Birds Without Wings (57 page)

Karatavuk at Gallipoli: The Death of Fikret (7)

One of the odd things about being at war is that you are exposed to all sorts of miracles, such as when you bend down, and suddenly a ball of shrapnel smacks into the trench wall just behind you where your head had just been, or you are on the latrine when a karakedi mortar shell comes down and explodes in the bit of the trench where you had been posted, or a hand grenade lands next to you, but it doesn’t go off, or it lands next to you just when you are shifting a sandbag, and all you have to do is drop the sandbag on the top of the grenade. These small things make you feel that God is looking after you.

Speaking for myself, I would say that what I found most miraculous was seeing aeroplanes in the sky. The first time I saw one, I could not believe my eyes. Obviously your first impression is that it is a huge and strange bird that makes a coughing and droning noise, but you realise very quickly that it is not, and everyone says, “Look, an aeroplane!” and they wave, and if the plane is low, the pilot waves back. I asked everybody how they worked, but no one seemed to know. Of course there is an engine, which is something I now understand, but instead of flapping its wings like a true bird, the aeroplane has a propeller at the front which goes round very quickly and eats the air in front of the plane and throws it behind. The German Franks had brought with them a plane called the Taube, which means “dove” in their language, and it was a monoplane, and the wings really were shaped to be exactly like a bird, and the tailplane was shaped to be like tail feathers. It contained two men, and it was the most beautiful and elegant of all the planes that I saw. The Taube used to drop little steel arrows on to the enemy, and these were called “flechettes.” I have one that I pulled from a tree after the campaign was over. Unfortunately, the Taube was bombed by the Franks when it was in its hangar at Çonk. We also had a plane, called the Aviatik, but it wasn’t beautiful. The Franks had a lot of
planes, at least eighteen, and I used to be able to recognise all of them. We men took great pride in being able to identify enemy aircraft, just as we had a pride in being able to identify their ships and know the names of their regiments. They had Farmans, Sopwith Tabloids and BE2s. The Farman looked like a skeleton held together with wires, but the Tabloid and the BE2s were very pretty, though not as pretty as the Taube. The Franks used to drop little bombs on us, a few at a time, and when that happened you could hear the Frankish soldiers cheering in their trenches. I think the planes were good for reconnaissance and taking photographs, but I don’t think they will ever be much use for attacking. They did cause panic every time they appeared overhead, but the damage was never very great. Anyway, of the things I remember with pleasure, the aeroplanes are the best, and in my opinion they are the greatest miracle of the world. If I was as rich as Rustem Bey, I would buy one, and fly out over the sea like an osprey and look down at the ships, and I would fly into the mountains like an eagle and look down on the valleys, and every day it would be like a new miracle.

The imam was always announcing miracles. He was a mean man who fulfilled the proverb that my father Iskander liked so much, the one that said “You might as well expect tears from a corpse as alms from an imam,” but anyway he had a great ability to perceive miracles, which shows that anyone who believes in them will think that they see a great many, and it is true that many times we could have been defeated if only the Franks had realised their opportunities. We cheered and praised God when we sank the
Bouvet
, the
Goliath
, and the
Triumph
, and the
Majestic
, which were great ships, but naturally we didn’t praise Him when the
Guj Djemal
was sunk with six thousand new troops on board. We praised God when Enver Pasha announced that the Sultan Padishah had been pronounced a Ghazi. We praised God when there was a break that allowed us to bring up ten new divisions, and when there was an attack by the Frankish Australian Light Horse. On that occasion their bombardment stopped several minutes before the attack, which gave us time to reoccupy our positions, and we massacred them completely, without taking a single casualty ourselves. There was also an attack by the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, and we praised God because they forgot to clear the communications trenches when they advanced, and so our men were able to rise up and shoot them from behind. We praised God for the miracle that the Frankish invasion began on the very night when Mustafa Kemal had all of us marching about on a night exercise, so we were already fully kitted up and mobile when it
happened. We also praised God in spring when the enemy aeroplanes bombed an encampment behind the lines, and so our troops had to be moved up to the front early, and this turned out to be just in time to meet an attack. We didn’t praise God when the Frankish ships managed to fire right over the peninsula by means of using observation balloons, and sank some of our ships. We praised God when we heard the Frankish bugler announcing the imminent arrival of a shell from our giant gun on the other side of the water. This bugler would watch out for the flash, and every French Tango would know that he had twenty-eight seconds in which to hide. We did not praise God when the Gurkhas took the top of the hill at Çonk, which gave them a big advantage, but we did praise God when the Frankish big guns stupidly opened fire on them and wiped them out, so that all we had to do was wait a little while, and then charge them and finish them off. That was when I took the bent Gurkha knife that I now have on my wall. After this the Franks brought up new troops, and there was a terrible battle in which countless thousands of us died. We were fighting like the mad, with our teeth, and with stones, as much as with our bayonets, and we did not praise God for that, even though we did praise Him when finally we were left in possession of the top of the hill. We praised God when the enemy landed at Suvla, and for some reason gave our German Frankish Major Wilmer time to bring up three battalions.

If you are a soldier, you are forced to think about God more than those who are at home. All around you is death and devastation. You look at a disembowelled body, and you see that man consists of coils of slime inside, and yet he is smooth and beautiful on the outside. You look at a body and you see that it is not a man because the spirit has fled, and so the body does not fill you with grief. You believe that God caused every second of your destiny to be written on the fortieth day after conception, and so you do not complain about hardship and horror, and you know that every single little thing that happens is because God wills it. This is a great comfort, knowing that God carries us in the palm of His hand, just as a man might carry a fledgling in the palm of his hand. You realise that there is no point in resisting the will of God, and so you recite the martyr’s prayer for the hundredth time, and so you say to yourself and your comrades “Allah koruson,” and you go over the trench parapet shouting the name of God, knowing that whatever horror comes upon you, it is only the first difficult step to paradise. There are very few people, and I was one, who begin to wonder why God wishes such cruelty and suffering upon His flock, and, when people say “God is merciful,” feel perplexity and a contrary feeling
stealing over them. It is only people like me who wonder why God does not do just one good miracle, and make the world perfect in an instant.

It is very possible to believe it a miracle from God when you duck down and thereby miss a bullet in the head, but then why does God decree a week later that you will die of dysentery?

The dysentery came upon us when the hot weather arrived. Çanakkale was perfect in the spring and autumn, but in the winter it was cold beyond imagination, and in the height of summer it was like being in a bread oven along with the loaves. All the green plants turned brown, all the flowers vanished away, the birds sat on the branches with their beaks open, and the sun made the skin shrink and the eyes ache, and the lips crack, and dizziness overwhelms. There was so much thirst that the water boys couldn’t keep up with us. You couldn’t touch anything made of metal, and you couldn’t touch the stones. The sweat would pour down our faces and down our chests, and pour off the backs of our necks and down our spines and between the buttocks, and our uniforms would have thick wavy lines of white where the salt had dried out of the sweat. We would sit in our trenches longing for the night, and when the night arrived, the relief of it was like being caressed by the hand of an angel, and then, of course, it quickly became too cold.

Much worse than the heat itself was what it brought with it. All the thousands of unburied corpses rotted so violently that the stink drifted over us at every movement of a breeze. It was such a stink that you got used to vomiting from it. If you want to know what it was like, you should kill a dog in midsummer, leave it in the sun for a few days until it swells up, cut open its belly, and thrust your head inside and breathe deeply. Sometimes the corpses would swell up so much in front of the trenches that they would obstruct our view, and so we would shoot at them and the gases would escape with a hissing sound, and the smell of sulphur would come over us. But no matter how many times you deflated a corpse, it would always blow up again, and I never understood why, because you would think that the holes would prevent it.

The other thing was that the corpses made millions of maggots, which were very big, and had shrewd-looking eyes, and black heads, and these maggots were crawling everywhere. Sometimes you saw what looked like a puddle of maggots, and you realised that it was because there was a corpse buried very shallowly, and the maggots were coming up to the surface. I had a comrade who was terrified of the maggots. His name was Ocak, and he was from Van, and he was otherwise very courageous, but he
was so horrified by the maggots that one day he refused to advance over some ground where there were corpses full of maggots, and so the officer shot him, and it wasn’t long before he was full of maggots too, and we would say, “Look at poor Ocak, he must have got used to the maggots by now.”

The violent rotting and the stink brought in the corpse flies, which were very big, and bright green. These flies were so numerous that they covered the world, and you would look around and everything seemed to be moving and shimmering, and a kind of desperate madness tried to overtake you, because the flies were so persistent that all you wanted to do was run away for ever, or run down to the sea and sink beneath the water. It was useless killing the flies, because it would have been like counting grains of sand, and if you did kill them, there were other very tiny flies that laid eggs on their bodies and made tiny maggots. The corpse flies went in and out of the mouths of corpses, because when you die your mouth falls open, and they were attracted to open wounds.

The corpse flies landed on your food when you were eating, and it was impossible to eat at all without eating the corpse flies. They landed on your cup when you were drinking, and you could not drink without drinking corpse flies. The corpse flies were as desperate for moisture as we were, and they would try to drink from our eyes, and they would cling to our lips so that we would have to pull them off by force. One day I fell asleep with my mouth open, and when I awoke my mouth was full of the corpse flies. After that I cut a corner from the white shroud that my mother had sent me in the event of my martyrdom, and I put this corner over my face whenever I wanted to sleep. As time went by I cut more bits off for my comrades, on condition that they would be gathered up and sewn back together if I was killed, but the truth is that you never know where the bodies of your comrades are, and so I never got the pieces back, and it was lucky I wasn’t killed, and now I have a new shroud waiting for me, that was made by my wife, and no doubt she looks forward to the day when she can wrap me in it.

It was because of the corpse flies that diseases came upon us. The flies were full of the filth of the putrid corpses, and they transferred this filth to us when we ate and drank them. Some people got a disease called enteric fever, and this disease gave you an unbearable headache and a sweating fever, and a cough deep in the chest, and pains in the stomach, and big spots, and it also gave you the shits. Some people got malaria if they came from places where malaria was bad, because when they got weak and
unhealthy with the bad conditions at the front, the malaria would come back upon them, and this killed some people, and some people were made helpless for days at a time. Other soldiers got an illness where the heart stopped working properly. All of us became very thin and weak, and it became difficult even to lift a rifle or walk.

The very worst thing was dysentery, and it is hard to explain the horror of it. It comes upon you very suddenly, and you have to run to the latrine, and to begin with you are shitting proper shit. Soon afterwards you become more and more desperate to shit, but all you can shit is slime and blood, and it oozes out of you, and in your stomach you feel cramps and spasms that make you double over and clutch your stomach and cry out with pain and misery. The fever comes over you, and the sweat pours from you, and you can’t make sense, and you are longing for water with a terrible thirst, and your tongue in your head turns white and yellow, and one of the worst things is that you can’t piss, however much you want to.

It happened to Fikret and me at the same time, and we spent whole nights asleep on the latrine between shitting blood and slime, and there were uncountable others like us, and there were many who died at the latrine because they were so ill that they died shitting out entrails, and fell into the latrine, and if they were not quite dead, then they drowned in the shit and blood, which were also covered with corpse flies, and they were so ill and wretched beyond measure that they were glad to die by drowning in shit and blood, and the shit and blood in the latrine was also heaving and buzzing with flies. Afterwards, you have to wipe yourself with your hands and then clean your hands with earth, but your hands never felt clean. One of the small satisfactions of life was to throw sand down into the latrines and bury the flies. I don’t know how many soldiers died of dysentery or left as invalids, but I think it was very many thousands. Fikret nearly died, and so did I, and the field hospital had so many cases that the doctors couldn’t help us, and we just lay there in a fever, shitting blood and slime, with our lives and our will to live pouring out between our legs. I missed many battles, and at one point it seemed I would never go back to the lines. Whenever I think of the military glory that we won at Çanakkale, and my throat swells with pride, I also remind myself of the inglory of groaning and sweating and shitting blood and slime, and not being able to piss, which is also a part of the military life. I remember our second officer, who was very smart and correct when he arrived, with his boots polished, and with a neat waxed moustache and the smell about him of lemon cologne, but soon he was crawling on his hands and knees among the corpses, crying
out like a wounded dog, with blood soaking into the seat of his breeches, and we pitied him for the loss of his dignity, and then finally he shot himself because of the indignity.