THE BRITISH ATTACK begins on an especially clear evening in the middle of November, with the kind of night sky made for stargazing. Nurredin Pasha orders the men to form two well-camouflaged lines of trenches crossing the Tigris River. The more seasoned Arab soldiers are placed on the east bank, where the brown water is already rising to meet the land. His friends in the Forty-fifth Division are stationed somewhere on the west bank. But this isn’t the time to think of them.
Eagle Eye is lying flat, with his chest, stomach, knees and feet immersed in the runny shit-colored mud of the earth. His body and rifle are covered entirely by leaves and branches. When he stays motionless, as he is now, even his comrades have trouble finding him. Behind him the din of machine guns and artillery rifles rip through sky, earth and limbs.
He shuts his eyes and listens to his breath. It travels up his chest, to his neck, then back again, until finally it reaches his right index finger. He opens his eyes again. His breath, vision, and rifle become one. Through his scope, he sees two enemy officers standing beside a low table near a mud-covered tent. He knows from the missionaries what a European man looks like, but these men look nothing like what he expected. They are dark-skinned and sport large curving mustaches. Nurredin calls these brown men who are British subjects “Indyan.” The older one wears a turban on his head like those who’ve visited the haj. Any minute now they may place a prayer rug in the direction of Mecca. Nothing about this war makes sense. How can this be a holy war if our allies pray to the Christian god and our enemies look as if they carry prayer rugs? He remembers Tekin’s words. He has a job to do, to survive, and these two would stop him if they could.
The one with the turban points down at what Eagle assumes is a map. They think they are safe. They are not. They stand on a mound of elevated mud, 150 meters away from where he is, and though his rifle is only capable of launching a bullet 120 meters, Eagle isn’t worried. He doesn’t think about the thirty-degree angle of elevation he’s supposed to assume to maximize the distance of his bullets. He doesn’t pay any attention to the kinds of calculations they taught him during training. He simply closes his eye, steadies his breath, and draws a line. A clean line from his eye, to the tip of his rifle, and beyond. Not a straight line but an arc, lovely and pure, only it ends in death.
Eagle releases breath and bullet. The turbaned one doing all the pointing drops to the floor, a privilege due to his higher ranking. There is very little blood. Eagle makes sure of it. The other soldier ducks behind a boulder. He looks around but sees nothing. Eagle stays still. This one will live. He will go back to France or England or wherever his dark-skinned people live, never knowing that a man called Eagle Eye, who once was Kemal, who once loved Lucine, considered killing him.
He continues this way until nightfall, remembering the face of every man he kills, trying hard not to think about who they are or aren’t. More than once, he envies his friends in the trenches. How wrong he had been to think of sniping as a gentler brand of killing. In the trenches, men engage in dozens of fifteen-minute offensives, with every weapon in the division firing collectively in the general direction of the enemy. No one can be certain of the trajectory of his own bullet. And their shared shame or glory is, in Kemal’s view, a much lighter burden to bear.
The brown British advance slowly up the river. The mud rises to their knees, making easy targets of all but the most careful ones. Kemal likens their clumsy bodies to flightless ducks. He marvels at the congruence of ingenuity and idiocy of this race. How can these men, who can’t even navigate their bodies safely across the water, be responsible for the massive battleships and gunboats that float down the river? How have these fools, who call everyone on the Turkish side “Abdul,” managed to build air vessels that glide across the sky, laying explosive eggs all over the land?
Thankfully, their gunboats explode in puffs of dark smoke, eliminated by carefully laid mines in the river. And Kemal is grateful that he need only face these men and not their machines. Though the enemy manages somehow to capture the first line of trenches, it is a small victory. Their dead litter the banks of the Tigris.
Kemal shivers as an errant drop of rainwater trickles down his neck. He wiggles his toes, numb and wet in their ill-fitting army boots. Through his scope, he spots Hüsnü and Tekin. His friends are safe.
He turns around to find the enemy, but they are out of range, moving closer to the river, no doubt in search of water. Dozens are busy loading the wounded onto springless carts. The cartloads of tattered bodies will be bumped to death or killed by the fresh downpour that will inevitably rain on their open wounds, but what is it to him? The enemy is retreating or else taking a much-deserved break.
THE NEXT DAY, Kemal is sleeping in a trench when the sun beats down on his head and wakes him. The familiar call of the bugle is missing, and the screaming sirens of death have gone silent.
“They’re gone,” says Mehmet the Babe. He is washing himself with a British helmet filled with water.