IN ANATOLIA
WE left the mosque of San Sophia with a memory of porphyry pillars, and a floor of serpentine, dulled, rather than polished, by millions of bare feet; and the great dome that above a circle of windows seemed to be resting on light; and gold mosaics, and two lost causes.
Then a lecture to some combined schools, and entertainment and tea given by the Principal and her teachers in a comfortable room.
Next day Michael Grant took us to call on the Director of the University, who told us that a great column standing outside his door was erected five hundred years ago in order to view fires in the city. The idea of having a fire-brigade was probably invented much later. Then we went to see the Blue Mosque, built something like San Sophia, only that the dome rests upon vast pillars instead of seeming to float upon air and sunlight. Four or five Turkish soldiers came in and looked round, but did not pray. They seemed a little disconsolate in the vast shrine, as though the latest of the tides of time had swept something out of it and left it barer than they had thought it would be. Another lecture that day, and the President of the Party and the Governor of Istanbul and others kindly attended; pure kindness, because not all of them understood English. Next day the President of the Party and his secretary called on us, and we naturally gave them coffee. He is President of the Party because there is only one party in Turkey. They had an opposition for a short time, but it was found to be inconvenient, and it and its leaders were abolished. The politics of Turkey are the work of Ataturk, and a chapter on what his politics were might perhaps be appropriate here; but, for one thing, I have not studied them, and, for another, I expect that most of the readers of this book will be democratic at heart, which might prevent them from successfully following those politics, were I to write a chapter upon them. So I will say no more of this great leader of Turkey than to tell one story that they told me about him there: he was sitting one evening with his cabinet, and, to introduce the topic on which they might speak, asked “What is Zero?” And one of his cabinet found the right answer, which was: “Far be it from me to have any opinion on anything that your Excellency does not know. But in your Excellency’s presence I am Zero.”
It will be clear that I have not studied Turkish politics; and it may even leak out through these pages that I am not greatly interested in modernity, to which Turkey just at present seems so devoted; and yet I was charmed by the Turks, and cannot remember meeting any that I did not like, and I made friendships there which I trust that the violence of these times has only interrupted, to be renewed, I hope, in the days when letters will be sent and received more easily, and when the German ambassador shall have lost his interest in keeping me out of Turkey. Later that day we drank coffee with Madame Halidé Edib, who was said to be the leading woman in Turkey, and who is certainly a very remarkable woman. Amongst other things I was told that she had commanded a brigade in the war against the Greeks, and she was at this time running the Faculty of Letters, to whose students I now read some of my poems, which she had asked me to do when we met at my lecture on the Drama the evening before. Perhaps she is not quite so modern as everyone else in Turkey, for I remember her telling me of a modern innovation, without very much enthusiasm. “There is a law,” she said, “that everyone has to have surnames now. My own sons have a surname, though I don’t remember what it is.”
That night I went with Grant to several places to hear Turkish music and singing, for Eastern music has a great fascination for me. At about midnight at one of these we heard a woman singing who we were told, as I could well believe, was the best singer in Turkey. At another I saw a woman with a face like the Sphinx at Gizeh, which may seem strange so far away in space, and so much further in time; but we are prone to judge customs and likenesses too much by the standards of one generation, being ourselves mortal, and we often overlook that immortal things like races alter very little indeed. Hitler for instance, judged by all that we have seen in our own time, seems far away from Attila; but the principal difference is probably only that Attila could ride a horse, and was in some other ways the better man of the two. Looking at the world from the racial point of view, I think one frequently finds a pair of people who were to all intents practically twins, separated by a few centuries and even a few thousand years. So one of this woman’s tribe, wandering along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean may have served as a model, or was perhaps the ideal, of whoever carved the Sphinx.
Next day we were shown over the museum, once the hareem of a Sultan. The museum was closed for the war, but the Director very kindly opened it for us and showed us many beautiful things, too famous throughout the world for me to attempt any description of them here. Those lands that had seen the rise and fall of Rome, and were near neighbours of Greece, provided ample material for a very artistic people to make a collection that is among the great treasures of the world. Much of it was hidden from these troubled times by sandbags, but a bronze statue of a Roman emperor, and marble statues from Greece, and the tomb of Alexander, were still visible.
Then we motored east along the Bosphorus to where Robert College stands on a hill looking over the narrow water into Asia. There I gave a lecture about the travels of my dreams and my body, both in an easterly direction, and we were entertained with American hospitality, which is saying a very great deal, and we stopped the night with them. Next day we returned to our hotel at Istanbul, the Pera Palace, which later in that year was partially wrecked by a bomb intended for our minister in Sofia. I missed the sentry over our door, which we had at Ankara. Why I was so honoured I do not know, but I saw nothing surprising in it in a town where Germans were running about wild. The sentry was a lady, and sat in a chair outside our door. Wherever we went in the hotel she followed, and lunched when we lunched, whether it was half-past twelve or a quarter past two. She did it quite discreetly, and was very unlike a much more inquisitive German woman that we met later in South Africa just before we went to join a convoy. In that hotel in Ankara one day we saw the German ambassador with his first secretary. Such sights give one something of the strange feeling that a tourist on a bicycle may have, perhaps in the Kruger National Park, as he comes on two elephants beside the road, while a big-game-hunter may travel for weeks without finding any.
On that day my wife and I had the delightful experience of crossing the Marmora into Asia with Michael Grant to call on Prince and Princess Abbas Djellal, or Abbas Bey and Mme. Abbas as they are known in Turkey since it became a republic. How much I learned of Turkish life and Turkish poetry from him! And all the tales he told me were true, except when he once said that he was not a very good chess-player, a matter which we sat down to examine straight away in his charming library, where in little upright cupboards among his books he kept his favourite guns. This game was a long and very hard one, and I just won it, and in the many games that we had together afterwards I never found it any easier to win, and sometimes failed to do so at all. In a smaller room there were beautiful pieces of calligraphy, framed lines in Turkish and Persian. Have we anything like this in Europe? Have we any handwriting that we would frame and hang on a wall for its mere beauty? Sometimes I say a few words on the subject of handwriting, but only among Europeans. For I feel that there is nothing that we can say of it, compared with what has been achieved in Turkish and Persian and Arabic. For in these countries calligraphy has something about it as beautiful as though flowers could write, or as though someone wrote down the songs of the birds in their own language. We had some talk about going into Anatolia to shoot, but we heard next day that the country was inundated and there would not be much chance of shooting. Luckily we eventually went in spite of this, and bitter cold as it was, and bad as the floods were, I cannot think of a shooting party I have ever enjoyed more. Grant arranged it for us and rather allowed it to me as a holiday, for the lectures had gone well, and he was the representative of the British Council in Turkey. The floods that spoiled the shooting made it possible for me to have any, as communication with Greece, whither I was bound, was cut by the same floods. We went back with Grant to Istanbul, and that day he had to return to Ankara. We came back from Asia in a snowstorm, and having travelled very lightly through the tropics, leaving most of our luggage to follow and not seeing it again for a year, my wife caught a cold which unfortunately prevented her from going about with me any more for some days.
On December 23rd I was invited to a concert of Turkish music, which I greatly enjoyed hearing. The audience was very small, scarcely a dozen, but it was very fine music. Of the audience I chiefly remember the military Governor of Thrace, a very pleasant fellow with the look of a sportsman, and not so unlike an English general, But I have noticed in my travels that one soldier gets to look very like another: Mars seems to grip them all in much the same manner, as a sculptor might make the same sort of face out of different kinds of clay. Some months later in Egypt I was told by someone who might have known better, that Turkey was coming in against us, and I felt quite certain that he was mistaken. And yet merely being right does not always prove one wise, and I had left entirely out of consideration the effects of the enormous pressure of German armies in Turkey’s near neighbourhood. I was only thinking of the wishes of the principal Turks I had met, charming people who certainly had at heart a better cause than Hitler’s. We had been granted a transit-visa through Turkey, which ran for a fortnight. Ahead of us the floods cut us off from Greece; behind us, as it were, our visa was running out. To be in a country in time of war with a passport that is no longer valid is of course no better than being found in a bank after closing hours without sufficient excuse. Grant had thought when he left that the branch of the British Embassy in Istanbul would be able to deal with this, but it seemed to be beyond their powers, and we missed Grant as the lost sheep of fable is reputed to miss its shepherd. He had however looked after us so well while in Istanbul, introducing us to all those at whose bidding prison-doors would open or shut, that I was able to write to the Governor of Istanbul to ask for his assistance, which was kindly accorded. On the next day I crossed the Sea of Marmora with the Abbas Djelals, and her sister Princess Zeinep. The two ladies are of the family of the dynasty that has reigned in Egypt since 1914, and my host belonged to the branch that preceded it. From the harbour of Mudanyeh we drove to the lovely city of Brusa and stayed a night at an hotel, where the hot water is supplied by Mother Earth herself. But memory is like a sieve with too coarse a mesh: too much goes through and is lost; and, as Time shakes it with the years, more and more falls through. A letter that I wrote to my wife at that time from Brusa preserves a few of the scenes that I saw then, and so I reproduce some of it here. “As we left Istanbul the clouds were going inland over the mountains and seeming to drag at the heather as they went. I wondered why the sight of their clawing shapes gave me such pleasure, an idle thing to do instead of just being thankful. I decided that the reason was that I delighted to see a wild and ancient thing come so close to earth that it even touched it. Islands like Circe’s appeared on our left. My hostess said she was born in one of them. The other princess was born here. We sailed due south across the Sea of Marmora, and motored here. Mountains with snow on them and a plain full of poplars. This evening a shaft of light came through clouds and lit the plain, lying along it like a golden spearhead, lighting the poplars and touching a mosque among cypresses, but leaving the cypresses dark. The north was black, and the mountains beyond the light dark grey to the east.
Dinner threatens and I must stop. We saw many beautiful things — a mosque with green tiles, some of them put in newly and pale green, others like old moss. And we saw a museum with the hand of Ozymandias in it and the foot of his wife, and many Roman and Greek remains, and rooms devoted to writing in many scripts, and a garden with a plane-tree fourteen yards round, and the tombs, or rather the chapels, of twelve Sultans in it. One of them wished the rain to fall on his tomb, and a space is left at the top of the dome for that purpose. We saw another mosque, where an imam was chanting. We saw more than I can remember, and we saw a street with a huge tree in the middle of it and all the houses old and Turkish.
Karaca Bey. Christmas Day.
A happy Christmas. We left Bursa this morning and its olive-groves, and passed by poplars, and willows and an orchard of pollarded mulberries and went through rather wild land, but mostly under cultivation. We only passed about two villages, with houses close together as a protection against the wind, untainted by corrugated iron or any other modernity. Once we passed a flock of white-fronted geese quite close to the road. Once a raging torrent appeared to be crossing our road, but when we looked at it we saw that the waves, a foot high, were only made by the wind, and the car was able to get over. Great floods have somewhat upset our plans. We came to one impassable obstruction for the car, a broken bridge, but luckily only three kilometres before the end of our journey, so we were able to walk here. This is a little town untouched by modernity, but entirely burnt by the Greeks since the Great War, so that every house in it is only about fifteen years old. We had lunch in a little eating-house, while geese wandered over flying quite low, and we are stopping in a house in the town. We start soon for the evening flight.
We passed carts on our way drawn by bullocks, and some by small horses.
They want me to stay as long as I can. You know my theory about sport: you have to allow long enough to include a run of bad luck. What about a week? If I get back by January 1st we can’t start for Greece before January 2nd. Perhaps not till long after that.
We went to a lake for the evening flight. We saw plenty of geese, but they did not come low enough and I did not get a shot except at one duck in the dark, which I did not get.”
I said that memory lets so much slip, and I quoted the letter above, despairing of being able to remember a thousandth part of what I had seen, and yet I have vivid memories of the little farm-house at the end of the main street of Karacabey. For memories are probably the most vivid where one’s thoughts and emotions have been most vivid, and in the upper storey of that farmhouse where we sat near a big stove there was the double stimulant to the intellect of two arts, chess and poetry. All the games that I had with my host were hard struggles, and when we were not playing chess he displayed memories of many fine pieces of Turkish poetry, which he told me in English prose. I have explained in my preface to Wandering Songs, a book into which I put many translations of Turkish poems, how easy it was for me to write these poems, for they were all given to me in English by my host, and all I had to do was to put rhymes to them. It is very pleasant to make poems like this, the first time I had ever done so, for at other times one has to wait until incalculable chance has sent one a theme that is of the substance of poetry and which one can recognize as being of that substance, and then one has to work that up into verse; but here was the rich material all ready to hand, given with the same hospitality that gave me that good shooting. His appreciation of poetry seemed equal to my own, his shooting a little better than mine, and if my chess was any better than his the difference was only barely sufficient for me to win with the hardest work of which I was capable. The farm-house in which we were staying was owned by a man who, as I was told, was descended from the conqueror after whom the village was named, Karaca Bey. Though customs have lately changed in Turkey, he always wore his hat, a bowler, indoors, because he thought that to appear bareheaded would be disrespectful to his guests. I cannot remember having known moderate comfort at a shooting-party before, for I have either enjoyed the luxuries of shooting-parties in the British Isles or have camped in desert, grass plain or mountain: this was about half-way between the two, but nothing could have been more enjoyable. The cold was intense, but it gave all the more glory to the stove, and in its welcome warmth I heard wonderful stories. Perhaps the most interesting story that I ever heard was told me by my host, as he had heard it from the Turkish corps-commander in the battle of Afion Kara Hissar, telling how in front of the Greek lines in the night, with his corps shrunken to a single division, he was listening to orders on the telephone telling him that the fate of Turkey depended on what he could do. And then he told of the battle. It was a wonderful story. But I will not tell it here, for, if it should happen that many copies of this book should be sold, I should be making my friend’s fine story common, without telling it nearly as well as he could. Yet one moment of that tale I will pass on, the moment when the general was standing on the hill not knowing what way the night attack had gone, and he suddenly heard the Mahommedan dawn-prayer rising up from the trenches of the Greeks. And another tale I heard of this same general, after the war, in Athens, sitting with Greek generals over maps, all discussing their war, re-telling their old plans, till dawn shone through chinks of the shutters, and none of them noticed it. A wonderful scene that must have been, this meeting in perfect amity between soldiers of these two races, one of them a band of conquerors that had won and ruled over so much of the world, the other a small race whose bravery is amongst the most ancient things in our histories and is now in our latest news.