If they tell us about a western globetrotter fighting on the Middle East front of World War I and that he had written his memoirs, most of us will think of Lawrence of Arabia. Few will know that two years before he published in London the first English edition, and limited to his friends, of his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom ("The seven pillars of wisdom"), Venezuelan Rafael de Nogales had already published in Spanish Four years under the Media Moon (1924), where he narrated his experiences in the Ottoman army during the First World War. While Lawrence is known throughout the world, few know about the exciting life of Rafael de Nogales.
Rafael de Nogales Méndez (1877-1936) was born into a wealthy Venezuelan family, with coffee businesses, for which he had dealings with German companies, this fact facilitated the Rafael's trip to Europe to train militarily in Germany, Belgium and Spain. In 1898 he had his baptism of fire fighting alongside the Spanish. He then began a journey through North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Great Britain and the United States, participating in different wars and revolutions before the First World War. Unfortunately, there is a lack of serious historical research that demonstrates with other sources the interesting events that Nogales narrates in his books.
It is normal that in many places our protagonist is described as an adventurer, but he did not consider himself such since he thought that an adventurer was a "pedantic illiterate, or socially an idle gentleman, out of action, who has no particular career and who is always ingeniously looking for ways to make money”[1], and he considered himself a knight errant; “A gentleman by birth who for every voluntary or selfless daring action has an elegant gesture. He is often a career soldier too worthy to sell his sword to the highest bidder but too impatient to wait for the war to continue on his lot. He cannot wait, he searches for it, creates it, invents it and directs it. He hates nothing but rust on his armor or a peaceful disposition in his soul. He goes out into the world to break spears for his ideals; the strongest of all is embodied in the old romantic phrase:act or die. For some men not to act is to die, to die an unpleasant spiritual death”[2].
Rafael Nogales was on the island of Trinidad, in the Caribbean, when he learned that the Great War had broken out and that Venezuela had declared its neutrality, obviously he could not miss that opportunity to action, honoring its motto “when you see a good war, get ready to fight in it” . If within the romantic conception born in the 19th century there were good wars, although Goya had already questioned this concept in his magnificent engravings The disasters of war Of course, for many, the First World War would be the beginning of the end of that war between gentlemen in which Nogales believed.
The journey of Rafael Nogales
As he writes in his biography despite having been raised and educated in Germany (both of his sisters married Germans), he decided to sacrifice his personal sympathies “for the sake of the Latin race, going to offer their services to the small but heroic Belgium, which had become overnight the champion of the weak nations although aware of their honor and independence”[3]. Despite his chivalrous offer, Rafael Nogales failed to be accepted into the Belgian army, as he did not belong to an allied nation. He then tried his hand at the French army, where he was only offered the opportunity to enter the Foreign Legion. In spite of everything, Nogales was not discouraged and continued looking for his good war for Europe In this way he arrived in Montenegro, a country that he describes in a romantic way, once again showing his sensitivity towards the weakest; “In those mountains breathed a free and heroic people who, after resisting the power of all the sultans for seven centuries, were at that time challenging the eagles of Austria from Cathar to Sarajevo with an army perhaps less than fifteen thousand men. "[4]. As in Belgium and France, Nogales failed in his attempt to enter the Montenegrin army. Thus, our protagonist arrived in the then neutral Bulgaria, where, thanks to his contacts with the German military, he managed to convince the Turks to accept his services, becoming Nogales Bey and fighting on different fronts in the Middle East. Paradoxically he would fight as an officer on the opposite side to the one he had initially thought of enlisting , alongside those sultans whom the Montenegrins had resisted.
Nogales began his service in the Ottoman Third Army in Erzurum (Anatolia), "Turkish Siberia", in January 1915, fighting the Russians in the footsteps of the Caucasus. If the majority of the soldiers verified in the trenches that that conflict had nothing to do with the glorious, short and victorious war that had been instilled in them and that made them march happily to the front, the case of Nogales was different; he was a professional military man with both regular and irregular warfare experience, and thus accustomed to the disasters of war. Nothing in his first contact with the Great War was excessively different from what he had experienced in previous military campaigns. When in the spring of 1915 he was sent to the province of Van, where an Armenian rebellion had broken out, Nogales had already found the mutilated corpses of numerous Armenians and began to discover that the Turkish front in the Caucasus was different from other and that in it not only was the Russians fought, but there was also an irregular war in which national, ethnic and religious rivalries that sank their deep roots in history were mixed. Initially, his opinion of the Armenians was not very positive, criticizing their attempt to create an independent Armenia with the support of Russia, trying to "seize by force the Turkish provinces of Bitlis, Van and Erzurum (in which they barely represented the 30% of the population, on average)”[5]. Nogales thought that autonomy was the most logical and just solution to the Armenian national problem within the Turkish Empire.
When he finally reached the city of Van, where Armenians and Turks were fighting, he was the only Christian taking part in the battle on the Turkish side, there were no German or Austrian officers, usual in other battles and fronts. It was in that campaign that he began to rethink his participation in the war, when contemplating the massacres of the Armenian civilian population , especially the elderly, women and children, asking to be discharged from the Turkish army, which was not accepted and feeling his life was in danger, given the Turkish interest in keeping the massacre secret. This last fact is questioned by Mehmet Necati Kutlu, Professor of History at the University of Ankara, who rightly points out that if the Turks had wanted to kill Nogales they would not have had too much trouble doing so, and who provides a document by General Mahmud Kâmil in which indicates that Nogales could not cause any harm if he discharged from the army even if he made some negative publication about the army and the Armenians[6]. Of course, this document is from October 1915, when the Armenian genocide and its international knowledge was in its infancy, surely two years later the opinion would not be the same.
It is evident that Nogales was a gentleman who emerged from the romanticism of the 19th century who in the First World War, like Lawrence of Arabia, encountered the harsh and black reality of the war in the 20th century. Throughout the book he describes the cruelty of the massacre of the Armenians; the mutilation of their bodies, the murder of women, the elderly and children, despite his attempts on various occasions to put an end to those massacres and save some lives, a fact that he will seldom achieve. Nogales will not blame the massacre on the regular Turkish army but on Kurdish volunteers and militiamen who followed orders from politicians like Governor Dyevded Bey , who "because of his patriotism, fanaticism or bloodthirsty instincts, call it what you want, had ended up becoming the exterminating angel of the Armenians in the eastern provinces" [7].
The Armenian genocide according to Rafael Nogales
When Nogales writes about the massacre of the Armenians he does so from the typical western point of view that at that moment he feels above the Eastern peoples, whom he considers cruel and inferior, but it is clear that he does not stop cursing his bad luck by becoming, along with the Muslims, the executioner of the Christians. His ongoing dilemma between fulfilling his obligation as an officer in the Turkish army and his feeling of Christian solidarity with the Armenians is shown in his book. His testimony of the genocide of the Armenians is of great interest as he is both that of a Christian and that of a professional soldier in the service of the Turks, not implicated in historical hatreds between each other.
The interest and veracity of what Nogales describes is shown in a certain way in that his testimony of him has been used by both Turks and Armenians . Although the first Turkish translator of his book, Ismael Hakki, was very critical of Nogales's description of the Armenian question and accused him of being "a foreign officer without ancestry who bit the hand that lent him the sword", the truth is that the book confirms the Turkish version that their actions against the Armenians, initially at least, only responded to a war situation, in the face of their uprising against the Ottomans. Also justifying what happened because of the atrocities that the Armenians also carried out against Muslim civilians. While the Armenians have also used his testimony to prove that they were the victims of the first genocide of the 20th century. The truth is that both sides are right, Nogales describes in stark detail the horrors of the fighting, the massacres, and the deportations that the Armenian civilian population suffered, while it is beyond doubt that the Armenians rose in armed rebellion against Turkey, instigated by Russia, and also massacred unarmed Muslim civilians.
Rafael Nogales did not leave the Turkish army after the siege of Van but he did manage to be transferred to the sixth Ottoman army to fight on the front in Iraq and Iran, later in 1916 he it would incorporate the fourth army on the Syrian front, fighting in Sinai, in Gaza and against the Arab uprising . His last service in the Turkish army was as military governor in Sinai before returning to Istanbul and attending the capitulation of Turkey on October 31, 1918.
After the First World War
Although US President Wilson called Rafael Nogales "the executioner of Armenia" and vetoed his entry into the United States, the truth is that the Venezuelan behaved at all times as a professional military man trying to the best of his ability to help the civilian population caught up in the whirlpool of violence that was the war in the Middle East. Surely his thought that that genocide was only the result of the brutality of the Eastern peoples, is what allowed him to continue maintaining his motto that there were good wars, unfortunately, as the imperialist wars of the 19th century had already demonstrated and will demonstrate the Second World War, neither genocide nor extreme cruelty to the civilian population were exclusive to Eastern peoples .
After the Great War and writing about his experience in it, Nogales still had time to be a war correspondent in Nicaragua , where he met Sandino, later writing his book The Plunder of Nicaragua (1928), which for his denunciation of North American imperialism was seized by the United States government. He would finally die of illness in Panama in 1936. Among the floral offerings on his grave was an oak wreath with gold laurels. She had been sent by Kaiser Wilhelm II , exiled at the time in Holland. The crown was accompanied by a card with these words:"To Rafael de Nogales Méndez, generalissimo in the great war, one of the bravest and noblest knights I have ever known."
Bibliography
- Jasmina Jäckel de Aldana, “From the globetrotting adventurer to the Venezuelan national hero?”, Asian and African Studies , Colegio de México, January-April 2000. http://www.redalyc.uaemex.mx
- Mehmet Necati Kutlu, “A Latin American Officer in the Ottoman Army and Some New Documents”, 1915 the longest year of the Ottoman Empire. A centennial look . National University of Costa Rica, 2015.
- Peter Englund “The beauty and pain of battle:The First World War in 227 fragments” Editorial Roca 2011.
- Rafael de Nogales Méndez, Memoirs , Volumes I and II, Editorial Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho, La Expresion Americana Collection, 1991.
- Rafael de Nogales Méndez, Four years under the Media Luna , Editorial Foundation The Dog and the Frog, Caracas, 2006.
- Violeta Rojo, “Memoirs of a Venezuelan Adventurer:Rafael de Nogales Méndez”, Contexto Virtual Magazine , No. 8, 2002. http://www.saber.ula.ve/bitstream/123456789/18898/1/violeta_rojo.pdf
Notes
[1] Rafael de Nogales Méndez, Memories , p. 27.
[2] Ibid p.28.
[3] Rafael de Nogales Méndez, Four Years Under the Crescent , p. 31.
[4] Ibid p. 34.
[5] Ibid p. 44.
[6] Mehmet Necati Kutlu “A Latin American officer in the Ottoman army and some new documents”, p. 25.
[7] Rafael de Nogales Méndez, Four Years Under the Crescent , p. 139.