CHAPTER 20
Mustafa Kemal (5)
Far from Eskibahçe, past Antalya, over the Mediterranean Sea, across the island of Cyprus (where no one may go without falling in love), beyond Beirut, Mustafa Kemal, trained as an infantry officer, finds himself in 1905, with characteristic military logic, posted to the 30th Cavalry Regiment.
He is depressed and appalled by Damascus; it is a place without vivacity or pleasure, a place that endures the interminable passage from birth to death behind closed doors and shutters. It is utterly moribund, marooned, medieval, stunted and paralysed by tradition, neurotic respectability and absolutist religion. The locals are Arabs, with whom he has nothing in common and no friendships to make. They are nonetheless loyal Ottoman citizens as the British have not yet seized the chance to stir up Arab nationalism. Mustafa Kemal dresses up in civilian clothes so that he can drink in a café with Italian railway workers and listen to the enchanting and enspiriting sound of mandolins. He befriends an exiled Turkish shopkeeper called Haji Mustafa who, like Mustafa Kemal, is a Francophile who has never been to France and is steeped in French philosophy. He has been expelled from the Military Medical School for subversive activities.
At the house of Haji Mustafa a secret society is formed. It is called “Vatan,” and it is just like a hundred other secret societies that will soon be springing up all over the empire, wherever there are educated young officers who wish to reshape their country. Romantic and passionate speeches are made. Mustafa Kemal drily reminds his co-conspirators that the object is not to die for the revolution, but to live for it.
Mustafa Kemal is disgusted by the behaviour of the 5th Army of which he is a part. It is there to police an accord with the ever-troublesome Druzes, who have agreed to pay taxes in return for exemption from military service. The older officers try to prevent the younger officers from going out on field duty, and Mustafa Kemal is infuriated when he is refused permission to go out with his men. They tell him that he is in training, that he is needed back at base.
He disobeys orders and sets off to find his unit, buttonholing the officer who has been sent in his place. It turns out that in fact these expeditions are for the purposes of extortion, and the villagers are being terrorised and pillaged under the pretence of tax collection. The soldiers are paid a pittance, usually in arrears, and the tribesmen themselves are little better than bandits. The former strive to collect more tax than is due, and the latter strive not to pay any tax at all.
Mustafa Kemal develops his perverse gift for obstreperous heroism. He accepts the hostility of his senior officers, and refuses to countenance the looting. He prevents an uprising in a Circassian village because he strikes the villagers as trustworthy. One village kidnaps a major, and Mustafa Kemal turns up and harangues them until they release him. He protests about the false or exaggerated reports of victories and triumphs that are being sent back to Istanbul, saying, “I’ll have no part in a fraud.” When a friend is tempted to take his share of the looting, Mustafa asks him coldly, “Do you want to be a man of today or of tomorrow?”
Mustafa Kemal, posted now to a marksmen’s battalion in Jaffa, is determined to start the revolution, and with the connivance of Ahmet Bey, the commandant at Jaffa, absconds to Salonika via Egypt and Piraeus, finally arriving on a Greek ship. He has a forged pass which was supposed to be for Smyrna, and a friend smuggles him through the customs. His mother is appalled, fearing the wrath of the Sultan, and Mustafa himself is mildly disappointed to find that the artillery general with whom he had been hoping to conspire is a conspirator of the purely theoretical variety.
It occurs to Mustafa Kemal that he might be causing himself a few small problems with the military authorities by effectively having deserted, and so he puts on his uniform and goes to the military headquarters in Salonika, where he explains his predicament to an old friend from school, who is now a colonel. They concoct an application for sick leave, pretending that Mustafa is on the general staff rather than serving in Damascus. The ruse works admirably, and in the following four months in Salonika, Mustafa organises a Macedonian branch of his secret society, which is now called “Fatherland and Freedom.” The conspirators are preoccupied by the obvious decline of the empire, and its intransigent political corruption and inefficiency. They feel themselves humiliated and dishonoured by the way that it is being disrupted, hamstrung and gulled by the Great Powers. The men are constitutionalists, and include Mustafa’s old poetic friend Örner Naci. Mustafa Kemal is just beginning to conceive the notion of a Turkish state within secure borders, with the accretions of empire permanently removed. Amid all the cries of “Greece for the Greeks (Jews and Turks out)” and “Bulgaria for the Bulgarians (Jews and Turks out)” it is hardly surprising that sooner or later someone will begin to say “Turkey for the Turks.” One day Mustafa Kemal will say, “Happy is the man who calls himself a Turk,” and this will be carved into hillsides all over Anatolia. It will become the truth because it was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk who said it.
He and the plotters meet at the house of an officer, newly wed, who is notorious for wearing oriental pyjamas and playing the flute. They swear allegiance to the ideals of the society upon a revolver, which they kiss reverently. Mustafa says, “This revolver is now sacred. Keep it carefully, and one day you will pass it on to me.”
The authorities twig at last that Mustafa Kemal is in the wrong place, and they send orders for him to be arrested. Mustafa hears about it just in time, and hurries back to Jaffa, where Ahmet Bey hastens him to Beersheba, where the army is facing the British in an imperial squabble about the port of Aqaba. The commandant reports to Istanbul, implying that Kemal has been in Beersheba for months, and that the Mustafa in Salonika must therefore be a different one. The papers are shuffled about in Istanbul, heads are scratched. The documents are left in drawers and under piles, misclassified, trodden on, torn at the corners, and finally forgotten. Mustafa is promoted to adjutant major and keeps his nose temporarily clean. At last, to his joy, he is posted back to Macedonia, where he is supposed to be serving with the 3rd Army, but instead finds himself inexplicably with the general staff.