Derna

I'm a merchant seaman, you know, and this thing started two months ago.

We were in the Mediterranean heading for Derna.

That's in Libya.

We were pulling in at night and the lights on the shore were sparkling.

Well, have you? No, no.

I ain't got no one to buy anything for.

Well, does anyone know what street it's on? In Derna? Street names? Nothing but alleyways except for a few blocks that they call downtown.

But they say you recognize it because it's lighted only with candles.

Compass had seen the British push the Italians back from their early war advances into Egypt and would see the Italian defenses of eastern Libya basically completely fall apart.

The British attack would capture Tobruk and just keep moving through Derna and Benghazi.

Eventually, the British forces would make their way to El Aglia, on the border between Cyrenaica and Tripletania.

This represented an advance of over 500 miles.

And speaking of historical events that got documented obsessively, Marines and flags on foreign soil.

The Marines raised the American flag at Derna, Libya, April 27th, 1804.

During the First Barbary War, to the shores of Tripoli.

From the Marine Corps hymn refers to this campaign.

forcing the Italian garrison into a permanent state of watchfulness that saps their strength as surely as any direct assault could.

Mustafa Kemal is given increasing responsibility over the forces around Tobruk and then Derna, and it is at Derna in the early winter months that he faces the engagement that will come to define this chapter of his life.

Not because it changes the course of the war, which by then is already sliding toward an outcome shaped more by European diplomacy than by anything happening in the sand, but because of what happens to him personally in the middle of it.

The Italians, frustrated by their inability to expand much beyond the coastal towns they have seized, launch an assault meant to break the Ottoman Arab lines encircling Derna and push the resistance back into the desert interior, where they assume it will wither for lack of supply.

Mustafa Kemal is present at the front when the attack comes, moving between positions to steady the local commanders, and it is during this engagement, amid the chaos of artillery fire and the confused, dust-choked exchanges of rifle fire across broken ground, that a fragment strikes him near the eye.

For a moment, a moment that will later be recounted and re-recounted by those who serve alongside him, there is genuine uncertainty about whether he will lose the eye entirely, whether this brilliant, restless officer's career, perhaps his life, will end here in a province most of Constantinople barely thinks about, fighting a war that half the empire has already quietly resigned itself to losing.

What Libya and the Balkans give him, above all, is not glory.

There is remarkably little glory in either campaign for him or for the empire he serves, but clarity.