

  The general is Kemal’s entrée to high society, and soon he is courted by everyone who is anyone. He becomes an habitué of the drawing room of Sultana Ratcho Petrova, Sofia’s most sought-after hostess. He receives the congratulations of King Ferdinand for having the best fancy-dress outfit at a masked ball. He has sent an orderly away to Istanbul to borrow a janizary uniform from a museum. He has the spectacular headdress, and a sword that sparkles with jewels, and he is a sensation. The King gives him a silver cigarette case. Years later, when Ferdinand’s foxiness has run out, and he is in exile, Mustafa Kemal will remember the compliment, and send him a gold one.

  Mustafa Kemal tours Bulgaria to see for himself how the Turkish minority lives. He is surprised but gratified to find them running businesses and industries, becoming rich by their own efforts, sending their children to schools where there are proper curricula, and not merely the recitation of the Koran in Arabic. The women are unveiled. Mustafa Kemal becomes ever clearer about what he wants for Turkey. He attends the Bulgarian parliament in order to witness the modern practice of politics. He involves himself with more or less clandestine projects involving the Turkish community. However, the most impressive thing is how far the ordinary Bulgarians have advanced in the few years since they threw off the Ottoman yoke. Once upon a time they were regarded as savages, but now they have forged ahead.

  Kemal is disappointed in love, perhaps, but only he and Dimitrina know the truth. Perhaps he has fallen for her, this pretty daughter of his friend General Kovatchev. He dances with her all night at a ball, and they talk of music. Then he speaks passionately to her of his ambitions for Turkey, of how women will be unveiled, about how their marriages will no longer be an enslavement, of how they will become as captivating and free and educated as Dimitrina herself. It is said that Mustafa Kemal sounds out how the general would feel about a proposal of marriage, and is discouraged. The general pointedly but politely refuses an invitation to a ball at the embassy. In any case, Mustafa Kemal will never see the sweet Dimitrina again, though equally she will never forget him.

  Enver and his companions are enjoying the salad days of power, and they are doing unexpectedly well. Enver has been promoted from major to colonel to brigadier within nineteen days, and he has ousted the War Minister and taken his place. “It is impossible!” exclaims the Sultan. “He is much too young.” With marvellous energy Enver is reforming the armed services, allegedly purging the old-fashioned ignorant time-servers among the officer corps, but apparently sacking every influential officer equal to or above his own rank. Enver gives over the reform of the army to the Germans, and General Liman von Sanders arrives with a large number of officers who will take control of all sorts of vital commands. The Germans find that the Ottoman soldiers are barefoot and in rags, that their destitute families have to eat in military canteens, that there is no care for the men on the part of the officers, that military hospitals are squalid, and that the horses and mules are sick and useless. Von Sanders and his men set about their Herculean task, and all goes well.

  Only hindsight will reveal what a catastrophe this dependence on Germany will bring in its train. The Archduke Ferdinand has been assassinated in Sarajevo, and now Enver and an inner cabal of the Cabinet have agreed on a secret treaty with Germany, with the intention of presenting a united front against Russia, the eternal enemy and arch-devil. All attempts to seek assistance and assurances from Great Britain and France have failed, and the Germans had seemed the obvious last resort. Enver keeps the Great Powers in the dark about his agreement, until he is ready to take the offensive.

  Mustafa Kemal thinks that the Germans will probably not win, and in any case he mistrusts them. He sees great danger coming from the Bulgarians, who have allied with Austria and still have dreams of a Greater Bulgaria. Enver, however, is enthusiastic and impulsive. By means of public subscription the empire has commissioned two battleships from the British, and the British are withholding them because Churchill has not been deceived about Enver’s intentions as war breaks out. The Ottoman public is outraged and two German battleships synchronicitously turn up, having gallantly run the gauntlet of the British fleet. The Germans generously, but not entirely disinterestedly, sell the ships to Enver, the sailors exchange their caps for fezzes, and Germany becomes ever more popular with the Turkish people.

  Enver is convinced that he can get the entire Muslim world behind him by playing the Islamic card, thus disabling much of the Russian, British and French empires. Unfortunately the Kaiser believes the same thing. Enver thinks that a war might be a very fine and profitable enterprise, and so, without telling anyone else, he arranges for the two new battleships plus the valiant old Hamidiye to enter the Black Sea. In his pocket the German admiral has a secret order, which states: “The Turkish fleet should gain mastery of the Black Sea by force. Seek out the Russian fleet, and attack her wherever you find her, without declaration of war.” They bombard the Ru
ssian ports of Odessa, Novorossik and Sevastopol, and sink some Russian warships.

  Enver’s colleagues are appalled and amazed by what he has done behind their backs. The Grand Vizier tries to resign, but the Sultan begs him to remain so that he has at least one reliable person in the government who is not insane. He and the Sultan are weeping together when the French and British ambassadors arrive to request their passports.

  Thanks to Enver’s idiotic adventurism the Ottoman Empire is now at war with Russia, which is at war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. As if this were not bad enough, because Russia herself has allies, the Ottoman Empire is now at war with Britain and France as well. The reluctant Sultan, who also has the misfortune to be the head of the Muslim world, is persuaded to declare the war a holy one. This he does in the great hall of the Topkapi Palace where the relics of the Prophet are kept. It is expected that the declaration of jihad will be received with much public enthusiasm, but in this case the empire is inexplicably siding with some Christian countries against some other Christian countries, and not many Muslims can make any sense of it. The Arabs in particular will prove disloyal and useless. At the Battle of Shuaiba they will hold back from the fight so that they can pillage whichever side is the loser, causing their Turkish commander to shoot himself in his disillusionment, anger and despair.

  Enver tells Mustafa Kemal to stay in Sofia, and Kemal is frustrated. He thinks that the war is a foolish one because it has no military object, but he still wants to be in it. He sets about trying to ensure that Bulgaria will come in on the side of the empire, but he chafes in his exile. He writes to Enver demanding to know whether the latter considers him an incompetent soldier, and he even considers leaving his post and enlisting as a private soldier, but, just in time, he is finally summoned home to be commander of the 19th Division.

  CHAPTER 50

  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. T
he 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.