Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  All this time some of my comrades had been standing watching, because there is a fascination in these things, and for the ones who see the dead and wounded there is always the thought that is secretly in their head, which is “Thank God it wasn’t me.” One of them kept saying, “Be strong, Fikret, God’s the boss,” and then finally Fikret just looked at him, and you could tell that Fikret’s look was saying “Go and fuck your mother’s cunt,” and so the soldier shut up.

  Fikret said, “I would like a cigarette,” but mine were all finished, and no one else had one either, and the imam wouldn’t give me any, so I went to the officer, who was not Orhan, because Orhan had been killed some time before. This officer was a Turk from Bosnia, and he was good, and he had a Bosnian accent. I said to him, “Permission to speak, sir,” and he said, “What is it, Abdul Nefer?” and I said, “Fikret Nefer has had his arm shot off, and he has requested a cigarette, sir.”

  So the officer took out his silver cigarette case, which he had taken from a dead Frankish officer along with his watch, and he gave me not one, but five cigarettes. He said, “If Fikret Nefer dies before he finishes them, please return the surplus ones to me.”

  I saluted him and he saluted back, and I took the cigarettes to Fikret and laid them on his left side where he could pick them up.

  When Fikret started to smoke, he proved that his character had not changed, because he blew out the first puff, and said, “By God, that’s almost as good as a cunt.”

  “We should get you to the field hospital,” I said, and he blew out more smoke and replied, “No. This is it.” He smoked some more, and said, “Why are you weeping, stupid son of a bitch?” and I didn’t know till then that I was weeping.

  I sat beside him as he smoked, first one cigarette, and then two, and by the third cigarette his head was beginning to fall and his eyes to close. I put my head close to his face, and he said, “This time I’m really fucked. I’ve got no blood left.”

  He managed to smoke another cigarette, but mostly it smouldered between his fingers. When I realised he was truly dying, I was seized by a certain curiosity, and I said, “Fikret, Fikret, can you see the green birds?”

  Very slowly and quietly and sadly he said, “There are no green birds.”

  I wanted to say something light, so I said, “Will you send me your spare virgins?” and he smiled a very little and shook his head to say no, and then he sighed very deeply and died. I took his cigarette from between his fingers and finished it for him. I looked at him, and saw how beaten down he was. His uniform was patched with pieces of hessian taken from sandbags, and his boots were different sizes because they had been taken from different corpses. He looked like a beggar. For a long time I looked at the profile of his face, the Arab nose, the loose lower lip, and felt a coldness coming over me. I was shocked by how little I felt, by how quickly I got bored sitting next to his corpse and wanted to do something else. It was only later that the grief began to trickle out of my hidden heart and into my veins, when I remembered the conversations that we had for many hours on many nights under the stars, when we discussed everything that there was to discuss, and we talked of our homes and our memories, and the plans, and he would say, “Now you describe every olive tree in your home town, and then I will describe every Greek harlot and every Greek café in Pera,” and that’s what we did, until we had talked about everything that ever was, and we smoked and laughed and talked of coarse things the way that soldiers do, and in the daytime we set up little battles between, say, a scorpion and an ant-lion, or an ant-lion and a beetle, and he would support one insect and I would support the other, and we would be crouching down in the stones cheering our insect on, and we would do a little dance of triumph if our insect won, and we’d never felt so careless in our lives.

  I took Fikret’s ammunition, and with it I killed fifteen Franks over the next few days, but just then, for the sake of something to do, I took the spare cigarette back to the officer, but he glanced at the blood on it and said, “Smoke it yourself, Abdul Nefer,” so I took it, and I sat next to Fikret, whose head had dropped to his chest, and I leaned up against him, and I smoked the cigarette, thinking about the great preciousness of tobacco, with his blood congealing and darkening on my bayonet and on my hands, and the field guns falling silent, and the corpse flies buzzing and diving.

  * “Ilik” means “delicious” in Turkish.

  CHAPTER 68

  Mustafa Kemal (15)

  When the botched Allied attack occurs, Kemal is given charge of six divisions, and he is elated, partly because Destiny has finally agreed with his assessment of himself as a man thereof, but mainly because he no longer has to stay in one place where the stench of corpses has become overwhelming. The attack gives him some fresh air for a change. He has not slept for three nights, but he rides about from place to place, upbraiding lazy or incompetent commanders, and assuming control in all areas. Fortunately, the Allied attack is a miserable fiasco, and their troops perish in the fires among the scrubland or are cut down by Kemal’s sharpshooters. Kemal displays his normal foolhardy courage, and does not even leave the track when an enemy aircraft bears down upon him and his mounted group of officers. After two divisional commanders are killed, and armed with a whip, he personally leads the dawn attack on the high ground of Çonk Bayiri, which has tantalised the Allies from the start, and which now they have finally attained. A ball of shrapnel smacks into his chest, but his heart is saved by a watch in his breast pocket. Later on he will give this watch to Liman von Sanders as a souvenir, and the latter will give him a gold watch in return, engraved with the von Sanders coat of arms. Mustafa Kemal will have a huge and painful bruise on his chest for weeks after the Allies are driven off the crucial peak. Mustafa Kemal’s dawn attack works, and the exhausted British soldiers are overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Up on the hill the Ottoman troops are subjected to an apocalyptic bombardment by the British navy, and the ground erupts into crater and flame, but all the Allied assaults are beaten off, and trench warfare predictably establishes itself on the new front. Kemal’s extraordinary luck and his rigid disregard for personal safety continue to burnish his legend among the troops.

  Squabbling in the high command resumes with the same predictability as trench warfare, as the Germans tighten their control over essential commands. Mustafa Kemal continues to suffer severe attacks of malaria and, coincidentally, the Allied commander, Sir Ian Hamilton, continues to go down with debilitating attacks of dysentery. Kemal becomes extremely bad-tempered, and is insulted once again by Enver Pasha, who fails to visit him on an official tour. Kemal resigns all over again, and resists all blandishments to make him change his mind. It is entirely possible that he is really angling to go and fight on the new fronts opened up by Bulgaria’s opportunistic entry into the war on the German side. Kemal’s hopes of going to Macedonia are confounded, however, by an appointment to go and command the armies in Mesopotamia, where the British have occupied Kut during a shambolic campaign that appears to have no precise objective. Ibrahim the Goatherd, exhausted in limb and spirit, is at this moment marching to confront them, his mind filled only with the desire to go home and marry Philothei at last.

  The Macedonian plan does not work out, however, and a German general takes command in Mesopotamia. Kemal stays on the Gallipoli peninsula, and resumes his personal war with anyone in authority. He refuses to accept any German officers in his sector, sending away the new commander of the 11th Division, and von Sanders agrees not to send any more of them. An Ottoman officer declines to accept an order from a German superior, and Kemal similarly refuses an order to hand him over. Liman von Sanders, highly embarrassed, sends Mustafa Kemal back to Istanbul, on “medical grounds,” and the truth is that Kemal is quite happy to go. He is indeed quite ill, and utterly weary, and he is tired of having his opinions ignored. People who know him are alarmed by his ravaged appearance. He goes to live with his mother and sister, forever exiled from their comfortable pink house in Salonika, and again he seeks
out the seductive company of Corinne Lütfü. Ten days after his departure, the Allies also leave Gallipoli, and Mustafa Kemal says that he knew they would, all along.

  It is quite likely that without Mustafa Kemal the Ottomans would have lost the campaign at Gallipoli, which would have saved the whole world a great deal of trouble. There would have been no Russian Revolution and no Cold War, and the Great War might have ended a year sooner, but Mustafa Kemal does not believe in saving anyone any trouble, and in Istanbul he continues to harass the authorities without pity.

  CHAPTER 69

  Karatavuk at Gallipoli: The End of the Campaign (8)

  As I might have told you, in places the lines were so close together that it was easy to dig saps underneath each other. Sometimes the sappers met each other in the dark and fought like rats. Sometimes the trench floor would collapse into a sap, and sometimes a dead body would fall on the sappers because of all the corpses buried in the floors of the trenches, and sometimes a sap would accidentally come out into the side of a trench, and you would sit very quietly, listening to the crunch of the spades and picks, and the voices of the miners, and as soon as a hole appeared, you said, “Haydi, Johnny,” and you threw in a grenade. If a sap was successful, a mine would go off underneath the trenches, and it would cause great damage and a big shock, and very many deaths. Mostly we and the Franks spent the time improving the trench systems, making it more and more impossible for any attacks to succeed, and we would advance our trenches underground and make a new front line until in some sectors we and the Franks were within a few paces of each other. People like me spent their time creeping about, sniping. The Franks developed a way of sniping using a special wooden frame and a periscope, so that the sniper was safe. This meant that I had to try to shoot the periscopes, and that way I never got bored. After a time I stopped climbing trees when I was sniping, because the Franks would rake each tree with machine guns quite regularly. It was also less tedious when the ducks began to migrate south, and we and the Franks shot them out of the sky by the thousand, and for once we had good meat to eat, even though it was tough, and by then our teeth were rotten and our gums were bleeding, and we all had toothache which is almost as bad as dysentery for making you unable to think. After the campaign I noticed that the following year there were no more ducks flying over at that time.

  The next big thing that happened was in the late autumn and early winter, when it suddenly seemed as if God Himself had got bored, and He threw the weather at us for four days. One evening there was a tempest of rain so violent that I have never experienced the like of it before or since. The air was solid with water, the rain fell in huge lumps, and it would have been possible for fish to swim in it. I swear there has never been rain like it anywhere. It roared like wild beasts, and it came down so swiftly that the trenches filled instantly with water, and a wall of water swept down on us, and many of us drowned, and I was only saved because a comrade scrambled out of the trench and held out his rifle, and I grasped it and he pulled me out just in time. I lay above the trench and watched it collapse in on itself, and I was as wet as if I were lying under the sea, and I saw the drowned bodies of my comrades floating past below me, and a dead mule, and old corpses that had floated up out of the floor of the trench, and old bones, and packages of supplies, and knapsacks, and I saw the water getting deeper and deeper, and we who had survived lay on the mud in the falling water, and prayed, and wondered if this was the end of the world, and we could hardly see an arm’s length in front of us, and our clothes were heavy and sticking to us, and we were as miserable as the damned, and the winds picked up ground sheets and blankets and whirled them about in the air like giant birds afflicted by madness.

  In the morning the water had subsided to a rifle’s depth, but we couldn’t go back down into the trenches, and there was nothing to eat, and we were still soaked. Fortunately the Franks had suffered the same as us, and they did not shoot as many of us as they could have.

  In the evening the wind turned round and came from the north. It didn’t often do this, and when it did the stench of corpses was carried to Çanakkale for a change. The north wind was always cold, though, and this time it was colder than I had ever known, and it began to snow. Snow is very beautiful, and I remember the story of Ali the Snowbringer, who was given that name because it snowed on the day he was born, but on this day it was so cold that the snow was not beautiful, it was like a knife stuck into the bone and twisted. After the rain it was like someone coming back to kill your father and brothers the day after he has slaughtered your mother and sisters. We huddled in the mud above the parapets of the trenches, with the snow settling on our bodies and our rifles and our equipment, shaking and trembling, our stomachs crying for something hot to eat, and I was thinking of all the times back home when we used to complain that the days were too hot in late summer, and I was thinking that if I ever got too hot again, I would praise God for it.

  It was as if God heard me and decided to play a trick, because he took the snow and multiplied it, and he took the wind and multiplied it, and he took the cold and multiplied it, and it became a blizzard. I had heard of blizzards from those who had been up in the mountains in winter, but I had never been able to imagine what it is like to have the bones aching from the inside with a pain as if they had been broken, to have the fingers immovable and without feeling, to have the jaws clattering their teeth together, and to feel the lungs hardening with every frozen breath. We did not have any winter clothing prepared, because winter had not been expected yet, and all our spare clothing was down in the trenches, buried under the mud and the snow that fell on top of it. Some people managed to light bonfires, they achieved the impossible, but what use was it when the wind whipped the heat away? When we stood in futility around the bonfires, stamping our feet and swinging our arms, the Franks did not shoot at us, nor we at them.

  I believe that the rain was worse for the Franks because they were on lower ground, and the torrent had swept through their trenches after leaving ours, but the snow and the wind and the cold were worse for us because we were on higher ground. There was nothing we could do, except huddle together. Eight men of my platoon, including myself, decided to lie in a heap together, to keep the warmth in and the cold out, and it is true that the lower you are, the less the wind is. We lay on the muddy stones, up against each other, our hands inside our clothes, the wind eating at our flesh, the snow piling up on our bodies, our mouths tasting of metal, and that way we endured until daybreak, when we discovered that, on account of our wet clothing, some of us had frozen to the ground and were unable to get up. Three of us were dead, and of the rest of us, four lost fingers and toes, and one man had to have his ears removed. I lost one toe on my left foot and I nearly lost the tips of three fingers, but I was lucky in the end, even though I have no feeling in those fingers any more. Our imam was found dead, with his knees and toes and forehead frozen to the ground in the act of prayer, and we found a sentry who had frozen to death on the firing step of the trench, clasping his rifle, upright in the correct position. Those who suffered the least bodily damage were those who had forced themselves to walk about all night, and those who suffered the most were those who had fallen with exhaustion. All of us were so wounded by the cold that we had to be withdrawn from the line, and replaced, and only two of us recovered enough to return. This was the worst calamity I have ever been through, and after being so nearly swallowed by death, I live each day in a state of surprise and wonderment. I will never forget the pain that went through me when I began to thaw out, the tingling and throbbing of it, and I would say that this pain was as bad as being frozen in the first place. The one thing about the freeze that was God’s insult to us was that when our clothing unfroze after three days, the lice that had been in there all came back to life as if they had never been frozen. The one good thing was that we were able to eat the mules and donkeys that had died, and the meat was good after so many months of olives and bread and bulghur wheat.

 
One astonishing thing happened as a result of the blizzard. Afterwards there was no more dysentery. From then on, no one would be groaning with stomach cramps, shitting his life out on the latrine along with blood and slime. Afterwards the weather became beautiful again, and the sun set over Mount Athos and Samothráki as if we had never known anything but peace.

  It was not long after this that the Anzacs and the soldiers at Suvla vanished overnight. They disappeared like ghosts. They left rifles that fired at us on their own, because water or sand dripped into cans that were tied to triggers, and when the can was full, the trigger was pulled. They also left a huge mine that exploded early in the morning in a sap under the trenches where we had massacred the Australian Light Horse, and they left many traps that exploded in their trenches when we went into them. All this was an unnecessary unkindness. They blew up their stores on the beach, but there was still enough equipment left for we who remained to take two years to collect it all. This included the bully beef that neither we nor they liked very much. In their trenches some soldiers had left tricks for us, such as rum bottles filled with paraffin, but others had left meals for us, set out on plates, and they left messages for us. Obviously I couldn’t read them, but I was told that they said things like “Goodbye, Johnny Turk, thank you for respecting the Red Cross, and remember that it was us who left, it wasn’t you who pushed us out.” I have a piece of paper that is now very old and yellow, and apparently it says, “Goodbye, Abdul.”

  We half expected the British and French Franks in the south to pull out in the same way, and the spare divisions were moved there quickly from Gaba Tepe and Ariburnu, but the Franks took us by surprise all over again. There were more storms and gales, and they managed to make it seem that they were all still there, and they even repelled an attack on the night they left. On this attack we carried planks to cross the Frankish trenches with, and we had inflammable things so that we could set fire to their boats, but, I am ashamed to say, even though there had been a very long and violent bombardment, since we had new German guns supporting us, many of us refused to go forward, and the officers started to beat us with the flats of their sabres, and our cries of “Allah, Allah” dried on our lips, and the Franks mowed us down where we stood paralysed above the parapets of our trenches. This also happened on another occasion, about a month before. I have often thought about this, and wondered why it happened, but the truth is that for months we had lived off little but olives and bread, we had frozen in ice and cooked in the sun, we had marched back and forth, back and forth, we had finally heard enough about martyrdom, we had faced death and agony unnumbered times, we had been treated like slaves and dogs, we had been beaten and shouted at, and finally we were too weary to throw ourselves once more into the hailstorms of singing bullets and the thorn-thickets of sharpened bayonets. We were worn out and we wouldn’t go on. What upsets me now when I remember this is the dishonour that we brought upon ourselves in the eyes of the Frankish soldiers who saw it. I also know that many of our men had been deserting, and crawling over to the Frankish lines to give themselves up. Nobody needs that kind of man anyway, and their dishonour makes them contemptible, and I don’t think of them as Turks. I expect they were Armenians, or Arabs or Bosnians, but not Turks.