By Frank Ledwidge
In years of reading about Albanian military history it had never occurred to me, as a former British military officer, that Albanian and British soldiers had ever fought against each other. They may have done briefly in the Napoleonic wars, when the French recruited the Sulliot regiment in the war for the Ionian Islands (1810-1814). But until I was browsing the diaries of Aubrey Herbert, a great friend of Albania, I had not known that some of the fierce and victorious Turkish soldiers that my own uncle had fought against in Gallipoli in 1915 were Albanian.
The British writer and politician Aubrey Herbert, who was at the time an officer in the Irish Guards regiment, wrote a diary about his time in the disastrous British Campaigns of Gallipoli and Iraq in 1915-1916.He called it ‘Mons ANZACand Kut’. He relates a day when there was a brief truce in the savage fight for Gallipoli. British and Turkish soldiers were using the time to bury their dead. Soldiers from both sides crossed the lines and met. Herbert was one of them…..
‘Then a lot of other Albanians came up, and I said: “Tunya tyeta.” I had met some of them in Janina. They began clapping me on the back and cheering while half a dozen funeral services were going on all round, conducted by the chaplains. I had to stop them. I asked them if they did not want an Imam for a service over their own dead, but the old Albanian pagan roared with laughter and said that their souls were all right. They could look after themselves. Not many signs of fanaticism….
“….I retired their troops and ours, walking along the line. At 4.7 I retired the white-flag men, making them shake hands with our men. Then I came to the upper end. About a dozen Turks came out. I chaffed them, and said that they would shoot me next day. They said, in a horrified chorus: “God forbid!” The Albanians laughed and cheered, and said: “We will never shoot you.” Then the Australians began coming up, and said:
“Good-bye, old chap; good luck!”
One of those intense, moving moments from that horrendous war. A few minutes later, of course both sides were trying their best to kill each other. One of those soldiers was my own great-Uncle, who fought his first battle in Gallipolli.
The Britsh Army employs many foreigners nowadays in the absence of sufficient young Brits who are willing or able to fight in the various wars our leaders have got us into. But since 1829, one group has stood out as the bravest and best – the Ghurkas, some of the toughest fighters in the world, from Nepal. When you have a Ghurka at your side, you are safe. Simple as that. I suspect that for Turkish Soldiers, much the same applied when they had Albanians looking after their flanks. They were regularly the best troops in the Turkish Army, the most feared opponents. As Edith Durham said: “The Albanian, in short, stands out in marked contrast to all the rest of the Sultan’s subjects. In appearance he usually impresses the stranger very favorably. The ‘magnificent Turk’ that the Cook’s tourist admires in Constantinople is almost always an Albanian. So is the faithful and honest kavas that protects him. When you meet someone who cries up the splendid physique of the Turkish army, you always find he has seen the Albanian regiment.”
That of course was written just before the First World War. I have seen very little written about the Albanian experience as soldiers fighting in the First World War. Maybe it is time for Albanian and indeed Turkish historians to put that right.
