The Dark Moment

by Ann Bridge

  So they stayed—and the great braziers of bright brass, the mangals, a metre wide and wrought like huge open lotus-flowers were brought in and set on the floor in the salon, the dining-room (because Réfiyé Hanim was so chilly nowadays) and the Pasha’s study; filled with red-hot charcoal they glowed away for hours, giving out a surprising heat, and the women of the household tended more and more to gather round them, together in the pleasant warmth, and discuss the news in lowered tones.

  It was never good news, now. It got steadily worse. Quite soon after Féridé’s wedding the tidings of the retreat in the Levant—first to Damascus, then on to Aleppo, abandoning the whole of Syria, began to filter through. The Pasha alone realised how much of a rout that retreat actually was; but on the map—and Féridé had a map, and studied it—the names spoke for themselves. He and Réfiyé Hanim and Féridé combined to keep the facts from Nilüfer as far as possible—she was not a person who studied maps. It was only very much later that they learned how skilfully Kemal Pasha had carried through that retreat, and saved the bulk of his army, and some of the panic-stricken Fourth as well; riding constantly, not in safety at the head of his columns, but at the tail with the stragglers, cheering them on by his presence, and by that blunt exchange of talk with the humblest conditions of men which, all his life, was one of his greatest pleasures as well as one of the main secrets of his political strength.

  And then the telegram came to say that Ahmet was a prisoner, captured by the English at that disastrous crossing of the Jordan, when the rearguard of the Seventh Army was taken by surprise and caught more or less en bloc. It came to the Pasha, and he went straight up with it to Réfiyé Hanim. She saw the paper in his hand, and her own crept to her heart—the kalfas, who had risen at his entrance, at some almost imperceptible gesture of his scurried out, but Mdlle Marthe, rising too, went and stood beside her old employer.

  “No, Ané,” he said at once: “it is not the worst. Really it is good news. He is a prisoner.”

  “Not among the Arabs?” Réfiyé Hanim knew something about the Arabs.

  “No, by God’s mercy—he was taken by the English.”

  “Ah, God be thanked and praised for that!” She, always so erect, for once leant back against her cushions; Mdlle Marthe’s eyebrows enquired, silently, whether she wanted her drops—she was very white. She made a faint gesture of negation.

  “Tell me, my son,” she said then. He told her what he knew, which was little beside the bare facts: Ahmet was a prisoner, in English hands, taken at the Jordan crossing. Like her grand-daughter-in-law, Réfiyé Hanim did not study maps, nor had she any very clear idea of the timing of the campaign—it never occurred to her that Ahmet had actually been a prisoner for three or four days at the time of Féridé’s marriage. “Ah, thank God that he is in English hands,” she said again, when the Pasha finished. “I am sure they treat their prisoners well.” But then she turned to the practical aspect. “Does Nilüfer know?”

  “No, Ané. I came at once to you.”

  “Féridé must tell her,” said the old lady, with decision; “she is the person who will do it best. My good Marthe, send someone to ask Féridé to come here, if you please.”

  Féridé, graceful, tall and elegant in one of her warm autumn trousseau frocks, came hurrying in. To this daughter of his, the Pasha merely handed the telegram without a word; no precautions, no managements, were necessary with her—he realised that.

  She ran to her grandmother, knelt at her feet, and embraced her. “Oh Niné, how good God is! He is safe!”

  “Yes, my jewel—he is; you are right,” said the old lady, kissing and fondling her as if she were still the small wild child who used to lose and tear her çarşaf.

  “And Nilüfer? Does she know?”

  “No, not yet,” said the Pasha.

  “But she must know at once! It is really for her, such good news.”

  “We thought you could tell her best,” said the Pasha.

  “Oh, I will, I will—at once. May I have this?” She took the telegram, and hastened away.

  Here Mdlle Marthe put in her word.

  “Mais quelle merveille, cette enfant!” she ejaculated.

  “Yes—there are few like Féridé,” Réfiyé Hanim replied. “She owes you much, my dear Marthe,” she added.

  Féridé had some trouble to persuade her sister-in-law that the news was really so good. “But when will he return, when?” Nilüfer kept saying, disconsolately.

  “Chérie, at least he will return—prisoners are always safe,” Féridé encouraged her. She spent most of her time for the next few days with the lovely unhappy creature, trying to cheer her up.

  In spite of all the bad news which preceded it, the Armistice of Mudros, when it was announced, came like a thunderclap to the Turkish people. Féridé always remembered how she first heard the news, because she was in the hammam, having a bath and washing her hair A bath in Turkey under the old régime was, like so many other things in life, rather an elaborate performance. The interior of the hammam consisted of several rooms, walled and floored with marble: in one the bather left her garments, and then, wearing a more modest version of those nahlins, or sandal-clogs, went on into another where hot and cold water fell from spouts into marble basins, and washed. If it was the hair, that was washed first—anything up to seven times—and then bound up in a turban on the head. Next the body was washed, also several times. But there was no comfortable plunge into a steaming tub; the temperature in the bathing-room was of course kept high on purpose, but one stood on the marble floor and scrubbed and scrubbed, over and over again, while a maid or dadiv dipped up water in a hammered silver bowl from a hot spout and dashed it over one’s body to fall all over the marble floor and drain away, at last, through small holes or gratings. (Turks are inclined to think that to lie and soak in a bath in the same soapy water into which you have just scrubbed off all your dirt is an extremely unpleasant and unhygienic proceeding—as it well may be; in any case even today every public bathroom in quite modern Turkish hotels is provided with an enamel bowl for the water-dashing process, and the westerner, European or American, who goes to take a bath is liable to find the floor a swamp as a result.) After this vertical scrubbing and splashing, one got into a bathrobe of Turkish towelling and retired into yet another room to dry off and, probably, to be rubbed and lightly massaged by some personal attendant.

  Féridé had finished with her hair, but had only scrubbed herself twice, and was preparing for a third effort, when Dil Feripé came pattering into the hammam—where Féridé was concerned she had no reserves or inhibitions at all.

  “News! Wonderful news!” she screeched. “The war is at an end. Oh, Allah be praised! Now, my jewel, you can really be married! Orhan Bey is sure to return at once.” (Dil Feripé did not know much about the process of demobilisation.)

  “How do you know this?” Féridé asked incredulously, soap in hand.

  “Osman brought the paper, and saw it, and passed on the word.”

  Féridé flung on her bath-robe, and hurried into the drying-room; she sat on a couch while the maid rubbed her down, but today there was no resting, no massage. She dressed hastily, went up and put something more respectable over her damp hair, and went at once to the salon.

  “Niné, have you heard? Is it true? How has it been arranged?”

  “I have only heard what the dadis know from the servants. Allah grant that it is true!”

  Féridé fidgeted about impatiently.

  “Oh, I wish my Father would come! I wish we had a paper of our own—how convenient that would be!”

  “I see no need for such a thing,” said Réfiyé Hanim, calmly; the old maids looked faintly shocked at the mere suggestion.

  At that moment the Pasha walked in, the paper in his hand. He seemed greatly concerned, but did not omit his usual greeting—“I trust, Ané, that your health is good?” And—“By the goodness of God, my son, I am very well,” the old lady replied. Then he greeted his daughter—�
��I trust, my child, that you also are well?” Féridé, as a married woman, now received more formal courtesies than before.

  “Very well, I thank you, my Father,” she replied, living up to her new position—but then her fine married manners broke down. “Oh Baba-djim,” she cried, reverting to her childish form of address, “is it true? Is it good news? Oh, do please tell us all about it!”

  The Pasha sat down slowly in a small chair by the brazier, his long thin legs stuck out in front of him. Suddenly he looked very old, Féridé thought. “It is true,” he replied slowly, “but it is by no means good. I can hardly credit that our Government can have agreed to such terms.”

  “What are the terms, my son?” Réfiyé Hanim asked.

  The Pasha unfolded the paper.

  “We are to open the Dardanelles and Bosphorus to Entente men-of-war, and give them free access to the Black Sea,” he said, obviously giving a résumé as he read; we are to hand over our whole Navy, and any other warships now in our waters—and in addition, should they require it, we are to place our mercantile marine at their disposition.’”

  “Mais c’est incroyable!” Réfiyé Hanim murmured.

  “That is not all,” said the Pasha, with indescribable bitterness in his tone. “We are to demobilise the Army immediately—well, ça se comprend; but in addition we are to hand over to the Entente all our troops now in the Caucasus, in the Hedjaz, in Irak and the Yemen, and in Syria.”

  “But that means Fuad!” Féridé interjected. “Will he become a prisoner of war?”

  “He will if these terms are actually carried out. But—” most unexpectedly a tiny smile crept round the Pasha’s grim mouth—“I have an idea that that hero of Ahmet’s may somehow arrange that very few of our troops are still in Syria by the time the Armistice terms are put into execution.”

  “Baba, are you coming round to approve of Mustafa Kemal Pasha? No!” Féridé exclaimed.

  “He is skilful and resourceful, one must admit that,” the Pasha said, judgematically. “God grant that he uses his powers now! I understand he is to have a new command, of all the Yilderim Armies, as from tomorrow. But do not speak of this.”

  “Is there any more, my son?” Réfiyé Hanim asked, her eyes on the paper.

  “Oh yes” he replied, once again bitter. “They are to take over the tunnels of the Taurus Railway, to have free use of our ports and railways for their transport, and to control all our wireless and cable stations.”

  “But—our railways, the tunnels, our cable stations!—and to pass through to the Black Sea! If all that is the case, we—we are not independent any more!” Féridé burst out, her grey eyes wide.

  “No, we are not,” said the Pasha, more bitterly than ever. “A beaten nation is not usually left with much independence.”

  “But have we really been beaten? The Germans have so taken things into their own hands—” For once Féridé’s voice faltered.

  “Yes, my child, we have; avouons-le,” said the Pasha. “By this Allenby —and of course this strange devil of a Lawrence has helped, he and his Bedouins.”

  Réfiyé Hanim put down the bandage she had been rolling; it looked as if bandages would no longer be necessary.

  “Well, at least we have been beaten by the English,” she said. “Not by the French, or these barbarous Russians or Bulgarians. The English are ‘gentlemen’—(she used the English word)—and they will treat us well. My Father always said that we could trust the English; that they had often helped us, and were our best friends. He saw much of them—he liked them.”

  Poor Réfiyé Hanim, and many beside her, were to suffer a sad disappointment. What she did not reckon on was that in the 1914-18 War England had allies, and that with her vast commitments, and the urgent desire for demobilisation, she might now have to delegate certain tasks to those allies. Once the war was really ended she handed over a good deal of the business connected with Turkey to her allies the French. But at the moment there was a general crumpling-up of all those nations on whose side Turkey had entered the war. On November the 3rd came the news that the Emperor Charles of Austria had fled to Switzerland; then that the Kaiser had abdicated and fled to Holland; there were rumours of mutiny in the German Fleet; finally, on November the 11th, the Armistice between Germany and the Entente Powers was announced. Two days later an Anglo-French fleet came steaming up the Marmara, and cast anchor off Istanbul.

  The Pasha, who had gone into the Club to pick up the latest news, saw them. He heard that they were there, and went down to the water-front by Dolmabatché to look at them. There they lay, the great wicked-looking ships, made grotesque by the uncouth camouflaged designs along their sides, their gun-turrets and super-structures profiled against that wonderful outline of rounded domes and pointed minarets, above Seraglio Point, that is like nothing else in the world. The Pasha stood and stared at them, almost incredulous, bitterness and humiliation filling his heart. So an American might feel who should see a Japanese fleet off Hoboken, or an Englishman at the sight of German destroyers lying in the Thames within revolver-shot of the Tower of London. The wonderful Narrows of the Dardanelles, guarded by those tremendous fortifications, from which all attacks had been beaten off, should have kept these waters, at least, inviolable—now they might as well never have existed; that hideous loss of life, the decimation of the Turkish Army, had been all in vain. As he climbed slowly up the hill again to his carriage, the Pasha remembered the last time he had seen foreign warships arrive in the Marmara: four years ago, when he had looked with satisfaction on the Goeben and Breslau, lying where these others now lay. Had that really been such a good thing, after all? At the time he had only thought how magnificently they replaced the Reshadieh and the Sultan Osman, which the perfidious English had retained for their own use; he had watched them, some weeks later, steaming up the Bosphorus to the Black Sea for their cruel raid on Sevastopol and Novorossisk. Then, that also had seemed natural enough—but now? Was that one reason why the Armistice terms were so terribly severe? Had the Germans, Enver Pasha’s dear friends, just used Turkey for their own purposes? Had it really been so wise to refuse the guarantee of the absolute integrity of all Turkey’s dominions, offered her at the outbreak of war by her old friends Britain and France and—under their pressure—even by Russia, merely as the price of maintaining her neutrality? If that offer had been accepted, this at least he would not have seen, he thought, as through a gap in the wooden houses he chanced once more to catch sight of those alien iron-clads, riding the blue waters below.

  A strong current was setting down the Bosphorus, while a fresh wind blew up the Marmara from the west; where the two met, around the Entente fleet, they created a jobble of little short waves with white curling crests. This is a familiar sight from the heights of Ayaz Pasha, under these conditions, and there came, irrelevantly, into the Pasha’s mind at that moment the recollection of one day during that summer of 1914, when his friend Dr. Pierce had been with him, talking about his book on Turkish folk-lore. He had meant to tell him the charming local saying about those small curly white waves: “The Captain Pasha is driving his lambs to pasture.” But for some reason he hadn’t done so—ah, Osman had brought in the paper, with the news of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. Sighing, the Pasha turned away from the sight of the Captain Pasha’s lambs gambolling round the French and English fleet, and walked on. Those had been happier days! His good friend Pierce, to whose annual summer visits he had so much looked forward—he hadn’t seen him, heard of him, for four years! And the little Canary, with her loud clear voice, whom Féridé had loved so much—little monster, Féridé, dragging her poor old dadi down into the crowds on the quay to say goodbye to her friend! Whoever heard of such a thing! But Féridé was not like other girls—she never had been; a smile, half pride, half fondness, gathered round the Pasha s rather grim old mouth. Lost in the happier past, he got into his carriage—the coachman had to call out “Pasham!” (My Pasha!) to him, or he would have walked by it, unseeing—and drove h
ome.

  . . . . . .

  Dr. Pierce heard the news of the arrival of the Allied fleets off Istanbul on that very day. Not, as one might have expected, in the scholastic calm of a semi-militarised Oxford, but in Syria. He had in fact spent most of the war in the Middle East. During that struggle the British Intelligence Service mobilised expert knowledge as never before: the Aegean Islands were full of archaeologists disguised as sponge-gatherers or lemon-buyers, the Levant of academic fig-sellers or vendors of sweet-meats. A lot of them sat in Cairo, others in Beirut, as well. Dr. Pierce did, for some time; but when Allenby’s advance in Palestine began—began with that fantastic mustering of cavalry, infantry, and field artillery in the shelter of the orange-groves near Jaffa, the men heating/ their food on “Tommy s Cookers” so that no smoke from fires should give their presence away to prying German air-craft—he was attached to those divisions as an interpreter in Turkish. It was with them that he heard the terms of the Mudros Armistice—and he heard them with mixed feelings. As an Englishman he could not but feel that Turkey, whose wilful, disingenuous, and needless entry into the war on the wrong side he had always deplored, had got what was coming to her; but he loved the Turks, and he could not forget his friends among them. “My God, what will poor old Murad Zadé say to this?” was his first reaction to the news of the Mudros Armistice; and then he scowled. “That Enver, with his medals and his German friends! —I always said he would do them no good.” But he was still terribly sorry for the decent Turks, like the Pasha, or even poor Javid Bey, a very decent fellow. Moreover, he found moments in which to wonder what Kemal Pasha, whom young Ahmet had always been raving about, would say to all this? That retreat of his had been an astonishing performance, and he had given a bloody nose to the Indian troops at Haritan, too.