Forty Days of Musa Dagh

by Franz Werfel

  Bagradian had ordered Chaush Nurhan to lead the attack against the captured sector with the other group of a hundred and fifty rifles. Nurhan advanced his men from behind stone barricades, towards the chief trench, with its flank supports. More than the dark -- a soughing beneficent wind muffled this crouching, rustling movement so perfectly that the Armenians managed to get some little way past the trenches, on either side, and so have them surrounded. One thing was especially in their favor. The Turkish trench garrison, one of the strong companies left behind, had stupidly lit a couple of acetylene lamps, which sharply lit up the soldiers' heads and plunged all else in densest obscurity. Here, too, endlessly calm and set on their object, the Armenians sighted the garishly outlined targets. It was as though nobody breathed. Not a limb stirred. Every life seemed buried in the shaftless coal mine of this night.

  The Kaimakam and the major were standing together at the place where, between ruined walls, the track first leaves the lower slope, to continue upwards through the wide conduit of the ilex gully. They were on the lower edge of the camp. Some men with lanterns and torches stood in a group to light them.

  The yüs-bashi glanced at his ultra-modern wristwatch, with its luminous face. "Plenty of time. I'm going to have them waked an hour before sunrise.

  The Kaimakam seemed concerned for the major's physical well-being. "Hadn't you better sleep in your quarters, Yüs-Bashi? You've a heavy day behind you. Bed will be good for you."

  "No! No! I don't want any sleep."

  The Kaimakam said good-night, went a few paces followed by his lantern bearers, came uphill again. "Don't misunderstand my question, Major. But can I be quite certain that nothing unexpected will happen in the next few hours?"

  The major, who had not come down to meet him, but stayed where he was, with his head half averted, repressed an angry reply. This civilian meddling was insufferable. He growled: "Naturally I've taken all the usual precautionary measures. Although my poor fellows need their rest, I've set very strong outpost lines. You needn't have bothered to come back, Kaimakam. I've also made up my mind to send out patrols to beat up the country all round our camp."

  And as the major said, so it was done. But these patrols, exhausted corporals and men, went stumbling half asleep past the rigid Armenians, whose eyes shone feline out of the leaves. They were soon back to report to the officer in charge that the country all round was clear and in order.

  Bagradian threw down the flaming matchstick with which he had just lit a cigarette. Little flames darted along the grass, and set fire to a tuft of it. Iskuhi, still at his side, trod out the greedy flames.

  "How dry everything is," she said.

  It was this match that inspired the impossible thought in Bagradian: He stood there, lost in it. The notion was double-edged. It might do his own people as much damage as the enemy. Bagradian held out his handkerchief, to test the direction of this strong wind. West wind, sea wind, driving branches downwards towards the valley. Neither he alone nor the Council could make the decision. Ter Haigasun, the supreme head of the people, must say yes or no.

  After an instant's silence Ter Haigasun said: "Yes."

  Meanwhile the whole armed force had vacated the altar square and Town Enclosure. Both storming parties breathlessly awaited the signal. Between the surrounded trench and the rock barricades the whole mass of reservist villagers. But that was not all. It must unfortunately be recorded that Stephan, long since escaped from his mother, was very elated and pleased with life, in spite of imminent catastrophe. This creeping and whispering in the dark, this close proximity of so many bodies on the alert, these sudden gleamings and extinguishings of hooded lanterns, and a hundred more such adventurous uncertainties, keyed up young Stephan's excited nerves to the sensation of having been transported into the midst of a pleasantly thrilling world of dreams. All this was enhanced by the very unusual order just issued to the cohort of youth, and their pride in being allowed, as the last defense of the encampment, to share in plans still not divulged. It is therefore easily understood that, even from their present exhausted state, Stephan and his comrades had been roused to irrepressible excitement.

  This strange order concerned the stores of oil. All the oil casks on the Damlayik, including those of the Bagradian family, were being rolled without further explanation on to the altar square, as well as whatever branches, sticks, and cudgels could be got together from the sites of the extinguished fires. First Stephan and his comrades, then the women, and all children of nine and over, were ordered from these piles of brush-wood to pick out as strong and thick a branch as possible. The teachers and Samuel Avakian, who supervised this distribution, had all they could do to prevent noisy quarrelling. They struck with their fists and whispered: "Quiet, you silly devils." It was the same round the oil casks. The branches must be dipped to the middle in the thick liquid, and twirled round in it. There were at least three thousand of them. It took a very long time. The people were still crowding round the casks when a whistle blast gave the signal and the hidden attackers opened fire on those trenches taken by the Turks. Its sounds were echoed at once a hundredfold by hollow din out of the gully, interspersed with drowsy long-drawn cries of alarm, so hoarse as hardly to be human.

  Gabriel Bagradian stood on a little summit of rock entanglements. During the sudden, crackling tumult of battle, a sound entirely different from that of any previous attack, the leader, in a kind of dream-like expectancy, had said nothing at all to the people waiting behind. Several minutes went by. The crackle of small arms sounded thinner. Gabriel could scarcely realize that the first act of his surprise attack had succeeded so quickly. But Chaush Nurhan was already giving the signal -- a few vehement flourishes with his lantern. The trench was back in the hands of its first defenders, who overflowed it, rushing down the slope after the enemy. Some of the Turkish infantrymen got lost in the dark and fell into the hands of pursuing decads. Some of them ran, stumbled, leapt downhill, towards the shouting gully and were bayoneted, or felled by their pursuers' rifle-butts. Gabriel sent Avakian back to the reserve. "Ready and forwards." He waited till the whispering shoals approached the rock on which he stood; than he ran forward and headed them. Slowly they crowded onwards down the slopes, through the thick shrubs, past the dead, down toward the din-filled grove.

  There it was like a hunt in full cry. The bravest among the officers, onbashis, and soldiers might try, again and again, to come up close to the brushwood conflagrations around their camp and douse them -- they extinguished their own lives. The ring of komitaji rifles drove them back into the center of the gully. Officers yelled contradictory orders. No one heard. Infantrymen and saptiehs ran about bellowing to find their rifles; yet, when they had them, they found them impossible to use. Every shot they fired might have killed a brother or a comrade. Many flung away their arms, which impeded them, as they ran or leapt through this thorny pathlessness. The very inner life of Musa Dagh seemed to do its share in this gruesome destruction. The revengeful thicket grew rankly luxuriant. Trees became treacherously taller. Whipping twigs and plants twined like lashes round the sons of the Prophet and brought them low. Those who fell, lay on. The indifference to death which marks their race descended on them. They buried their heads in thorny nests. The yüs-bashi, by dint of his own cool energy and many strokes with the flat of his sword, had collected round him a little knot of utterly flabbergasted infantrymen. When sergeants, corporals, and old soldiers grew aware of their officer, in a feeble glimmer of dying campfire, they joined the rest. The major, thrusting his sword towards the heights, yelled: "Forward!" and: "After me!" With an odd excitement he noticed his phosphorescent wristwatch. Suddenly he remembered the words which he had said last night to the Kaimakam: "I don't want to go on living if tomorrow that Armenian camp still isn't cleared." And truly at that moment, he did not want to live. "After me!" he yelled again and again. He could feel the whole force of his own will power, able by its single strength to transfer this rout into a break-through. His example h
ad its effect. And even their longing to be out of this inferno of a wood urged the soldiers on. They roused themselves to leave the cover of their own apathy and, bellowing, followed their commander. They came scatheless to the upper end of the gully. With thudding hearts, utterly exhausted, having lost all consciousness of reality, they went on, lurching up the mountainside, into the light of lanterns, the fire of decads, which received them. They were flung back like so many lifeless dummies. The yüs-bashi did not at first perceive his wound. He felt very surprised at suddenly finding himself so isolated. Then his right arm felt heavy. To feel the blood and pain pleased, almost delighted, him. His shame, his loss, had become far less. He dragged himself back, with his eyes shut. . . . " Fall down somewhere," he hoped, "and forget it all."

  When, from recaptured trenches the din of battle retreated downhill, that was the sign for the Town Enclosure. A tongue of fire shot up. One of the oil-soaked torches began to crackle into flame and, within a few minutes, had passed it on to a thousand more. Most of the villagers had followed the example of Haik, Stephan, and the other boys, who then, with a torch in each hand, moved off in a long, extended line. Earth had never seen such a torchlight procession. Each one who bore these spluttering candles at arm's length was startled by this incomprehensible clarity, which seemed to light up his very soul. The light was not, as single flames are, an intensification of endless dark, but, like the light that fires a whole people, it shot a glorious breach in the dark of space. The long, far-flung lines and groups moved onwards slowly, ceremoniously, as if they were on their way, not to a battlefield, but to a place of prayer.

  Down in the villages, in Yoghonoluk, Bitias, in Habibli, Azir, in Wakef and Kheder Beg -- yes, in the north, in Kebussiye even, the honey village, not one new tenant could get to sleep. When the wild clatter of the surprise attack reached these villages, their armed inhabitants snatched up rifles, set out, and now garrisoned the low ridges, though they did not venture too near the gully. But their women stood in the gardens, or on the roofs, avidly and fearfully listening to the furious yelping of the bullets. Suddenly, at one in the morning, they saw the sun come up behind the Damlayik. Its black ridge stood sharply outlined; behind it spread a tender, rosy glow. This unearthly vision, this never-to-be-equalled sign and wonder, worked on these credulous women's spirits like the trump of doom. And when, a short while later, the whole edge of the mountain burst into flames, it was too late for natural explanations. Jesus Christ, the prophet of unbelievers, had let the sun of His might rise behind the mountain; the Armenian jinn of Musa Dagh, in alliance with Peter, Paul, Thomas, and the other worthies of the Evangel, were protecting this people. The ancient myth of supernatural powers behind the Armenians had found its completest confirmation. More than these simple women became imbued with it. The mullahs, too, watching the miracle from the round gallery encircling the church dome of Yoghonoluk, took flight out of this mosque that had been the Church of Ever-Increasing Angelic Powers.

  Less magically, but far more terribly, were those Turkish soldiers still on the mountain-slope appalled by this irresistible line of lights. It gave the impression of vastly superior numbers, sprung up out of nowhere, as though the whole Armenian nation, all the convoys dispersed over Turkey, were gathered at that time and in this place to avenge, with torches and balls of fire, on a mere handful of their oppressors, the monstrous wrongs they had endured. The little garrisons of Turks before each defense-sector raced back down the slopes. No officer could manage to hold them. All still alive in the cursed region of the ilex gully had fought their way, heedless now of bullets, through thickets, and come out on the lower slopes. The Armenians were not numerous enough to box-barrage the mouth of the gully. A few valiant officers and men, missing their bashi from among them, had once again forced their way out, to snatch up that wounded, unconscious officer just as he was about to be taken prisoner. They carried him down to Villa Bagradian headquarters. During which painful journey he came to himself. He knew now that everything was over, that the Christians had scattered his whole power, that for him there could be no return, no reinstatement. From the depths of his soul he cursed the bullet which had only shattered his right arm, and not done its business more efficiently. He only longed to faint again. That prayer, however, remained unanswered. The clearest, coldest perception of precisely what this would mean worked on and on in him.

  The procession of fire had no more enemies left to face. Slowly the long lines of incendiaries approached the ilex gully, the woods around it. About half-way down the slope Ter Haigasun halted the long lines and gave the order (passed from one to the other) to cast flaming stumps into the undergrowth. The flames sank down in the smoking shrubs. From all sides, in a few minutes, there came an endless crackling, as of pistol shots, as if the whole Damlayik would explode. Flames shot high in many places. The woods were on fire. Woe, if the wind should veer in the next few hours. The Town Enclosure, which lay nearest the edge of the mountain, would have been the prey of flying sparks and tongues of flame, borne down the wind. It was fortunate that Gabriel Bagradian should have cleared a glacis before these sectors. This forest fire ate its way so quickly, so instantaneously, up the sun-dried flanks of the Damlayik, that what stood here in a roaring mass of flame looked like no earthly fire, no earthly fuel. There was scarcely time for komitajis and decads lower down the slope to rescue the spoils of the attack; more than two hundred Mauser rifles, abundant munitions, two field-kitchens, five sumpter mules with their fodder, bivvy sheets, rugs, lanterns and much besides.

  When the real sun came up, a stony sleep lay on the Damlayik. The fighters slept where they had fallen. Only a very few had had the strength to drag back into cover. The boys slept, coiled in heaps on the bare earth. Women in the Town Enclosure had sunk down lifeless on their mats, unwashed, tousled, without a thought of their tiny children who whimpered hungrily. Bagradian slept; so did all the leaders. Even Ter Haigasun had not the strength to complete his Mass of thanksgiving. Towards the end of it, overcome with exhaustion, he had sunk down like a drunkard before the altar. The mukhtars slept, without having picked the day's sheep for killing. The butchers slept and the milkmaids. No one went to work. No fires were lit in the kitchen square, nor water carried from the wellsprings. No one could attend to the many wounded still lying in agony in their trenches, nor to those who in the course of hours had managed to drag their way to the hospital hut. All who are summarized so impersonally in that one colorless word "wounded" lay strewn about in horrible reality: faces without eyes or noses, chins mushed into bleeding pulp, bodies smashed by dumdum bullets, yelping men with stomach wounds, dying of thirst. Only death, not Bedros Hekim, could help these wretched. But till he bent compassionately over them, they too were helped through dragging hours by some narcotic, feverish half-sleep.

  Down in the valley slept the infantry, the saptiehs, chettehs, as many as came clear of the slaughter. The officers slept in their rooms at Villa Bagradian. Yesterday's first victim, the Kolagasi from Aleppo, had been taken back in an ambulance to Antakiya many hours ago. Now another wounded officer had replaced him on Stephan's bed. The Kaimakam, too, in Juliette's bedroom, had been overcome by sleep. He had been engaged on a report to the Wali of Aleppo when it became no longer possible to sit upright.

  But his mind and conscience worked in the depths of sleep with more cruel truth than ever in the meshes of consciousness. He had just encountered the worst setback in his career. Yet every failure contains the elements of grace in it, since failure, with a grin, reveals the ineptitude of human estimates of worth. This Kaimakam, this high official, this member of Ittihad, he of whom the party thought so highly, this Osmanli, steeped to the marrow in all the pride of his warrior race -- what had he just been forced to experience? That the weak were strong, the strong in reality impotent. Yes, impotent even in those heroic activities which made the weak appear so despicable. But in his sleep the Kaimakam's perceptions went deeper still. So far he had never one instant doubted that Enver
Pasha and Talaat Bey were in the right; more, that against the Armenian millet they had acted with consummate statecraft. Yet now furious doubts of Enver Pasha and Talaat Bey reared up within the Kaimakam, since failure is also the stern parent of truth. Had men the right to work out skilful plans by which this or that people should be stamped out? Was there even, as he had asserted a thousand times there was, enough practical basis for such a scheme? Who is to say that one people is worse or better than another? Certainly men cannot say it. And God, that day on the Damlayik, had given a most unmistakable answer. The Kaimakam saw himself placed in certain contingencies which made him feel not a little concerned for his skin. He was sending a written resignaHon to His Excellency the Wali of Aleppo, destroying, of his own free will, the whole structure of his career. He offered the Armenians, in the person of Gabriel Bagradian, wrapped in a bathgown, freedom and friendship. In the central committee of Ittihad he urged the immediate recall of all Armenian convoys and passed a compensatory tax to indemnify them. But the Kaimakam's soul only haunted such ethical summits in deepest sleep. The thinner wore the fabric of his slumbers, the nearer he returned to everyday consciousness, the more utterly did his surface mind reject any such foolhardy suggestions. At last, in far smoother, more peaceful repose, he hit on a convenient way out. Why not simply omit any superfluous, uneasy report to the central authorities? The Kaimakam slept on till midday.