Forty Days of Musa Dagh

by Franz Werfel

  The Kaimakam's report was a masterpiece of political insight. Should he obtain only a portion of his requests, he would be the most independent district governor in Syria. A well-trained official heart of the last generation would no doubt have fluttered in apprehension at the rather challenging tone of this huge dispatch. Not so the Young Turk. Such blunt decisiveness was attuned to the ears of the present authorities. They were on their knees before the progressive West, and so, in superstitious awe of such words as "initiative" and "energy," even though the voice that spoke them was somewhat harsh.

  Simultaneously the ruined bimbashi, whose rosy cheeks had certainly faded out for ever, was scrawling a long dispatch to the base commandant, his immediate superior. It was verbose, full of prolix accusations against the Kaimakam, who had forced him to this disastrous undertaking, without having allowed him any time to make the necessary preparations. The bimbashi's tone was doleful, subdued, ceremonious, and consequently as wrong as it could be. The broken old man was removed within twenty-four hours and summoned to attend a court martial. He vanished through the night into obscurity, from the scene of many years' comfortable activity, the most innocent victim of Armenian success in war.

  But His Excellency the Wali of Aleppo was so impressed with the suggestions of the Kaimakam of Antioch that he had them telegraphed on to Istanbul, with a strong personal recommendation, to the Ministry of the Interior. This subordinate had touched, with his finger tips, a very sore spot in his superior. Ever since the great Jemal Pasha, with the unrestricted powers of a Roman proconsul, had been commanding in Syria, all walis and mutessarifs had shrunk to the stature of minor deities. Jemal Pasha treated these mighty ones as so many commissariat officials attached to his army. They were given curt orders to deliver at such and such a point so and so many thousand oka of grain, or, in a given time, to put this or that high-road in faultless repair. This general seemed to regard the whole civil population as an onerous set of unnecessary parasites, and civil government as a quite unnecessary evil. His Excellency of Aleppo was therefore delighted with the chance to rap this iron pasha over the knuckles, and apprise the Istanbul authorities of the wretched failure of arrogant fire-eaters.

  Talaat Bey, however, read the Kaimakam's masterpiece with mixed feelings. It was his job to protect the civil arm against encroachments by the military. And to him these Armenian deportations were a matter of far greater urgency than the boring ambitions of discontented officers. He stroked his white piqué waistcoat with his great paws, several times, as his habit was. At last the nimble fingers of the telegraphist, attached to these mighty paws, clipped the sheets together, scribbled, and attached the slip: "Urgently request immediate settlement."

  The dossier wandered without delay on to the desk of the Minister of War. It was Enver Pasha's habit never to refuse a request of Talaat's. That evening, when they came together at the Endjumen, the smaller cabinet meeting, Enver came straight to his friend. The young war-god smiled demurely, and blinked long lashes. "I've sent Jemal an urgent wire about Musa Dagh. . . ." And without awaiting Talaat's thanks, with a daintily mischievous moue: "I'm sure you ought all of you to thank me for having sent that mad creature to Syria -- well out of mischief!"

  There was an Arab hotel before the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem. Its windows looked out over the David citadel, with the towering minaret. In this hotel General Jemal Pasha, the general in command of this particular army, had set up his temporary headquarters. Here he read the dispatches from Enver, the Wali of Aleppo, and other functionaries, imploring him to provide for the instant quelling of this wretched Armenian revolt. (In those days it was the habit of all Young Turkish potentates to wire volumes to one another. It was more than a matter of mere urgency. It sprang from a barbaric joy in the use of talking electricity.) Jemal Pasha sat alone in the room. Neither Ali Fuad Bey nor the German, von Frankenstein, his two chiefs of staff, were with him. Only Osman, the head of the bodyguard, stood at the door, a valiant and romantic mountaineer, who gave the effect of a uniformed dummy in a war museum. Jemal's bodyguard served two objects. Their barbaric splendor was a concession to Asiatic love of display, which could not otherwise be indulged, in the mechanized drab of modern warfare. At the same time they served to allay a fear -- one which all through the ages has distinguished dictators from their less successful fellow men -- of assassination. Osman had orders never to leave the general alone, especially not with any caller from Istanbul. For Jemal by no means felt it to be impossible that his brethren, Enver or Talaat, might send him some highly recommended expert -- in the art of death. The general scanned the dispatches, especially Enver's, with close attention. Though really this seemed a trifling matter, it turned his sallow face sallower still; the lips, pouting out through the black beard, turned white with rage. The general sprang to his feet, began pacing up and down. He was as short as Enver, but stockily, not daintily, built. He hunched his left shoulder a little, so that people who did not know him well thought him deformed. Heavy red hands hung down limp, out of the gold-striped sleeves of his general's tunic. The mere sight of them was enough to explain the rumor that this was the grandson of a former Istanbul executioner. Enver was composed of the lightest substance, Jemal of the heaviest. If the one was all dreamy caprice, the other was all arid, passionate brooding. Jemal loathed the silken favorite of the gods, with all the detestation of physical underlings. He had had to sweat for everything which dropped into Enver's lap -- martial celebrity, luck, women's favor. Jemal took up the dispatch again, and tried, through its official impersonality, to get the tones of Enver's coquettish voice. Throughout these minutes the fate of the seven communes on Musa Dagh was more in the balance than ever previously. A chit from Jemal would have sufficed to send two full battalions of infantry, machine guns, a mountain battery, against the Damlayik. That would have settled matters in an hour, in spite of all Bagradian's valor. As Jemal read the dispatch a second time, his anger seemed to simmer up to boiling point. He snapped at the disconcerted Osman to get out, and, on pain of death, not disturb him again. Then he went across to the window, but drew back at once, fearful of showing the world his naked soul, Oh, if he could only dispose of Enver! That society beauty of the war! That inflated little drawing-room pet! That climber, who never in all his life had done one really masculine act, who'd wangled his reputation as a general by retaking Adrianople with his cavalry -- sidling into it, when the whole business was really settled. And a Jemal had to play second fiddle to this vain, insignificant playboy of the Ottoman empire! That cunning sissy dared attempt to rid himself of a Jemal, by fobbing him off with the Syrian command -- Jemal's rage against the Mars of Istanbul deepened by several fathoms of the soul. An absurd trifle had released it. Enver's telegram began with the words: "I beg you to take immediate measures." No thought of addressing him as "Your Excellency," not even with the simplest "Pasha"! And Jemal was a stickler for forms, especially when in contact with an Enver. He would use the most pedantic ceremony, even in their intimate conversations. Feverishly touchy, he watched lest Enver should fail in due respect or abate one jot of his martial dignities. This wire, with its insolent beginning was the last drop in Jemal's cup of hate, which was running over. Enver, for several months, had made monstrous demands on the general, who had always complied without a word. First Jemal had been commanded to send back his third and tenth divisions to Istanbul, later even his twenty-fifth, and finally the whole Thirteenth Army Corps, which had been moved to Baghdad and Bitlis. At the moment the dictator of Syria commanded no more than sixteen to eighteen shabby battalions, and this in a huge war area extending from the heights of the Taurus to the Suez canal. All this was Enver Pasha's work -- the war situation was merely a pretext. Of that the rabid Jemal was persuaded. The general-in-chief, with his usual pickpocket methods, had disarmed him, drawn his teeth, at the same time depriving him of any possibility of a victory. A hundred scurvy, treacherous details, seen with the full lucidity of hate, stood out in Jemal Pasha's mind, all so many fur
ther proofs of the low-down way in which Enver had always treated him. He and his clique had constantly kept Jemal at arm's length, failed to inform him of their most important resolutions, to invite him to intimate sittings. This relationship, from the very first, had been a train of carefully thought-out snubs and -- worse, most disgraceful of all -- Jemal could not assert himself against Enver! The fellow's very presence and personality made him feel irretrievably second-rate, although he knew himself far superior, both as a leader and a general. Jemal Pasha, hunching his left shoulder, still wandered round and round the table. He felt quite powerless. Crazy juvenile schemes flashed into his mind: Move on Istanbul with a new army, take prisoner this insolent puppy, open the Bosporus to the Allies, make peace with the present enemy. For the third time he took up the dispatches, but at once slammed them down on the table again. What would be the most poisonous mischief he could do to Enver and his clique? Jemal knew that in the Armenian deportations they saw their most sacred patriotic mission. He himself had often referred to them as that. But he would never have endorsed that typical piece of Enver amateurishness which made of Syria the cloaca for Armenian corpses. The Minister of War had been careful not to ask him to sittings in which the deportation law was discussed. If he had, not a shred would have been left of darling little Enver's pretty schemes. Another reason in that, why the soapy swindler had moved him southeast, out of the way. Now, in his wild itch for revenge, he wondered whether to bar the eastern frontier, drive the convoys back to Antioch, and so bring to nothing the whole great work.

  As he was thinking this, his German chief-of-staff, Colonel von Frankenstein, knocked at the door. Jemal at once put to flight the larvae of his heated imagination. He was again the steadily reflective, almost scrupulous general known to his entourage. Pouting Asiatic lips retreated into the meshes of the black beard. He was always particularly careful to give this German general the impression of grumpy, very objective logic. Von Frankenstein met the most stonily casual of Jemal's commanding officer's stares. They sat down to the table. The German opened his portfolio, drew out notes, and began a report on the disposition of fresh troops in Syria. He noticed the heap of dispatches. Enver Pasha's instructions lay on the top.

  "Your Excellency has had an important courier?"

  "Don't disturb yourself, Colonel," Jemal replied. "Nothing that really matters here depends on the Minister of War, but solely on me." One red hand gripped Enver's dispatch, which the other tore into minute shreds, and strewed them out of the window, as far as to the citadel of David. Gabriel Bagradian had found an involuntary ally. This touchy potentate neither answered, nor would he send one cannon, one machine gun, to Antakiya, to smoke out Musa Dagh.

  Jemal Pasha's refusal to intervene had saved the mountain camp from sudden destruction, not from a slower, constricting process. The dictator of Syria and Palestine might himself refuse to take a hand. But there were other, subordinate commands, with powers to act independently. The keen, hatchet-faced major reigned in Antakiya in place of the poor cashiered bimbashi. He contrived to get the general in Aleppo to detach several companies from the garrison there. The Wali also wrote to the Kaimakam, to expect the arrival of a large reinforcement of saptiehs. So that the Kaimakam had had success from his move in the Aleppo quarter. And success stimulates ambition.

  Bagradian, as he stood at his observation post, had often felt as though the Damlayik were a dead point in a wide vortex, a center of absolute rigidity, in a swirling and very hostile world. And today, as oxcarts, loaded mules, and crowds came streaming into the valley, the movement round this one dead point began to take most visible form. What was the meaning of the flood? . . .

  The Kaimakam, who saw the hour approach when outstanding political services should place him in the forefront of the party, had contrived to weave a new, strong thread of destruction into the mesh that bound the Armenian people. He had taken advantage of the Arab nationalist movement, which for some time past had kept Syrian officials with their hands full. Such widely extensive secret societies as El Ahd, "the Oath," and the "Arab Brotherhood" were disseminating fiery propaganda against Istanbul with the object of uniting all Arab tribes into one independent state. Here, as everywhere else in the world, nationalism had set to work to break up the rich, indeed profoundly religious concepts of the state into their paltry biological components. The Caliphate is a divine idea, but Turk, Kurd, Armenian, Arab denote only terrestrial accidents. The pashas of former days knew well enough that their concept of all-embracing spiritual unity -- the Caliphate -- was nobler than the uneasy itch of pushful entities for "progress." In the indolence and vice of the old empire, its laisser-aller, there lay concealed a cautious wisdom, a moderating, resigned governing principle, which entirely escaped short-sighted westerners striving after quick results. The old pashas knew with the subtlest instinct that a noble, even if ruined palace will not bear too much renovation. But the Young Turks managed to destroy the work of centuries in a breath. They did what they, the chiefs of a state comprising several races, never should have done. Their mad jingoism aroused that of subject peoples. Yet let us be just to the world's fools. It is a dull eye that can see no author behind the play. Men want what they must. The vast, supernatural ties of empire are loosened. It only means that God has swept the chessboard clear, and begun a new game against Himself.

  In any case, Arab nationalism was on the march. From the south it spread through Turkey to the line Mosul-Mersina-Adana. In the Syrian vilayets it was very much a factor to be reckoned with, since already, on the rear of the Fourth Army, or on its flanks, that mutinous envy spread abroad which so endangers an army in the field. All the uproar against the poor bimbashi in Antioch had its secret source in this envious mood. And the Kaimakam had the inspiration to win over this simmering Arab populace at the Armenians' expense. All Armenian property, by the text of the law of deportation, went to the state; that at least was how it stood on paper. In reality it was left to the discretion of provincial governors to make what use of it they pleased. On the very day after the last disaster on Musa Dagh, the Kaimakam had begun to send out officials into all districts with a numerous Arab population within possible reach of the seven villages. In each he had caused it to be proclaimed that the most fruitful land in the whole of Syria, between Suedia and Ras el-Khanzir, with vines and orchards, silkworm and bee farms, richly treed and watered, with houses and barns, was to be freely parcelled out among all those who should arrive forty-eight hours later to settle in the Armenian valley. The müdirs slyly suggested that industrious Arab cultivators were to be given the preference over Turks.

  Hence this astonishing migration. The Kaimakam had come in person for an indefinite stay in Yoghonoluk, to supervise this parcelling out of land, and ingratiate himself with the Arab notables. He took up his quarters in Villa Bagradian. In forty-eight hours the villages looked as populous as ever. Arabs and Turks, grown rich, began to fraternize. Never had they seen such houses. Palaces! It seemed almost a pity to live in them. In a trice the church had become a mosque. Allah was praised in it that same night. The mullahs thanked Him for all these new and bounteous gifts -- though it is true that a shadow still lay over them, since up there the insolent Christians were still alive. It was every believer's duty to help exterminate them. Only when that was accomplished, could they settle down to enjoy these blessings, as just men should. The men came out of the mosque with glittering eyes. They too were hotly eager to make quick work of those whose places they had taken so that a vague, nagging uneasiness in their honest peasant hearts might cease to trouble them.

  The men above grimly watched their houses being occupied. But to them it was all the same.

  What had happened to time? How many eternities did a day need to creep into night? And yet how quickly the day passed in comparison to night, the snail! Where was Juliette? Had she been living long in this tent? Had she ever lived in a house? Had she lived in Europe long ago? Certainly this could not be Juliette, who now lived captive amo
ng the mountain folk. Certainly it could not be Juliette who awoke each morning with the same start of horrible surprise. A tired, pale creature slipped out of bed, stood on the rug, pulled off a nightgown, sat on the camp chair, at the looking glass, to examine a pale, yet sun-scarred, face. Could it be Juliette? Could the face, with its dull eyes and brittle hair, please any young man? Juliette, for the last few days, had dismissed her maid in the early morning. She had begun, with nervous hands, as though she were committing a crime, to attempt some kind of toilette, with what was left of her many essences. Then she had dressed, tied on a big white apron and, round her hair, a napkin, like a coif. It was all she ever wore, now she worked in the hospital. Coif and apron gave moral support. They felt like a uniform. Uniforms were de rigueur on Musa Dagh.