Blood-Dark Track

by Joseph O'Neill

  Having constructed this cold-hearted polemic, I recoiled from it. Although its final proposition rang true, taken as a whole it was clearly specious, not least because it appeared to sanction, say, the massacre of a classroom of schoolchildren as a mechanism of political complaint; and every moral intuition I possessed told me that was surely wrong. In any event, the polemic was a red herring: for Admiral Somerville was almost certainly killed by people who thought he deserved to die. What I still didn’t fully understand was why they thought this – or why they thought that killing him would be politically productive.

  However, to return to Mrs Salter-Townshend’s point, did any of this matter any more? A palpable change in the political culture in Ireland suggested that it did not. Irish nationalism had entered a phase in which even the republican wing of the movement increasingly recognized the distinction between improving the lot of northern nationalists and unifying the island. It was more noticeable than ever that, with the progress of the peace process – i.e., the 1994 and 1997 ceasefires, the IRA’s agreement to the ‘Mitchell principles’ of non-violence, the all-party talks, and finally the Good Friday agreement – people in the Republic felt increasingly able to take an interest in the bloodshed of Irish history as a kind of entertainment, and anguished and bitter scrutiny of this or that unpleasant incident suddenly seemed misplaced and old hat. As old tensions disappeared, I wondered if it wasn’t a hard reality of certain kinds of political change that, after a point, certain victims and injustices were best forgotten about; and if, perhaps, the healthiest thing might not simply be to let Admiral Somerville rest.

  8

  The storm-blown, starving travellers landed, their mouths watering at the sight of all this wealth of food, but directly they seized a bread-fruit from the nearest tree, it passed from their hands into a shadow, and everything they met with had the same evanescent quality.… At length they met with some of the inhabitants. Like everything else in this strange country, though they appeared to be solid, they, too, were shades, and the living men passed through their forms as if there was nothing there. The shades spoke, however, and told them that this was Bulotu, the Place of Departed Souls, and they were the Tangaloa of old time, and the Souls of Eiki, their departed Chiefs. They said that no solid food, such as they needed, could be got here, for all that grew was shadow-food, the Food of the Gods, for their shadowy sustenance.…

  But Bulotu is a bourne from which no traveller may ever return for long. It is the Land of the Dead, and its air, however deliciously scented, is the air of Death, not fitted for mortal lungs. In the course of a few days after reaching Tonga, all these travellers died, and being Chiefs, went permanently to Bulotu; not as a punishment for their temerity, but as the natural consequence of once breathing that fatal atmosphere.

  – Admiral Boyle Townshend Somerville, Will Mariner

  A dana, the fourth biggest city in Turkey, sits on the inland rim of a sweltering delta largely given over to the cultivation of cotton. In 1942, the counter-espionage agent Sir Patrick Coghill found Adana ‘a deadly, absolutely one-horse town for all of its 80,000 inhabitants’, and forty years afterwards, with its population approaching one million, Adana was still looked on – at least, from the maritime, relatively cosmopolitan vantage-point of Mersin – as tedious, insular, and provincial; which was perhaps why my own interaction with the place was limited to flying into and out of its small, stifling airport. In recent times, these adverse perceptions have been challenged. Although to drive into the city is still to penetrate a spattering of industrial buildings and dreary, dimly-lit blocks of housing, with its theatre and its resident orchestra and its archaeological and ethnographical museums and its university hospital and its increasingly cherished antiquity – Hittites, Persians, Greeks and Romans were settled here, the last-mentioned building a twenty-one-arch bridge that still carries traffic across the river Seyhan – Adana is developing another image. We are now invited to see a vigorous and self-confident city that, although devout as ever – a new mosque has the tallest minaret in Turkey and a capacity close to 30,000 – is not afraid to look the west in the eye or, even, to glance at the face of its pre-Kemalist past. One aspect of this modified vision, I discovered one night in late August 1998 was the restoration of Adana’s rather magnificent three-storey station-house to its original glory. Its stones and brick had been cleaned and its red roof tiles renewed, and in the tree-lined plaza at the front of the station a shiny, vividly painted steam engine was marooned on a length of track. The installation functioned as spectacle and technological homage – who does not admire steam engines? – but, like any relic, it also gave off a spray of history which for most people no doubt fell as fine, inconsequential vapour.

  A railroad first arrived in Adana back in 1886, on the completion of the short but valuable Mersin–Adana line, which, like most of the few disjointed railways then in existence in Turkey, was wholly owned by British capitalists. In 1908, the Mersin–Adana line officially became a branch line of the Deutsche Bank-financed Baghdad Railway, which was seen by Germany’s rival powers, themselves engaged since the Crimean War in the exploitation and manipulation of the disintegrating, systemically out-dated and finally debt-crippled Ottoman Empire, as one of the most sinister features of German expansionism: for the BBB (Berlin–Byzantium– Baghdad) promised German-controlled railways from the Baltic to the Persian Gulf and German growth in Mesopotamia, Syria and Arabia. For the German public, the appeal of the drang nach Osten was entrancing. German traders ranging from travelling salesmen to infrastructural contractors followed the banking syndicates into the Ottoman Empire, and by 1898, when the Kaiser visited Istanbul, the finance and trade of the Empire, which previously had been practically exclusive to France and Great Britain, was predominantly in German hands. In order to fund the Railway – regarded by Sultan Abdul Hamid II as a crucial military transport link between the great cities of Istanbul, Izmir, Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut, Mosul and Baghdad – the Ottoman government issued guarantees which committed it to paying investors huge sums; the result was German control over the Ottoman treasury and powerful political influence over the Sultan and, after his removal from power in 1908, the Young Turk government.

  Although British influence in the Near East went back a long way – in Macbeth, Act I Scene iii, there is a reference to a sailor who’s ‘to Aleppo gone’ – it was France, as the dominant regional power, that had the most to lose from the growth of German influence. In imitation of the French imperial method, German missions and schools sprang up in the Near East to promote knowledge and appreciation of das Deutschum – the values and character of German civilization, German history and, most importantly, the German language. In the words of one Dr Rohrbach, an influential commentator of the time,

  No lasting and secure cultural influences are possible without the connecting link of language. The intelligent and progressive young men of Turkey should have an abundant opportunity to learn German.… We can give the Turks an impression of our civilisation and a desire to become familiar with it only when we teach them our language and thus open the door for them to all of our cultural possessions.

  The epitome of the intelligent and progressive young man of Turkey was, of course, the linguistically gifted sixteen-year-old who, in September 1916, presented himself to his German superiors for work in the construction of the Berlin–Baghdad Railway, Joseph Dakak.

  The station-house at Adana gave way to two relatively humble platforms. In the rafters of the platform roofs, hundreds of swallows had established a colony. The birds fidgeted and cleaned their feathers and looked out of nest-holes and darted around in the warm air, while below them sprawling families played out scenes of good-tempered restlessness. The women, every one wearing a headscarf, kept an eye on the children, often grabbing them and giving them ferocious and unselfconscious kisses. The men, cigarettes constantly ablaze, sat with their legs daintily crossed, the toe of the dangling foot pointed towards the ground so as not impolitely to ex
pose the sole of the shoe. They wore pyjama-like trousers, knitted hats, cloth caps, baggy short-sleeved shirts (the buttons undone to reveal a white vest and an undergrowth of chest hair), faded blue or grey or brown suits. I was the only westernized traveller, Turkish or foreign, to be seen.

  At four in the morning, a blinding, otherworldly light, accompanied by a terrible blast of a horn, advanced out of the western darkness. The Taurus Express had arrived. There was a brief crush as passengers with cases and packages descended from the carriages. Then I boarded the train. It was packed with overnight travellers struggling for sleep, and the odour of feet was distinctive. There was no restaurant car, and First Class consisted of claustrophobic six-seat compartments that appeared marginally less comfortable than the open seating in the Second Class carriages.

  Inexplicably delayed, the train remained immobile for an hour. Then, at daybreak, we finally dawdled out of the station, the diesel engine roaring like a bus. We crossed the river Seyhan and sluggishly traversed the northern part of city, where nomads had made camp in a wasteland of cement structures ruined by an earthquake a couple of months before. The train continued to emit monstrous hoots, scattering wild dogs roaming around the track and awakening people in the ramshackle sleeping platforms built on the houses’ flat rooftops. A flock of storks hovered on air currents high in the pale sky. Ahead, the railway line made a frail curve towards the east.

  When I first conceived of this outing, my thought was simply to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps on the Taurus Express. But the Taurus Express was no longer an international spy-train. It was merely bound for Gaziantep, a couple of hundred kilometres to the east, and not, as in the old days, across the frontier to Aleppo and beyond. The luxurious wagon-lits had been replaced by tired carriages, and the cosmopolitan gentlemen and shady diplomats and pulp-fiction blondes of the war years had disappeared. Nowadays the train only carried families who could not afford to travel by bus and who in the old days would have sat crushed into hard-seated, sweaty third-class coaches armed with bags of dates, grapes, white cheese and salted nuts. This was not Joseph Dakak’s scene at all. He would never had travelled, for example, in the company of the group of men seated next to me. Dressed in old-fashioned rustic attire, they spoke in an extremely expressive and intent manner, their serious looks and emphatic gestures and low, urgent tones suggesting important and telling confabulations; but I had no idea what any of them was saying, and even if my Turkish had allowed me to eavesdrop I would have been little the wiser, because I had no real idea who these people were or what kind of existence they led. Although, in westernized Mersin, the public lives and values of Christians and Muslims had merged to such an extent as to be superficially indistinguishable, my fellow travellers came from a world I knew little about – and actually feared. They belonged to the Anatolian hinterland into which the train was headed, a region that, on the dozen or so nights I’d crossed it by bus from Istanbul or Izmir to Mersin, had always filled me with a dread of my impending annihilation. I knew it as a black, unfathomable zone of flickering petrol stations, senseless land formations and barely lit villages, a place in which humanity, almost entirely rubbed out by the vast dark erasers of the plains and mountains and sky, was exposed at its most nugatory. What I was really feeling, during these journeys, was the solipsistic anxiety that can result from being plunged among people with whom I stood in a relation of near-total mutual ignorance. To be among such strangers was a form of eradication; for which of them could bear witness to who I was? And the converse was also true: unable meaningfully to incorporate these Anatolians into my construction of the world, I lacked the ability to do them justice. They were literally insignificant.

  I was confronting this disagreeable truth, as the train pulled slowly clear of Adana and trundled through the dull, industrialized flatlands of the Çukurova delta, because I was thinking of the hundreds of thousands of Armenians who had passed this way in the autumn of 1915. The Armenians had been forcibly evacuated from places as distant and diverse as Erzerum and Van in the far north-east, and Sivas and Istanbul and Izmir in the west, and Adana and Mersin. They were sent, without proper sustenance, on a journey which took most of them through hundreds of kilometres of mountains and deserts before they reached the Taurus Mountains, where they funnelled through Pozanti and the Cilician Gates before struggling on across Çukurova. Much of their ghastly voyage followed the railroad on which I was travelling. Almost all major stations on the line were the site of lethally unsanitary accumulations of deportees. In November, 20,000 were reported at Tarsus, another 20,000 at Adana, 150,000 more scattered between Adana and the Amanus Mountains. They were on their way to Aleppo and, from there, bound for the Mesopotamian and Syrian deserts. As they marched across Turkey and Syria, the Armenians were subjected to robbery, butchery, starvation, thirst, sexual attacks, and disease. Estimates of the final number of fatalities ranged from 300,000 to over 1.3 million. To put it another way, before the Great War around one and a half million Armenians lived in the territory occupied by modern-day Turkey; by 1923, only 100,000 remained.

  In September 1915, Joseph Dakak also headed for Aleppo, where he was about to start his last year of school. It was practically certain that he saw the Armenians trekking east, and since as a schoolboy in Aleppo he was not confined to the grounds of the school and was at liberty to walk around town, he would have seen thousands of Armenians in transit in Aleppo. They formed, by all accounts, a terrifying and heart-rending spectacle. And yet my grandfather never spoke of the death-marches, just as he never spoke about the massacres of 1909 or the Armenian exodus in 1921. At first I’d thought that his was a terrorized dumbness; but I came to realize that it reflected the kind of benighted gulf that divided me from my fellow train passengers.

  Just how many Armenians were killed, and in what circumstances, and due to what causes, were questions that continued to cause great controversy. Over eighty years later, Armenians were haunted by an awful sense that a terrible and clear crime against their nation, which had been witnessed and contemporaneously documented in detail by missionaries, consuls, medical workers and other western bystanders resident in Turkey, had gone unacknowledged. Groups like the Armenian National Institute in Washington DC conducted a passionate and relentless campaign to perpetuate the memory of the victims and to gain international recognition of the genocidal character of their deaths and losses: in other words, that what happened was a premeditated effort by the Ottoman government to exterminate the Armenian people. Orthodox Turkish history maintained that the Ottoman government undertook drastic but essentially defensive wartime evacuation measures designed to eliminate a real threat to the security of the State: for example, the Armenian population in Van, in the far east of Anatolia, sided with the Russian forces in a campaign in which tens of thousands of Turkish soldiers died. Insofar as mass deaths and brutalities did occur – and doubt was cast in this regard on ‘pro-Armenian’ accounts – it was said that these were, in essence, the unauthorized work of independent third parties, Kurds, bandits, rogue gendarmes and war-crazed military personnel, whose dreadful actions, calmly considered, were not proof of a State intention of racial annihilation.

  Earlier that summer, the French national assembly had voted to declare its recognition of what it expressly called the Armenian genocide. Although the vote was unlikely to be ratified by the Senate, it represented a significant triumph for the Armenian campaign, which had only met with full official success in Russia and Canada. The United States, for example, limited itself to expressing sympathy for the ‘tragedy’, since its relationship with Turkey, a key NATO ally, precluded any further acknowledgement. There was also the wider hazard of setting a precedent. If the Armenians were accommodated, what would there be to stop an even more influential political grouping – the Irish-Americans, for example – from pressing for similar recognition, and historical crystallization, of the moral and legal character of events in their national past? Current Irish historical grievances w
ent at least as far back as 1649, the year Oliver Cromwell re-established the English Parliament’s control of Ireland. Ireland had been unruly since October 1641, when perhaps 4,000 Protestant Ulster settlers were killed by their Catholic neighbours. The massacre – never forgotten by the settlers or their unionist descendants, for whom it served as an example of what would happen to them in Ireland without the protection of the Crown – inspired a widespread Irish rebellion headed, most notably, by Owen Roe O’Neill (no relation); Cromwell’s response was to authorize the killing of thousands of non-combatants at the towns of Drogheda and Wexford. Three and a half centuries later, these slaughters still resonated in certain Irish (and Irish-American) minds as examples not of military barbarity but of a genocidal tendency in the British treatment of the Irish. This tendency was also to be glimpsed in Cromwell’s shipment as slaves to the West Indies of thousands of captured Irish soldiers, and in the ethnic cleansing of the Irish propertied classes in the 1650s, when land in the ownership of indigenous Roman Catholics was turned over to British Protestant settlers while the natives were deported to the wilds of Connacht; but its fullest manifestation occurred with the Great Potato Famine. In terms of the number of dead and deported – the Irish emigrants had, arguably, been subject to a species of expulsion – and also in terms of the catastrophic testimonies of squalor and mass starvation and disease they generated, the victims of the Famine were comparable to the victims of the Armenian holocaust; and from there it was only a short step to another comparison, namely of the nature of the English government’s responsibility for the Famine with that of the Young Turk government’s responsibility for the fate of the Armenians.