The Last of A Kind: Speaking of Basra and Baghdad

Long ago, in the 1800s and 1900s, they came for the boys, and forced them into the army. A war needed ‘material.’ Human material.

It’s called conscription today.

Back then, it was just a round up of village boys. What are called recruiters now, back then were just soldiers on horseback, riding with sabres and rifles, often in the night, arriving almost as a dream in the villages.

Clouds of dust, saddles whining, silver tack shining, saddle blankets tasseled. What tribal boy could not be enchanted by the regalia alone?

Yakup Satar was of an outlying Tartar tribe, born in Crimea. As a young man, he had a leaning toward allegiance to Turkey. His people were fierce: his father, a Tartar chieftain, had fought for independence from Russia/

Yakup was a boy of 17 when he went into WWI against the British in the Mesopotamian campaign.

Yakup was 19 when he was captured by the British in February 1917, as the British and Indian army drove the Ottoman Empire’s forces back up the Tigris from Basra towards Baghdad.

Released after WWI, fighting and allegiance to freedom seemed his greatest reason, and he re-upped in the Turkish War of Independence, and next, the Greco-Turkish War.

Finally, unlike many who’d been taken prisoner during those years who died by the thousands from starvation and dysentery and murder… Yakup finally made it home. After all he’d seen, it must have been, as they say, an adjustment.

Life went on.

What did he have to show for it all besides profound longevity and luck, and his war memories, and his own foibles and heroics?

Long ago when he came finally home from warring, a woman married him… and slept with him, perhaps to take the war out of him… as a good woman will often do for a soldier who’s been burnt near to the ground by all he’s lived and seen.

The woman gave Yakup in barter for some of his perseverations on warring, six living children…. who in turn gave him 50 living grandchildren.

The precariousness of life during war and mayhem and murder,
but then the definitive preciousness of life force, after.

This week, Yakup, now an old, old warrior, died at age 110, the last Turkish veteran of the First World War.
And more… a last of his kind.