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CHAPTER 5 – TWO SHIRTS OF FLAME 
187 
any sense in its course that there is any gap between the narrator’s perception and 
reality nor does she use the narration to characterise the narrator. As previously 
noted, the background to the narration is intended to reflect the external reality of the 
war, as the English reader is repeatedly told by Halide Edip herself.
The moral categories of the novel are also relatively straightforward. There is some 
indulgence to the misguided such as some Circassians or old believers in the 
Sultanate. Ayşe can feel for the Anatolian irregulars who started the resistance but 
will be swept aside by the regular army
44
. İhsan can weep after three days of 
“clearing” a village which supported the “counter revolution” and hanging its ring 
leader, Mehmet Çavuş
45
, but this is said to be his regular business
46
. Such 
reservations, however, are episodic and do not darken the image of the nationalist 
movement just as nothing lightens the blackness of the Greek invaders. Nor is there 
any doubt of the kind expressed in 
Yaban 
about the actualisation of the future 
improvements to which İhsan simply aspires. 
The characters in the plot are characterised merely by where they stand in relation to 
the nationalist movement. Ayşe is a paragon but, as she says herself, a love of her 
must be a love of Smyrna. İhsan having been an exemplary Ottoman officer, now 
presents the perfect image of the Nationalist officer. The triangular relations between 
the Anatolian population, the counter revolutionaries and the nationalists are 
44
Adıvar 1924, 174 
45
Adıvar 1924, 168 
46
Adıvar 1924, 173 

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CHAPTER 5 – TWO SHIRTS OF FLAME 
188 
represented by the love triangle of Mehmet Çavuş, Kezban and İhsan. It is almost 
inevitable that a simple village girl Kezban is infatuated with İhsan to the point of 
risking her life to save his while being pursued by the villain, Mehmet Çavuş. As for 
the green colour of the eyes of Ayşe, Kezban and İhsan, which is repeatedly 
emphasised, comment is superfluous.
As the first novel of the War of Independence written before the war was even over 
Ateşten Gömlek
sets a pattern. The topoi of the heroic woman, the decadent old 
order, Anatolia, a non combatant population indifferently mobilised, the virtue of the 
nationalists, the treacherous local Christians, the vicious invading Greeks and the 
sufferings of the innocent Muslim victims at their hands are all here.
The fragments so far found of Yakup Kadri’s 
Ateşten Gömlek
are three (A, B and C) 
and set out in Appendix 1 with their translation in Appendix 2.. As already discussed 
the piece published in 
Dergâh
has a military man narrating in the first person his 
protection of an adulterous woman named Cennet (Fragment A). The two manuscript 
pages which have an indeterminate position contain a soliloquy of a man in torment 
(Fragment B). The piece labelled as the last pages of the novel has the narrator, who 
is addressed as Tevfik Bey, visiting the dying and delirious Kerim Bey apparently in 
a hospital (Fragment C). There has obviously been a war going on . In Fragment A 
the narrator lives in a tent and refers to his sergeant and his privates; in Fragment C 
there is a reference to “yesterday’s war”. However, the war is not in the foreground. 

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