CHAPTER 37
Mustafa Kemal (8)
Mustafa Kemal decides to follow his own precepts, and gets out of politics. He will be a soldier, tout court. He joins the Training Command of the 3rd Army, and initially antagonises the old-fashioned types with his newfangled ideas and his trenchant criticisms, but he impresses his pupils by his lucid teaching, and his unnatural ability to arrive fresh and early each morning, despite his long nocturnal bouts of crapulence. Adjutant Major Mustafa Kemal is scornful of anyone above his own rank.
The Germans are donating their military expertise to the Ottomans, and Mustafa Kemal neither likes nor trusts them. He does, however, think that they are wonderful soldiers, and he sets out to learn as much from them as he can. He translates a military manual by General Litzman, and he impresses Marshal von der Goltz when the latter comes to supervise an exercise for which Kemal has devised the general scheme. He conducts more and more exercises, with himself in charge. On exercises where he is not in charge, he prepares his own plans and orders, and then compares them to the ones actually used. During debriefs he is unstinting in his criticisms, and pernickety about details.
He is still vexatious to his superiors, and they put him in charge of a regiment in the hope that the great theoretician will make a fool of himself in practice. During an Albanian uprising Kemal draws up a plan for the capture of a crucial pass, and it is taken without the loss of one soldier. The uprising is crushed. At the celebratory dinner in Salonika, Mustafa Kemal prophesies that one day there will be a Turkish, not an Ottoman army, and that it will save the nation. He tells Colonel von Anderten that the Turkish army will not have done its duty until it has also saved Turkey from its own backwardness.
Mustafa Kemal goes to Paris with a military delegation, and before he goes he buys himself a hat and a suit that he thinks are Western. When he arrives, his friend Fethi meets him at the station, and mocks him delightedly because the hat is too jaunty and the suit is green. Mustafa Kemal and Fethi go out to buy him another suit that Parisians might take seriously. During the military discussions, when he is in uniform, Kemal makes himself conspicuous by vociferously advocating his own plans during the manoeuvres, and a French officer tells him that no matter how brilliant he is, no one will take him seriously as long as he wears a kalpak on his head. One day, when he is dictator of Turkey, the kalpak will go the way of the turban and the fez, Mustafa Kemal having become the only dictator in the history of the world with a profound grasp of the semiotics of headwear.
Back in Salonika, Kemal becomes disillusioned and depressed. There has been no promotion and there seems to be no future. He tells a friend that he is resigning his commission, but after an encouraging drinking bout at the White Tower, he changes his mind.
He also seems to have changed his mind about staying out of politics. He has become frustrated, and when out drinking likes to tell his friends of the government offices to which he will one day appoint them. Fethi, who is Kemal’s putative roaming ambassador, starts to tease him by calling him “Mustafa Kemal, the drunken Sultan.”
Mustafa Kemal is frustrated because he knows that he is destined for greatness, but does not see how it will come about. He is not in charge of the revolution, and his fellow revolutionaries are bar-room theoreticians, talkers and dreamers. They operate within gratifyingly elaborate systems of secrecy, a world of passwords and arcane oaths, and they devote much of their time to conspiring against each other. Mustafa Kemal wants things to be clear and direct, he wants specific goals to be set, and he wants unerring action to be taken in achieving them. Mustafa Kemal wants to reform the whole political system, and he has clearly understood, as his future career will demonstrate, exactly what Rousseau meant when he said that a people must be forced to be free.
Mustafa Kemal has to conceal his agnosticism from his respectably Muslim co-conspirators, but everyone knows of it, just as they know of his promiscuity and his bibulousness. Nonetheless, there are those who incline towards Kemal’s ideas; Islam is gradually being replaced by Turkish nationalism, and the argument is going to be about the nature of this nationalism. There is in Salonika a revolutionary professor who bears upon his forehead the romantic cruciform scars of a failed suicide, who animadverts that Turks should revert to their pre-Islamic ways, but Mustafa Kemal is of the opinion that Turkey should become a modern Western state. Gradually he is finding people who agree with him, and the authorities are becoming suspicious again. They transfer him from his regimental command, and install him at the office of the general staff in Istanbul, where they can keep a close eye on him.
Fate intervenes in the form of the imperial Western powers, which are at the height of their weening self-confidence. They are generously bringing Western civilisation to the unenlightened lesser breeds, whether the latter wish it or not, and with the notable omission of the democratic institutions that are precisely what make Western civilisation worth having. Germany seizes Agadir, whereupon the French become indignant, and it is ultimately agreed with the Germans that France shall have Morocco, and Germany shall have some of the Congo. The Italians, piqued at not having been invited to the party, seize Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, which are, inconveniently, but pertinently to the progress of Mustafa Kemal, Ottoman possessions.
Accordingly, the empire has to go to war, and the handsome, romantic, but unintellectual Enver Pasha is duly dispatched to Tripoli with a dashing contingent of officers. Mustafa Kemal does not really care about North Africa, since Turks do not live there, and in any case the Balkans are a far more present danger, but he seizes the chance to attain a little glory, and, disguised as a journalist, bearing false papers, off he sails on a Russian ship, accompanied by the poetic Ömer Naci. Also with him, much to his irritation, comes Yakup Cemil, his former would-be assassin. He has had to raise the money for the journey all by himself.
Whilst he is in Libya, his native town, his beloved Salonika, is taken by the Greeks, and he will never see it again. The Greeks demolish the mosques one by one, and those Turks who have the means to do so contrive to leave. The great fire of 1917 will further obliterate the town of his youth, and the remnants of the Turks will be forcibly deported at the end of this story, during the catastrophic events of 1923. For the moment the ancient colony of Spanish-speaking Hebrews are permitted to remain, only to disappear twenty years later, when the Nazis in their turn will have taken Salonika from the Greeks.