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The entire middle section of The Walnut Trees is taken up with the life of Vincent Berger himself, whose fragmentary notes on his `` encounters with mankind '' are now conveyed by his son.

`` He was not much older than myself, '' writes the narrator, `` when he began to feel the impact of that human mystery which now obsesses me, and which makes me begin, perhaps, to understand him ''.

For the figure of Vincent Berger Malraux has obviously drawn on his studies of T. E. Lawrence ( though Berger fights on the side of the Turks instead of against them ), and like both Lawrence and Malraux himself he is a fervent admirer of Nietzsche.

A professor at the University of Constantinople, where his first course of lectures was on Nietzsche and the `` philosophy of action '', Vincent Berger becomes head of the propaganda department of the German Embassy in Turkey.

As an Alsatian before the first World War he was of course of German nationality ; ;

but he quickly involves himself in the Young Turk revolutionary movement to such an extent that his own country begins to doubt his patriotism.

And, after becoming the right-hand man of Enver Pasha, he is sent by the latter to pave the way for a new Turkish Empire embracing `` the union of all Turks throughout Central Asia from Adrianople to the Chinese oases on the Silk Trade Route ''.