CHAPTER 68
Mustafa Kemal (15)
When the botched Allied attack occurs, Kemal is given charge of six divisions, and he is elated, partly because Destiny has finally agreed with his assessment of himself as a man thereof, but mainly because he no longer has to stay in one place where the stench of corpses has become overwhelming. The attack gives him some fresh air for a change. He has not slept for three nights, but he rides about from place to place, upbraiding lazy or incompetent commanders, and assuming control in all areas. Fortunately, the Allied attack is a miserable fiasco, and their troops perish in the fires among the scrubland or are cut down by Kemal’s sharpshooters. Kemal displays his normal foolhardy courage, and does not even leave the track when an enemy aircraft bears down upon him and his mounted group of officers. After two divisional commanders are killed, and armed with a whip, he personally leads the dawn attack on the high ground of Çonk Bayiri, which has tantalised the Allies from the start, and which now they have finally attained. A ball of shrapnel smacks into his chest, but his heart is saved by a watch in his breast pocket. Later on he will give this watch to Liman von Sanders as a souvenir, and the latter will give him a gold watch in return, engraved with the von Sanders coat of arms. Mustafa Kemal will have a huge and painful bruise on his chest for weeks after the Allies are driven off the crucial peak. Mustafa Kemal’s dawn attack works, and the exhausted British soldiers are overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Up on the hill the Ottoman troops are subjected to an apocalyptic bombardment by the British navy, and the ground erupts into crater and flame, but all the Allied assaults are beaten off, and trench warfare predictably establishes itself on the new front. Kemal’s extraordinary luck and his rigid disregard for personal safety continue to burnish his legend among the troops.
Squabbling in the high command resumes with the same predictability as trench warfare, as the Germans tighten their control over essential commands. Mustafa Kemal continues to suffer severe attacks of malaria and, coincidentally, the Allied commander, Sir Ian Hamilton, continues to go down with debilitating attacks of dysentery. Kemal becomes extremely bad-tempered, and is insulted once again by Enver Pasha, who fails to visit him on an official tour. Kemal resigns all over again, and resists all blandishments to make him change his mind. It is entirely possible that he is really angling to go and fight on the new fronts opened up by Bulgaria’s opportunistic entry into the war on the German side. Kemal’s hopes of going to Macedonia are confounded, however, by an appointment to go and command the armies in Mesopotamia, where the British have occupied Kut during a shambolic campaign that appears to have no precise objective. Ibrahim the Goatherd, exhausted in limb and spirit, is at this moment marching to confront them, his mind filled only with the desire to go home and marry Philothei at last.
The Macedonian plan does not work out, however, and a German general takes command in Mesopotamia. Kemal stays on the Gallipoli peninsula, and resumes his personal war with anyone in authority. He refuses to accept any German officers in his sector, sending away the new commander of the 11th Division, and von Sanders agrees not to send any more of them. An Ottoman officer declines to accept an order from a German superior, and Kemal similarly refuses an order to hand him over. Liman von Sanders, highly embarrassed, sends Mustafa Kemal back to Istanbul, on “medical grounds,” and the truth is that Kemal is quite happy to go. He is indeed quite ill, and utterly weary, and he is tired of having his opinions ignored. People who know him are alarmed by his ravaged appearance. He goes to live with his mother and sister, forever exiled from their comfortable pink house in Salonika, and again he seeks out the seductive company of Corinne Lütfü. Ten days after his departure, the Allies also leave Gallipoli, and Mustafa Kemal says that he knew they would, all along.
It is quite likely that without Mustafa Kemal the Ottomans would have lost the campaign at Gallipoli, which would have saved the whole world a great deal of trouble. There would have been no Russian Revolution and no Cold War, and the Great War might have ended a year sooner, but Mustafa Kemal does not believe in saving anyone any trouble, and in Istanbul he continues to harass the authorities without pity.