CHAPTER 63
Karatavuk at Gallipoli: Karatavuk Remembers (4)
Every soldier has a comrade who stands out above the others. If your comrade is killed, you find another after a while, but there is still only one comrade that you remember in particular, and you think of him as being above all other comrades. This is because, after the great comrade has been killed, the wound in your heart makes it impossible to have such a comrade again.
I will write of Fikret. He was from Pera, and his slogan was “I am from Pera, so I don’t give a shit.” He was built like a stevedore, and the reason for this is that he had been working as a stevedore in the docks at Istanbul. I am not saying that he was big, because he was no taller than I am, but he had the powerful deep chest, and the thick, strong arms and legs of a man who has learned to lift and carry the heaviest things. I know personally that he was very strong, because he was the one who lifted the beams into place when we were making covered trenches, and he was stronger than anyone when we were collecting the wounded during the ceasefires. He could make us laugh by clenching the muscles of his neck, and they would all stand out and make him look grotesque. If you bumped into him accidentally, it was like walking into a tree.
Fikret was ugly. He had the hooked nose of an Arab, and a loose lower lip. His eyes were not set equally on his face, he had a moustache like the frayed end of a wire hawser, and he was covered with a thick stubble only a couple of hours after shaving. He smelled like a goat much of the time, as did we all, but the goatishness of his smell was on a greater scale than any of the rest of us could manage even after days of furious fighting in the trenches. In the trenches, what you smell is in this order: corpses, cordite, shit, piss, sweat. After a couple of days in action, Fikret’s smell came in between the cordite and the shit.
What was good about Fikret was the honesty of his badness. To begin with he was always in trouble. He told the imam that he didn’t give a shit about God, and he didn’t give a shit if the war was holy or not, because all that mattered was that it needed fighting, and all of us were outraged by what he said, and the imam reported him so that he was in trouble for conduct likely to demoralise his comrades and undermine the state. He was given extra labour fatigues, and he said afterwards, “I don’t give a shit; I am from Pera.” If Lieutenant Orhan had not intervened, I think he would have been shot. Lieutenant Orhan told him to keep his opinions to himself, and fortunately he had more respect for the lieutenant than he did for the imam or even God Himself, so he confined himself to all the other topics he didn’t give a shit about.
Fikret was dependably foul-mouthed as well. If you asked him where to put something, or if he knew where someone was, he would always reply, “Up your mother’s cunt.” Normally anyone who said this would expect to get a knife in the throat, but he would say it in a very friendly manner, just as if he were being genuinely helpful, and in any case soldiers quickly adapt to the worst behaviour of their friends. “I am from Pera, so I don’t give a shit” became the slogan of all of us, even though Fikret was the only one who was really from Pera, and soon even the most pious of us was replying “Up your mother’s cunt” when anyone asked where anything was. To this day I still have to catch myself out, and prevent myself from saying it.
Fikret liked to put on the appearance of being very lazy and apathetic, but when there was something to be done he worked very methodically. He didn’t work fast, but he never needed a rest. He always fought at my side, and we looked out for each other. I don’t know why this happened, because there was no reason for us to be friends.
I first got to know him because he showed me how to delouse my clothing. It didn’t get washed very often anyway, but even a good washing does not kill the lice. One day when I was itching, Fikret told me to take off my uniform, and not be modest about it, because no one has to be modest in the presence of lice. We sat in the sun and he showed me how to get the lice out of the seams of the uniform, and crack them with the thumbnail against the side of the first finger. Fikret knew a lot about lice, because he said the louse was the number-one animal in Pera. There are three kinds of lice. One of them is the parting keepsake of a whore, one is on the head, so that you have to shave it, and the third is the kind that puts pinpricks in your armpits and thighs and belly, and makes you itch so much that you scratch its shit into your skin with your dirty nails, and that’s how you make yourself ill. It is worse if you are hairy, because the eggs are laid on to the hairs. At Çanakkale we had lice in two sizes, and they were grey or white, unless they were purple from drinking blood. When we went for our relief days behind the lines, we always deloused, except for the kind of ignorant peasant who has always had them anyway. When I first made friends with Fikret, he took my jacket and showed me how to search through the seams, looking on both sides. Up until then I had avoided him, because the things he said were shocking to me, but it was this concern of his about my lice that made me realise that he was not entirely a bad man.
One day when we were behind the lines at the resting point, Lieutenant Orhan came up to me and ordered me to put my shirt on an anthill that was nearby. I didn’t dare to question the order, and so I did it, and a few hours later Lieutenant Orhan returned, and he picked up the shirt carefully, and shook all the ants off, and he showed the shirt to me, and he said, “Just as I thought. Check this shirt for lice, Abdul Nefer.” There weren’t any lice at all. It turned out that he had been watching the Franks through his binoculars, and had seen them doing this trick with anthills. I don’t know if the ants eat the lice, or kill them, or just drive them away, but my hint for all soldiers who try this is to make sure you get all the ants off before you put the shirt on, because the sting of an ant is very much more painful than the bite of a louse. I also advise all soldiers never to put up their head suddenly over the parapet of a trench, because the sudden movement attracts attention. Always put your head up as slowly as you can possibly manage, even though this takes a lot of nerve. My advice to snipers is that you can cause machine-gun emplacements to collapse by careful shooting. What you do is stitch a row of shots side by side vertically down the sides of the supporting sandbags. This causes the bags to break in half and lose their sand, and the emplacements can sometimes collapse quite suddenly. You do this mainly for entertainment, and the enemy always rebuilds the emplacement during the night.
One day Fikret had the idea that we should collect all our lice into tins, without killing them, and toss these tins into the Frankish trenches. We had the opportunity to do this, because our trenches at one time were only five paces apart. We were laughing about this, when we heard a Frank shouting, “Hey, Abdul,” and the tin came back with a turd in it. The Franks always called us “Abdul,” which was strange to me, as it is my real name and Karatavuk is only a nickname, and sometimes they threw over chocolate, which I had never had before and which I liked a great deal, and we would throw back sweets and cigarettes, which were much better than theirs, and sometimes grapes. We shouted “Haydi, Johnny” when we threw things. The Franks were living off small round hard pieces of unleavened bread that were called biscuit, and also a kind of meat in tins that was called bully beef. After a time they were fed up with eating it, and they would throw it into our trenches. One time I was hit on the head by a can and I had a big bruise. We opened the tins with our bayonets. There came a time when we were fed up with eating it ourselves, because in the hot weather the fat in it melted and it poured out of the tin like slime, and we got Lieutenant Orhan to write a note in French and we tied it to a can and we threw the can back. The note said: “No more bully beef, please, but milk yes.” As for us, when we were in the trench we lived on bulghur wheat and olives and bits of bread. The Franks were lucky, because Greek traders arrived and set up stalls on their beaches, and didn’t care about the shrapnel shells bursting all around them. We had very few Greek traders coming to us, because we had no money anyway. This trading with the Franks made many of us hate the Greeks, because we were sure that many of them were from Ottoman lands. Greeks will trade with anyone, even the murderers of their own mothers.
People would be surprised if they knew that we and the Franks threw each other gifts, as well as bombs. It came about because we got to know our enemies. To begin with we did not take prisoners at all. We hated them, and they hated us, and we bayoneted them because the extra merit in killing infidels would get us to paradise more easily. Lieutenant Orhan always told us not to kill prisoners or the wounded, because they might have useful information, and, in addition, troops who know they will be killed are much less inclined to surrender, but sometimes we killed them anyway when he wasn’t looking or when the killing lust was up.
There comes a time when you are satiated with killing, however, and you get lazy about it, and it starts to disgust you. You look into the eyes of the enemy and you don’t see an infidel any more, and there is no more hatred. In any case, something happened that changed everything.
It was early on in the campaign, no more than a month after the beginning. The days were getting hot, but the nights were still very cold. We were facing the Franks who were called Australian and New Zealander. They were tall and proud men who fought as fiercely as the little men called Gurkhas, and they had fought their way up a steep slope from the beach, and we couldn’t dislodge them from the gullies. Later we found that the best way to destroy them was to let them attack. Generally, they were very big indeed and made easy targets. They would be uncontrollably enthusiastic and they would carry on too far, and then we could isolate them in little groups, and slaughter them. We found out that they called themselves Anzac, which was very puzzling to us. When the weather grew hot these soldiers fought only in their boots and shorts, and their bodies grew dark, and they had tattoos on their bodies which were pictures of monsters, and women with almost no clothes on. They had a strange war cry which was “Imshi yallah” and we thought it was perhaps “inshallah” in their language.
We put in the biggest attack that it is possible to imagine. We were 40,000 and we attacked them at dawn. We were so closely packed and there were so many of us, that every bullet must have killed several men. I think that most people do not know that bullets normally go right through a body. I was fighting with Fikret at my side, and I could smell him. The Franks had many machine guns that cut us down like grass.
By midday 10,000 of us were dead, and I doubt if we killed many of the Franks. The attack was called off, and Fikret and I crawled back to our trench.
By the next noonday, the stink of the 10,000 in the hot sun was so bad that we couldn’t bear it. It was sweet and loathsome. What was worse was that none of the wounded had been collected, and they were dying of thirst and agony, crying out and whimpering between the lines. Fikret wept to hear it, and all of us were utterly grief-stricken by it, because the pity had risen up in our hearts. We were saying to God, “Please let there be a ceasefire.”
From the Frankish trench a Red Cross flag was sent up, and we had a burst of hope. But straight away one of our snipers shot the flag down, and the hope sank. But then Lieutenant Orhan said, “Wish me luck,” and climbed out of the trench. He ran out towards the enemy with his hands raised, and quickly our own men raised the Red Crescent flag. Lieutenant Orhan had gone to apologise to the Franks for the shooting down of the Red Cross flag.
We came out of the trenches with our stretchers, and collected the wounded, working alongside the Australian and New Zealander Franks. They nodded to us and looked down from their great height, and said, “Good day, Abdul.” It was strange to be working peacefully at a merciful task alongside those who had been killing us. Some of us swapped badges and cigarettes with the Franks.
It was arranged that the dead would be buried four days later, by which time the air was so vile that it was making us vomit. Our chief prayer after such battles was for the wind to blow westward and let the stench carry over the enemy’s lines instead of our own.
It was when we were burying the dead that everything changed between us and the Australian and New Zealander Franks. The British Franks sent a special officer who spoke Turkish and Arabic, and his name was Honourable Herbert. This officer was the only one who could coordinate what all of us were doing, and so we Turks took orders from him, and so did the Australian and New Zealander Franks. Honourable Herbert gave us receipts for money and other things that were found on the dead.
I will tell you about the dead. There had been fighting for one month, and the dead had never been collected. The bodies were of different ages, and so they were all in different stages of decomposition. Some bodies were swollen up, and some were black, and they were seething with maggots, and others were turning to green slime, and others were fully rotted and shrivelling up so that the bones stuck out through the skin. A lot of them were built into the parapets and fortifications, so that you might say they were being employed as sandbags. Most of the dead at that time were ours.
When they were being buried, there were sentries posted by both sides, and these sentries stood at ease with bayonets fixed, and we chose the biggest man there was to stand with the white flag, and the Franks also chose their biggest soldier, and so there were two enormous giants standing there with their white flags, and we had flags fixed in the ground by both sides to show how far it was permissible to go. They told us not to take photographs, but only officers have cameras, and they took photographs anyway, because the Frankish officers were also taking photographs. Their officers talked to our officers, and I think it must have been French, because Lieutenant Orhan knew how to speak it, and I heard him speaking. We exchanged cigarettes, and the Franks liked to shake our hands, so we had to accustom ourselves to it.
All the time we were slaving in the sun, and we were sweating as if we were steaming in a hamam, and our backs were aching from lifting. The original idea was that a white line of cloth was laid halfway between our lines, and we would carry all the Frankish bodies and put them in their half, and the Franks would carry all the Ottoman bodies and put them in our half. But this was impossible because the older bodies fell to pieces when you tried to move them, and the meathooks and broomsticks were ineffective, and sometimes the bodies that were swollen up exploded, so finally we agreed to bury the bodies where they lay. We were covered in corpse slime, and the corpses were covered in green corpse flies. We got the corpse slime from our hands by picking up handfuls of earth and rubbing the slime away. We buried the many thousands in shallow graves, barely covered with earth, knowing that many of them would soon come back to the surface when the shelling started again. I had the nausea in my nostrils for weeks afterwards, and sometimes it still comes back upon me when I dream. It was after this burial that the dysentery began to take hold.
In the early evening we had to finish our work, and the British Frank, Honourable Herbert, who had been commanding us, said, “Tomorrow you can shoot me,” and we all said, “May God prevent it.” He came to our trenches and some other Franks came, and they shook hands with us, and the Franks looked down on us and said, “Bye-bye, Abdul,” and when they went we all gave them a salaam. The firing resumed almost immediately, but after this we did not hate each other any more, and I never again shot a Frank who was not engaged directly in a military activity. We had realised that they, too, were men whose hearts had been left behind in the fields about their homes, and after this the war became less holy. All the same, we continued to hear the stories of how the martyrs had come back from the dead, wearing the green turban of the haj, in order to fight again, some of them carrying their heads under their arms. It was said that they had begged God to send them back to earth so that they could be martyred all over again.
We heard that if we accidentally charged over a ravine, we would float down to safety. These kinds of stories were always being told to us, and even in the height of summer we heard that a company of the enemy had charged, and a cloud came down, and when the fog lifted, the company had completely disappeared. As for me, I became interested in small miracles, and I collected a lot of bullets that had collided with each other in the air, and they had interpenetrated and made crosses. I have ones which are made out of every type of bullet that was used. I also have a bullet that has gone into the middle of a ball of shrapnel.
It was good that we were able to throw gifts to each other, but it was generally bad to have the trenches so close together. It was impossible to sleep because of the grenades. The Franks did not have proper grenades, and they made their own with tin cans that had nails and stones in them. They didn’t kill us, but they filled our skin with nasty fragments, and they were bad for our peace of mind. We had proper grenades that were round like balls. You had to light a fuse first. At times we ran out of these grenades, and made our own, very similar to the Frankish ones.
These grenades were turned against us, because some of the Franks, but not the French Franks, would catch them and toss them back at us. We never knew how this was possible until we realised from observing the Franks on the beach that they had a game which involved waving a plank, running backwards and forwards, and frequently throwing and catching a ball. The consequence of this was that all the Franks, except for the French Tangos, were very good at catching and throwing, and I believe that they had men on the alert whose job was to catch the grenades as they came in, or scoop them up straight away and throw them back. After a time we got wise to this and we let the fuses burn for longer before we threw them. They still threw them back, but the game became more dangerous for all of us. The best thing to do with grenades is to drop a sandbag on them. The Franks had another game which consisted of kicking a large ball around on the beach. They did this stark naked, and every now and then they would jump up and down and cheer for no reason, and if a shell fell among them, they would just clear away the dead and wounded, and carry on playing the game. Also, they would throw bread on the water, and wait for fish, and then throw a grenade among them, and then collect the fish. They were naked when they did this too, and often they swam naked together in the water, so when people say that the Franks are shameless and immodest, I know personally that this is true.
The other bad thing about having trenches close together is that it was easier to dig under each other’s lines and plant high explosives. Sometimes our saps would coincide with theirs, and we would meet underground, and we would be stabbing each other in the dark. This was the most terrifying and horrible fighting of all, and I am glad that it only happened to me once. It was similar in midsummer, however, because by then we had covered our trenches over completely, and were shooting out of embrasures and loopholes, and when the Franks attacked, they pulled parts of the covering aside and dropped down among us, and then we were all hacking and punching and kicking each other in the dark until we all fell with exhaustion, and lay among the heaps of wounded and dead, and I have no idea how many people I killed with my bayonet, and how many were Turks and how many were Franks, and I don’t know if it was a Frank or a Turk who gave me the stab wound whose scar I still have in my thigh.
One thing that happened to us was that we got moved around a great deal, and were often not in one place with our particular unit. They split us up and spread us about so that one day we were a proper regiment, and the next day we were part of another unit that consisted of men from different regiments. This was done according to where the officers thought that reinforcements were needed the most, so we who survived got to know all of the sectors. I will tell you about some of the enemy that I have not mentioned yet.
The French Tangos were partly white men and partly black men. The black men carried machetes, and these were almost as bad as the bent knives of the Gurkhas, but the officers wore red trousers, kepis and dark blue coats. With the black French soldiers, all we had to do was shoot the officers, and then the black men would lose heart and turn round and run away. Obviously we always shot the officers first when there was an attack, and it was lucky for us that they were dressed up like peacocks. The British officers had special belts and service hats, and they had revolvers instead of rifles, and they wore their insignia on their cuffs, so it was easy to shoot them as well. When I was sniping I always tried to shoot the officers, but by the end of the campaign the Frankish officers were no longer wearing their insignia, so that we snipers no longer had any advantage. We used to shoot messengers and signallers as well. I remember that I did not shoot those who were trying to rescue the wounded. There was a man with a donkey that we saw very often, and he would collect the wounded on his donkey, and we often talked about him, but one day one of our snipers shot him anyway. When I went out sniping I would disguise myself as a bush, all tied up with branches and leaves, and I would have to move very slowly, and I would take a long time between shots, so that no one could locate me. There was one of us who disguised himself as a pig, and we didn’t like this, and thought it was unclean, but the imam said it was not unclean to disguise yourself as a pig, it was only unclean to touch a real one. In the long boring days in the trenches when nothing was happening, the Franks played a game with us. They would hold up a piece of white board on a pole, and wave it back and forth slowly, and we would try to hit it. If we missed they would raise another board that said “miss,” and if we hit it they would raise a board that said “hit.” Sometimes there were duels, when one of us and one of them would stand up on the parapets whilst the rest of us watched, and these two men would shoot at each other until one of them was hit.
The French Tangos liked to be shelled by the big guns on the other side of the water, because after it was over, the white officers would go to the big holes made by the shells, and look for ancient things. They even went to look for ancient things when we were still shelling them, and many of them got killed like this. In the big battles it was the black French Franks in the far south whose line always gave way, and consequently we were able to enfilade the rest of the Franks, so they all had to fall back. This is one of the reasons that the Franks could not defeat us. The French Franks had the Black Cat mortar that I mentioned before, and also the 75mm guns that were just as bad for us, because those 75s could fire twenty rounds a minute, and every time we attacked the French Franks we were cut to pieces in the open ground before we could advance any distance at all. You could say, therefore, that on the one side the French Franks were no good at attack, but on the other it was impossible to defeat them by attacking.
The British Franks were south of the Australian and New Zealand Franks, and they fought very much the same. They were smaller, and they were discouraged when you shot their officers, whereas this did not affect the Australian and New Zealand Franks. The British Franks had a strange policy of attacking in the middle of the morning, just as the heat of the day was coming upon them, after we had eaten our breakfast and had time to get everything prepared. For this reason they hardly ever surprised us, they were quickly exhausted by the sun and the terrible thirst that it brings, and we slaughtered them very easily. They once did an attack at ten in the morning, three days running, immediately after a very light bombardment that alerted us to the fact that they were imminently arriving, and we heaped their bodies high before us. Everyone knows that you should attack by stealth at dawn.
There were also some other Franks, and I will tell you a little story about them. They were from a place called India, and they had big beards and turbans, so naturally we thought they were Muslims. They fought like devils. We couldn’t understand why Muslims would be fighting against us when this was a jihad. Anyway, one day a scheme was hatched out, at a time when it was known that the ordinary Franks were to be replaced by these men with beards and turbans. By the way, there was another kind of Frank with a beard, who was British, and who was really a sailor who was fighting as a soldier, and they were called Royal Naval Division, but it is not those that I mean, as those ones did not have turbans.
Now the idea was that we would creep up to the trench as the ordinary troops were leaving, and drop down into it to greet the Muslims when they arrived, and persuade them to desert to our side. In this way we would take the trench without bloodshed, and win many extra troops.
The plan went surprisingly well, as none of us expected even to reach the trench. But we reached it, and dropped down, and we held our rifles in our left hands, pointing upwards, and when the Indians approached, looking at us as if we were mad, we salaamed, and said, “Salaam aleikum,” expecting them to say “Aleikum salaam” and greet us like brothers. It seems that they thought we were trying to surrender, so instead of greeting us they tried to take our rifles, and we had little struggles with them, but no shots were fired. Then Lieutenant Orhan suddenly said, “That’s enough! Come on, men,” and we climbed out of the trench and ran back to our own lines, doubled over, but no one took a shot at us, and we reached our trench. After he had recovered his breath, Lieutenant Orhan said, “Maybe not everyone who looks like a Muslim is one.” This was true, because it turned out those soldiers were called Sikh, and were not Muslim at all, and it is also true that for a long time we thought the Gurkhas were Muslim, and we sent them messages and greetings and invitations, but it turned out that they were of another religion completely, and it so happened that it was Muslims that they hated the most in the whole world.
Sometimes those of our officers who could speak English or French would shout out orders to the Frankish troops, and it was a ruse that often worked. Sometimes the bravest ones would infiltrate the Frankish trenches, and in the darkness of the middle of the night they would ask to see the officer in charge, and then they would shoot him and make their escape.
I will tell you a curious thing about the Franks. When we took them prisoner they believed that we were going to castrate them.