Читать книгу The Rebirth of Turkey - Clair Price - Страница 7

HIS PERSONAL APPEARANCE—​THE EASTERN TRADITION OF GOVERNMENT UNDER WHICH HE WAS BORN—​THE WESTERN TRADITION WHICH HE HAS SOUGHT TO TRANSPLANT TO HIS COUNTRY—​THE DIVERSION OF THE TURKS FROM A MILITARY TO AN ECONOMIC LIFE, WHICH HE IS BEGINNING—​“DO YOU THINK YOU WILL SUCCEED?”

Having applied at the Foreign Office in Angora for an appointment with Mustapha Kemal Pasha, a message finally reached me about 2 o’clock in the afternoon that a half-hour had been arranged for me at the close of the day’s session of the Grand National Assembly. The gray granite building which houses the Assembly, stands at the foot of Angora, with the red and white Crescent and Star flying above it by night as well as by day. “The Pasha’s” car stood at the curb. He lives in a villa presented to him by the town of Angora, at Tchan-Kaya, a suburb three miles away, and the sight of his car, a long gray machine of German make, is one of the few means of tracing him. He is the easiest of all men to meet, but the most difficult of all men to find.

Within the building, one of Kemal’s aides led me to a large room off the corridor, within which to await the end of the session. It was the room in which I had first met him, a large room with a flat-top desk in the center of one side, with a row of chairs around the four walls, and a sheet-iron stove with a pile of cut wood beside it, in the middle of the carpet. I waited possibly a half-hour, listening to the noise from the Assembly’s chamber and making guesses as to what the trouble was. I had hoped to secure an hour or two with Kemal and had been listing, during the month I spent at Angora, a number of subjects on which I was anxious to secure his opinions. But he is not only difficult to find but difficult to hold for long. I had applied to the Foreign Office a week before and I believe they were not only willing but anxious to secure the appointment I wanted. My application, however, happened to coincide with a crisis in the Assembly and I had to make the best of a half-hour.

The session had no sooner broken up and the clamor of the deputies begun to overflow from the chamber into the corridor, than the aide summoned me. We crossed the corridor into a small room with a flat-top desk and, in the corner behind the desk, the limp folds of a tall green banner inscribed with Turkish letters of gold. From his chair at the desk, the military figure of Kemal himself in civilian clothes rose to greet me—​a man with a face of iron beneath a great iron-gray kalpak. He spoke in French and the flash of much gold in his lower teeth gave sparkle to the military incisiveness of his manner, a manner which conveyed an instant reminder of cavalry.

His face is one of severely simple lines. The lower line of the kalpak comes down close to the straight eyebrows, and there is no waste space between the eyebrows and the eyes themselves. “The Pasha” is reputed to have occasional fits of temper which reveal themselves in a noticeable squint in the pupils of his eyes, but during all the time I talked with him that afternoon, those eyes of pale blue fixed themselves on me and never left me.

There is a story of some famous German general who is reputed to have smiled only twice in his life, once when his mother-in-law died and once when he heard that the Swedish General Staff had referred to certain military works outside Stockholm as a fortress. Applied to Kemal, the story would hardly hold true for he has the gift of making himself genuinely pleasant when he cares to exercise it. I can speak of it only in connection with the handful of Westerners who have lived in Angora during the last four years. Turkey has been not only Turkish but desperately Turkish during these last years, yet no public celebration of its victories has occurred in Angora without the handful of Westerners in the town attending and without Kemal himself making an opportunity to receive them upon its conclusion. On these occasions, they have been received with a sensitive cordiality hardly understandable by those Westerners at home to whom it has never occurred that nations are born, not in debating societies, but in the mud and blood of suffering.

Kemal is, however, a professional soldier, dismissed from the old Ottoman Army by the Damad Ferid Ministry in Constantinople and now occupying a politico-military position at the head of the new Turkish Government. He has brought to Angora the blunt directness of the soldier rather than the statesman, and his remarkable personal prestige has colored his entire Government. Yet it is not sufficient to define him as a soldier. The head of the new Turkish State happens to be a soldier because the dominant tradition of the old Ottoman Empire was the Turkish military tradition. In any country with a great military tradition, the best brains of the country tend to flow into the Army and the best brains of the Army tend to flow into the General Staff. Kemal reached the General Staff of the old Ottoman Army at a time when the best brains in the country were attempting to carry it from those Eastern traditions of government in which it had had a long and rich experience, to the newer Western traditions at which it is still serving its apprenticeship.

If it is possible to press down the difference between these two traditions of government into the limits of a single sentence, it might be said that the Eastern tradition is that of action and the Western tradition is that of argument. Under the Eastern tradition, government is centralized in a single ruler whose power is as nearly absolute as his own personal abilities enable him to make it. Under the Western tradition, the functions of government are decentralized and authority is carried down to a popular electorate, represented by deputies in a parliament to which the Government of the day is immediately responsible. Under the Eastern tradition, all things are possible to an individual ruler as long as he disposes of sufficient force to impose them. Under the Western tradition, all things are possible to an electorate as long as it abstains from force in imposing them. London is the home of the modern Western tradition but to find the home of the Eastern tradition today it is necessary to go farther east than Turkey, to a country like Afghanistan. One episode which illustrates the contrast between the two traditions, is that of an Afghan notable who happened to be in London at a time when the Government fell, and who lost no time in sending an aide into the West End to purchase arms with which to defend himself. For further illustration, I might draw on my own experience. I called on the Afghan Ambassador at Angora in the course of my stay there and discovered, I thought, an astonishing ignorance of our Western ways. His was a charming tea, served by a charming gentleman who kept a charming revolver on his desk throughout the period of our talk and two charmingly brawny Secretaries of Embassy close at hand in case, I suppose, of emergency. It happened, however, that no emergency developed and our talk of an hour’s duration ended as happily as it began.

But if we Westerners have slowly built up our own peculiar traditions of government at home, we have not always carried them with us into the East. In our contacts with Eastern peoples in their own lands, we have tended to adopt the Eastern tradition. We have met force with force and it is possibly difficult to blame the more provincial of Eastern peoples if they conclude from their contacts with us along their own frontiers, that our traditions of government are the same as theirs. We cherish at home the reign of law, but our imperialisms in the East have not always exemplified our love of law. Probably their relatively lawless nature has been justified by necessity, for the complicated machinery of Western trade demands conditions of security if it is to work smoothly. Doubtless imperialism which is the simplest method of affording it a degree of security, will continue as long as it is able to command superior force, although naturally it is a daily humiliation to the strongest of Eastern peoples. Necessity will tend to justify its continuance until Easterners demonstrate that they can adapt our tradition of law to their own needs and that they are themselves able to afford legitimate Western trade (not of the get-rich-quick sort) that security which it has a right to expect. It is this task of adapting the Western tradition of law to Eastern needs, of substituting in the East a new and Eastern regime of law for the lawlessness of imperialism, while disturbing as little as possible the inter-flow of sound and legitimate trade—​it is this task which constitutes the Turkish problem today.

Kemal is a Westerner who was born under the Eastern absolutism of Abdul Hamid. He has known the East, the West and that curious offspring of both of them, imperialism. He is the son of a country which has belonged in the past to any man who proved strong enough to take it and which has rewarded its strong men with prestige or a cup of poison or both. He has been a consistent Young Turk, although his beliefs once flung him out of his country in disgrace and later tossed him the dying remnant of his country to do what he could with it. In his unaffected bearing, he embodies the old Ottoman officer type at its best, and at its best that type was a very fine type indeed. He is a great Turk and as a man among men he towers head and shoulders above the type of man which our Western democracies have sometimes projected into political life. A century from now, the historian of the future will see him in a larger and more adequate perspective than we are able to look upon him as he moves among us today.

He resumed his chair behind the desk, with the green and gold banner hanging limply in the corner behind him, and took from his pocket a string of amber beads with a brown tassel. His cheek bones are rather high, his nose is straight and strong, his mouth is straight and thin-lipped. I think a cartoonist would find him easy to do—​a towering iron-gray kalpak, and beneath it the straight strong lines of the eyebrows, the mouth and the chin. He wore an English shooting suit of tweed, a gray soft collar with a gray tie, and high-laced tan boots with the short vamp which is native to the Near East. Physically, he gives a lean, wiry impression.

He speaks either Turkish or French (he knows no English) in the mildest of tones, hardly above a whisper and with a blunt frankness which manages to remain free from any suggestion of truculence. I formed the impression that he does not find talk congenial; he says what needs to be said but he prefers to listen. Certainly he is quite devoid of that love of talk which sometimes afflicts Western statesmen and which is one of the less beautiful aspects of our Western tradition of popular government. Like any other good soldier, there is not the faintest trace of pose in him. He does not employ to Westerners the, to us, exaggerated courtesies of the East; when he does talk to us, he talks as we ourselves endeavor to talk to each other, with simplicity and directness. At one time in our talk, I asked him for photographs of himself since they were not then obtainable elsewhere in Angora and weeks afterward I happened to mention the matter to a Western friend in Constantinople. “What did he tell you?” “That he would have them sent me the next day.” “And did he?” “Yes.” My friend thought it over; he has lived in Constantinople for some thirty years. “If you can really get any Turk to give you a definite word on any subject under the sun without making you wait a month for it,” he said finally, “its fairly certain there’s been a revolution in the country.”

I had a feeling from the first that I was talking to an iron image, that his brain was miles away busying itself with a thousand and one affairs. He had a manner of dismissing question with question as though he were very busy but desired not to be discourteous, and the heaped-up pile of papers on his very neat and orderly desk made it probable that this was precisely the case. I changed my tactics finally and began firing questions at him abruptly, determined to get his undivided attention. He reached up suddenly with a gesture which might have savored slightly of impatience, and flung aside his kalpak, revealing a tall sloping forehead, fringed at the top with very thin brown hair, a forehead totally out of keeping with the severely simple lines of his face. If his face is the iron face of the cavalry officer, his forehead is the forehead of the statesman.

I kept on firing questions at him until I felt that his brain had paused at its distance to listen. I continued to fire questions at him until I felt that his brain had turned, had rushed down from its distance and was sitting intently behind those fixed blue eyes, staring out at its questioner:

“Suppose Turkey’s Western population leaves the country en masse when it becomes certain that the Capitulations are ended?”

“The West can help us or hinder us greatly,” he said, “but it ought to be remembered that we Turks have our own problem to work out in Turkey.”

“Just what do you mean by your own problem?”

“You have seen the country, you know the condition in which Turkey is. Our villages, our towns, our communications, all need to be built anew from the ground up. We have had a good Army in times past. I don’t believe there has been a better Army in Europe. But we hope soon to be able to demobilize and then our real work will begin. We shall have a potentially rich country on our hands and we shall have the right which we have not had recently, to do what we can with it. We want to make it a country worthy of its name, we want to give it not only the best its own civilization offers it but the best we can take from other civilizations. To that end, we shall welcome the help of others but in the very nature of our task, any help we secure from others must be subordinated to our own efforts. If we can not succeed, nobody else can.”

“Do you think you will succeed?”

“If you will come back two years after the peace, you will see what sort of beginning we have made.”

When my time was up, I left him and walked back in silence to my rooms. I dispatched the aged Armenian maid after tea, took off my shoes and donned my slippers. I felt somewhat as a man does when he has seen a great cavalry charge and has returned to his billet and taken his boots off. I became aware finally of the squeak of ox-carts beneath my windows. A long string of them was passing on its 300-mile trek up from the coast to the Army bases in the interior. The air was filled with their slow screaming squeak, a squeak which with infinite deliberation removed the skin from every note in the chromatic scale, the squeak of wooden axles daubed with tar to tickle the musical palates of a team of oxen. Each cart, a mere wooden platform mounted on wooden wheels, bore a tall mound of hay for the oxen and beneath the hay the rope-handled ends of two or four or six new wooden boxes protruded, the number of boxes depending on the calibre of the shells within. Most of the drivers were Turkish peasant women, jacketed and pantalooned, their feet shod in rope-bound woollens, their faces and hands reddened by exposure. Dead men’s fathers and sons and brothers in the Army, widows and dead men’s daughters behind the Army—​but still the rope-handled boxes squeaked up from the sea….

It is out of the dumb stubborn strength of this peasantry that the Turkish military tradition has been fashioned in centuries past. But can the Turks direct this strength from their native military tradition into a new and Western economic tradition? This is the question mark which hangs over the Turkish problem today and Kemal knows it.

“Do you think you will succeed?” I had asked him.

“If you will come back two years after the peace, you will see what sort of beginning we have made.”