Gray Wolf

The Life of Kemal Ataturk

H. C. Armstrong

• Publisher: Eschenburg Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781787206076
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

MUSTAPHA KEMAL ATATURK, the great Turkish dictator, is a figure of great significance to the modern world. He did in Turkey what, in effect, Nasser and the other present-day "strong men" are trying to do in their countries, and he is their model and ideal. In fact, Nasser said of this book specifically "This has been the most important book in my life."
Besides being of great historical importance, this book, first published in 1933, is also a fascinating study of an extremely complex and controversial figure, in which an iron self-discipline and a sudden capacity for self-abandonment existed side by side and indeed reinforced each other.
Richly illustrated with maps and drawings.
"This has been the most important book in my life"—Gamal Abdel Nasser

 

GRAY WOLF

PART ONE

I

ALI RIZA and Zubeida lived the threadbare life of the Ottoman Turk, poverty-stricken yet dignified.

Their house was in the Turkish quarter of Salonika, half-way up the hill, under the walls of the old fort, below which lay the squalid little commercial town, full of Jews, and the port to which came the export trade of the Balkans.

Ali Riza was an insignificant little man, without any deep beliefs or outstanding character. When a boy he had come down from the Albanian mountains on the Serbian frontier and found work as a clerk in the offices of the Ottoman Debt Administration in the port of Salonika. Like a thousand other Turkish Government clerks he did his routine work without enthusiasm or particular ability. His pay was insufficient, and often so many months in arrears, that in order to keep his family and make both ends meet, he was forced to supplement it by private trading in his spare time.

The street in which they lived was a narrow alley-way of cobbles roofed over with twisting vines. The house was a broken-down affair with the upper story projecting at an angle over the street. All the houses in the Turkish quarter were blind and silent, the doors always shut and the windows carefully latticed. There was no movement or life. Sometimes some children played gravely in the street, or a few men lounged and dawdled drinking coffee, smoking and talking before the café. Otherwise there was a sleepy silence. Occasionally a hodja passed on his way to the mosque, or a woman dressed in shapeless black clothes would come out of a house, close the door carefully behind her, draw her black cloak across her face as a veil leaving only one eye uncovered, and pass on her way to the fountain like a black ghost in the sunlight.

Each house was bolted and barred against its neighbors. In these—and they were little more than hovels—the women lived the shut-away life of a bygone and dead age, when there were harems and eunuch-guarded favorites, and rich pashas with splendid palaces.

 

Zubeida was shut away like the rest. Though nearly thirty when Mustafa was born, she had been veiled since she was seven. She rarely went out, and then only with an escort. Except for her family and a few women in the neighboring houses she spoke to no one. She was quite uneducated, could neither read nor write, and was ignorant of all the ordinary affairs of the outside world.

Yet she ruled the family. She was a masterful woman with a domineering manner and, when roused, a raging temper. She was of good peasant stock. Her father had been a small farmer in southern Albania and her mother a Macedonian. Tall and powerfully built, with blue eyes and flaxen hair, she had the vitality of robust health. She lived close to the good earth from which she had sprung and had the qualities of the peasant. She was profoundly religious, patriotic and conservative. She had a shrewd brain and judgment for the primitive realities of life.

Like every Turkish woman, her whole life was concentrated on her man-child—an elder son had died at birth and there was a daughter, Makboula by name. She spoilt Mustafa without restraint, but he responded very little. He was a silent, reserved boy, weak and bony, with pale blue eyes and sandy hair. He rarely showed any affection, accepted his mother’s petting as a matter of course, disobeyed her orders and fiercely resented any punishment. He was abnormally self-sufficient, rarely made friends with other children, but played solemnly by himself.

Ali Riza had given up his post in the Ottoman Debt and started trading in timber. He wanted Mustafa to be a merchant. Zubeida wanted him to be a priest. They sent him first to the mosque school to learn his pot-hooks and to intone passages of the Koran, and then to the school of one Chemsi Effendi where he made good progress.

 

Suddenly Ali Riza died. There was no money in the wood business. The family were penniless. Zubeida shut up the house and claimed shelter with her brother, who farmed some land at Lazasan, a village outside Salonika.

There Mustafa was put to clean stables, feed the cattle, scare crows and tend the sheep. He seemed to like the life. The rough work and the open air suited him, making him tough, wiry and healthy, but as he grew older he became even more reserved, solitary and independent.

After two years, when Mustafa was eleven, Zubeida persuaded a sister to pay for his schooling. During these months when he had been working in the fields the boy had become wild and untamed: she had lost all control of him; he would not listen to her; she did not wish him to grow into a shepherd or common farm laborer.

Mustafa went back to a school in Salonika. There he was forever in hot water. After his open, free life he kicked against the discipline. He was truculent with his masters. With the other boys he was self-opinionated and boastful, so that he became unpopular. He refused to join in their games; if they interfered with him he fought them.

One day he was involved in a general scrimmage. A master dragged him out, and, while he kicked and fought, gave him a sound thrashing. Blind with anger, Mustafa ran away and refused to go back to school.

II

ONCE more Zubeida had Mustafa on her hands. Her sister would waste no more money in sending him to another school and he refused obstinately to go back to the same one. When Zubeida tried to reason with him he became mulish. When she stormed at him he stormed back at her.

His uncle suggested making a soldier of him: he was a difficult boy and would never settle down to a trade: they had better send him to the Military Cadet School in Salonika: it was subsidized by the Sultan and would cost them nothing: if the boy showed he had brains he would become an officer: if not he would become a private. Anyway his future would be fixed.

Zubeida would not hear of it; but Mustafa had made up his own mind. His uncle’s suggestion appealed to him. Ahmed, the son of their next door neighbor, had just become a cadet and swaggered about showing off in a uniform. Mustafa did not wish to be a priest. As to being a shopman, that was work for Greeks, Armenians, Christians, Jews and such-like cattle, not for a Turk. He wanted to be a soldier: to be an officer, wear a uniform and give orders to men.

Without telling anyone else, he persuaded an old retired officer, who had been one of his father’s friends, to stand sponsor for him with the College authorities. He sat for the examination and passed in as a cadet before his mother could stop him.

At the Cadet School he found his feet. He was successful, but also unpopular. Inherently thin-skinned, he became touchy and ill-natured if criticized or spoken to roughly. He kept to himself, made no friends and yet he wished always to be noticed and to be pointed to as somebody out of the ordinary.

None of the boys dared interfere with him for he fought back at once. When they tried to get him to join in with them, or asked him what he was at, he became brusque:

“I don’t mean to be like the rest of you,” he said. “I mean to be somebody,” and went on his own way.

He succeeded in his work, for he had an uncommon flair for mathematics and all military subjects, and he was smart on parade.

In his second year one of the masters, a Captain Mustafa, took a fancy to him, promoted him to be a pupil teacher and gave him charge of a junior class. To distinguish him from himself he gave him the second name of Kemal. From that date he was known as Mustafa Kemal.

He progressed rapidly up the College, showing great ability at examinations, and even more at teaching other boys, for he enjoyed schoolmastering and lording it over his class. He showed also a jealousy, which would grow into a spiteful dislike, of any other boy who was more successful than himself. He would play second fiddle to no one. He became churlish if anyone competed with him. He must be the outstanding figure or he would not be in the picture at all.

The friendship and protection of Captain Mustafa did him no good. The friendship was unhealthy. He developed over-rapidly. Before he was fourteen he had passed the boy stage: the gropings after sex: the petty dirtiness: and he had started an affair with a neighbor’s daughter. While the other boys were playing games or ragging each other he was off on his own, dressed up in his best clothes, swaggering down the streets, making sheep’s-eyes at the women behind the latticed windows, or ogling the cheap women in the harbor.

At seventeen he passed out well from the Cadet School and was sent to the Senior Military School at Monastir.

PART TWO

III

MONASTIR was full of the sound and dust of marching columns and the rumble of guns. Greece had seized Crete. Turkey had declared war and troops were hurrying to the battle-front.

It was a time of trouble and strife, of wars and the rumor of wars. The Ottoman Empire was in its last agonies. The Christian Powers, with their claws set into its writhing carcass, and snarling at each other, were each getting ready to tear out a rich morsel.

It was torn also by discontent. Centered round the Sultan, its organization was the same as it had been in the great days of the Osmanlis in the sixteenth century, but it had grown effete, decrepit and corrupt. Everywhere there was poverty and inefficiency, and with them discontent. All the young men cried out for reform.

The Sultan, Abdul Hamid the Red Fox, was as afraid of his own subjects as of the foreigners. He repressed every new idea. He refused all reforms. He covered the whole Empire with a network of spies, so that wherever three men talked together there was a fourth eavesdropping and reporting to the secret police. He allowed no liberty or personal security. He filled the prisons with Turks and massacred the Christians.

The land was full of the spirit of revolt and revolution, and especially in the Balkans round Monastir, where the “fire of sedition” always glowed hot, ready to burst into flame. New ideas were abroad.

With the passionate earnestness of youth Mustafa Kemal absorbed them all. Like every Albanian and Macedonian, his instinct was to resist all authority. At heart he was a revolutionary. He pictured himself leading revolt, overthrowing the despot, saving and cleansing the country. In these pictures he saw himself always the center, the leader, the ruler obeyed and respected by all.

On his holidays he went back to Salonika, but kept out of his mother’s house as much as possible. She had remarried with a well-to-do merchant from Rhodes. Mustafa Kemal had told her brutally that he disapproved. They had quarreled. After that he refused to acknowledge or speak to his step-father.

When in Salonika he spent much of his time with some Dominican monks who taught him French. He had made friends with a pleasant shy youth a little older than himself called Fethi, a Macedonian from Orchrida. Fethi knew French well. Together they devoured all the revolutionary literature they could get: Voltaire, Rousseau, all the French writers, and the political economy of Hobbes and John Stuart Mills. These were forbidden books. To be caught with them meant imprisonment. The danger made the reading all the sweeter.

Mustafa Kemal practiced oratory and harangued the other cadets: Turkey, their Turkey, must be saved from the claws of the foreigner and from the corruption of the Sultan. On freedom and liberty he wrote articles and treatises, and fiery rich-worded poetry.

At work he was as successful in Monastir as he had been in the Cadet School in Salonika. He was reported on as “a brilliant, difficult youth with whom it is impossible to be intimate.” He was specially selected for the General Staff College—the Harbia—in Constantinople, gazetted as a sub-lieutenant and sent there.

IV

MUSTAFA KEMAL was twenty, wiry in build, with a tough constitution and unlimited vitality.

He had no experience of life. Salonika had been a mean little port; Lazaran a country village; Monastir a dull provincial town. He had none of his mother’s deep beliefs or principles to keep him steady.

At once he plunged wildly into the unclean life of the great metropolis of Constantinople. Night after night he gambled and drank in the cafés and restaurants. With women he was not fastidious. A figure, a face in profile, a laugh, could set him on fire and reaching out to get the woman, whatever she was. Sometimes it would be with the Greek and Armenian harlots in the bawdy-houses in the garbage-stinking streets by Galata Bridge, where came the pimps and the homosexualists to cater for all the vices; then for a week or two a Levantine lady in her house in Pangaldi; or some Turkish girl who came veiled and by back-ways in fear of the police to some maison de rendezvous in Pera or Stambul.

He fell in...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• AUTHOR’S NOTE
• INTRODUCTION
• FOREWORD
• PART ONE
• PART TWO
• PART THREE
• PART FOUR
• PART FIVE
• PART SIX
• PART SEVEN
• PART EIGHT
• PART NINE
• PART TEN
• PART ELEVEN
• PART TWELVE - FINAL
• EPILOGUE
• APPENDIX - OUTLINE HISTORY OF PERIOD
• WORKS CONSULTED AND GENERAL REFERENCES