Charles Glass - Tribes with Flags - Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria

I found Mehmet Udimir in his library office, where the same ancient Mongol brought us tea. I tried to tell him that I’d had an interesting time in his tourism district and that I’d found people who spoke English and Arabic. “Arabi?” he said, his face lighting. “Takellem Arabi?” Do you speak Arabic?

Suddenly, we began a conversation. It was then he told me his name had been Mohammed Haj, that he had three sons and that he was an Alawi. He sounded pleased I was going on to Syria, where the president, a fellow Alawi, was “a very strong man.” Next time I came to Alexandretta, he said, we would go to his house and drink arak.

It was Hind Koba’s cousin, an interesting man who had studied at the American University of Beirut in the 1950s, who suggested that I see the French military cemetery before I left Alexandretta. Mr Philippi, or Philipioglu in Turkish, asked me, “If you are writing a book about the Levant, don’t you want to see what is left of the only Army of the Levant?”

The taxi driver who was taking me to Antioch that evening did not know how to find the cemetery, but Mr Philippi had written directions in Turkish, which said it was near the Belediye Ekmek Fabricase, the Municipal Bread Factory. We drove to a large bakery on the outskirts of town, east of the main highway, and then a hundred yards along the side of a high wall to a monumental gate. A lintel above the gate, supported by three arches, was inscribed, Cimetière Militaire Français.

“I never knew this was here,” the driver said as he stopped his old Ford.

The arch in the gate’s centre was higher than those on the sides, which had their own, smaller inscriptions. On the left were the words, Aux Morts de Syrie Cilicie, and on the right, lère et 4ème Divisions de I’Armée du Levant. We had reached the final resting place of the Army of the Levant, a small piece of a foreign field that would be forever France. It was as dismal and tragic as France’s Levant adventure itself, an enterprise begun in the Crusades, rekindled when Leibniz urged his plan for an invasion of the Ottoman Empire on Louis XIV, dashed for a century after Napoleon’s defeats in Palestine and Egypt, revived in the post-First World War occupation and flickering even then with a token force of paratroopers in Lebanon.

Within the high walls row upon row of stone crosses stood guard over marble slabs. As I walked slowly past each grave, reading the names of the officers and men, or the inscription to each soldat inconnu, a young man walked up behind me. Without disturbing the peace of the dead, he quietly told me in French he was the caretaker. His name was Salim, and he was twenty-one. His father had been caretaker for forty years before him. “C’est territoire français,” he said of the ground on which we stood. He told me there were 561 graves in all. He left me to pace the ranks, and, as I read the names and dates, I noticed something strange. All of them had died between 1919 and 1922, yet the First World War had ended between Turkey and the Allies in 1918. Enri Bonari, a corporal, had died on 17 February 1921. Auguste Boyer, also a corporal, had been killed on 21 July 1922. There was something even stranger, a spectre that kept cropping up: graves of members of the Légion Arménienne and the Bataillon Assyro-Chaldeen. Joseph Romechaud of the Armenian Legion died on 1 August 1919, and Gabriel Josim of the Assyro-Chaldean Battalion was killed on 29 March 1921. The Levant Army was a collection of local minorities, hired by the French to fight the Turks, when, after the war, the Allies, having taken Turkey’s Arab provinces, launched a campaign to conquer Turkey itself. It was little wonder that, when the Army of the Levant left in 1939, most of the Armenians and Assyrian Christians fled with it.

Salim motioned to me to follow him to the south-east corner of the graveyard, where crescents rather than crosses stood above four tombstones. “Musulmans,” he said. Two of them were simply soldats français inconnus, the third plaque had been painted over and was illegible, and the fourth, grave number 238, was marked, “Domani.” He may have been a cook or camp-follower, a Gunga Din in the service of the invaders remembered only by the nickname his French masters had given him. He had died with the army he served, but there was no indication of when.

In the centre of the far wall, nearest the sea, was a large cupola supported on four sides by Islamic arches, a structure blending the Western neoclassical with the Oriental. Carved into the stonework was the memorial: A LA MEMOIRE DES MORTS POUR LA FRANCE EN SYRIE-CILICIE. On either side were monuments to the Tirailleurs Algériéns, Tirailleurs Sénégalais, Zouaves de 3ème RM et 83 soldats inconnus, who had come from all over the French Empire to give their lives for nothing. The dome was like a temple, hovering protectively above a long slab of stone on the ground. Decorated with nothing more than a simple cross, the slab had no inscription, nothing to reveal who lay beneath it. Salim whispered, “Le Général.”

The general and 561 of the men under his command stayed behind while the survivors, Christian and Muslim, French and native, retreated to other corners of the dying empire. The last detachment in Turkey of the Armée du Levant remained, buried, numbered and for the most part named and dated, on the only remnant of French territory in the eastern Mediterranean. They had fought and died near here, but there was nothing about their battles worth remembering. Their army had passed through, like so many before it, and left its dead beside a port town which took little notice of history’s struggles. As we left them to begin our ascent of the Amanus Mountains, the sun was setting into the sea, extending a finger of dying red light through the darkness into the open tomb of the last commander of the Army of the Levant.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.