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Forty Days of Musa Dagh

Page 15

by Franz Werfel


  The war lord refused, with a hint of surprise, to understand. For the leader of a great empire, his cheeks looked surprisingly fresh and young. "The position on the Caucasian front improves every day. It is of course a little premature to speak of the southern army under Jemal and your countryman Kress."

  "Most encouraging, Excellency. But, by the interior I mean the peaceful vilayets, not the war zone.

  "While a state is at war, all its government districts are war zones, more or less."

  This was discharged with a certain delicate crispness. So that the outpost skirmish had gone against Dr. Lepsius, who was forced to open frontal attack: "Your Excellency is aware, perhaps, that I'm not here as a private individual, but as representative of the German Orient Society, who will require my report upon certain happenings."

  A surprised Enver sat wide eyed. What exactly is an Orient Society?

  "Our Foreign Office, indeed our Chancellor, is in active sympathy with my mission. On my return I am to deliver a lecture in the Reichstag on the Armenian question, for the information of the German press."

  Enver Pasha, listening in routine patience, his eyes cast down, looked up at the words "Armenian question." The sulkiness of a spoilt child whom heavy grown-ups will not stop pestering with their stale old nonsense clouded his face for an instant. It passed at once. Yet Dr. Lepsius' heart already failed him. "I come to you in my need, Excellency, because I'm convinced that a leader of your distinction will not do anything which might besmirch his name in history."

  "I know, Herr Lepsius," Enver Pasha began, in the softest, most indulgent voice, "I know that you've come here, and asked for this interview, to demand my explanation of all these matters. And although a number of urgent questions require my attention, I'm perfectly willing to spare you whatever time you may need and give any information you choose to ask for."

  Lepsius was forced to acknowledge this sacrffice with a deeply grateful little bow.

  "Ever since my friends and I have controlled the government," the general continued, "we've always striven to grant the Armenian millet's requests, and see that absolute justice was meted out to it. There was an old understanding. Your Armenian friends acclaimed our revolution most cordially; they swore all kinds of oaths of fidelity to us. Unfortunately they broke them overnight. We shut our eyes as long as possible, as long as the Turkish people, the ruling people, was not in danger. We are living in Turkey, are we not? But when, after war was declared, cases of high treason, felony and subversive tendencies kept increasing, when desertion assumed alarming proportions, when it came to open revolt -- I'm only thinking, mind, of the great revolt in Zeitun -- then we found ourselves obliged either to take action to repress it or lose our right to direct the war and remain the leaders of our people."

  Lepsius nodded, as though he were well on the way to becoming convinced. "In what, Excellency, did these legally proved cases of treason and sedition consist?"

  A broad gesture from Enver. This plenitude of crimes could never fully be exhausted. "Conspiracy with Russia. Sasonov's speech praising Armenians in the Petersburg Duma was clear enough. Conspiracies with France and England. Intrigue, espionage -- all you can think of."

  "And these cases have been legally investigated?"

  "By court martial, naturally. It would be just the same in your country. Not long ago fifteen of the worst offenders were sentenced and publicly executed."

  "Clumsy insolence," Lepsius mentally decided. He leaned back and tried to control his unsteady voice. "According to my knowledge those fifteen Armenians were arrested long before the war. So they can scarcely have been found guilty of treachery by usual military law."

  "We ourselves derive from the revolution." Though the general did not answer to the point, he did so with the gleefulness of a schoolboy who remembers a most amusing escapade. "We know exactly how all that's done."

  Lepsius swallowed down a very expressive description of the revolution and all its works. He cleared his throat for the next inquiry: "And these Armenian notables and intellectuals, whom you've arrested here in Istanbul and deported -- are they also convicted of treachery?"

  "You must see for yourself that we can't keep even possible traitors so near the Dardanelles."

  Johannes Lepsius did not contradict, but plunged, in a burst of sudden temperament, into the main issue: "And Zeitun? I'm very anxious indeed to hear Your Excellency's view of Zeitun."

  Enver Pasha's blankly gleaming suavity was overcast with a sudden disapproval. "The revolt in Zeitun is one of the worst mutinies in the history of the Turkish empire. Unfortunately our troops lost heavily in their struggle to subdue the rebels, though I'm afraid I can't give you exact figures."

  "My reports of Zeitun differ from those of Your Excellency." Lepsius planted this blow in hesitant syllables. "My accounts make no mention of any revolt of the population there, but of provocative oppression, lasting over a period of months, by the district and sanjak officials. They speak of some trifling disorder, which could easily have been checked by strengthening the town police, whereas any fair-minded person can easily perceive a deliberate intention in military reinforcements of over a thousand strong."

  "You've been given false information." Enver was still quietly well behaved. "May I inquire who your informants were, Herr Lepsius?"

  "I can name a few of them, but I may as well say that no Armenian sources are included. On the other hand I have the specific memoranda of various German consuls, reports from missionaries, the eyewitnesses of the worst atrocities. And finally I've been given a most consistent account of the whole business by the American ambassador, Mr. Morgenthau."

  "Mr. Morgenthau," said Enver brightly, "is a Jew. And Jews are always fanatically on the side of minorities."

  Lepsius gasped at the graceful evasiveness of this. His feet and hands were cold as ice. "It isn't a question of Morgenthau, Excellency, but of the facts. And you neither will, nor can, deny them. A hundred thousand people are already on their way into exile. The officials talk of nothing but resettlement. But I suggest to you that, frankly, that's a misnomer. How can a people of peasant mountaineers, craftsmen, townsfolk, professional people, be resettled by a stroke of the pen in Mesopotamian deserts -- empty plains? In waste country, hundreds of miles away from their homes, which even bedouin tribes refuse to inhabit? And that object is simply a blind. The district officials are conducting these deportations in such a way that, in the first eight days' march, these wretched people either collapse or go mad of hunger, thirst, disease, so that helpless boys and defenceless men get slaughtered by Kurds and bandits, if not by the military -- and young girls and women are literally forced into prostitution. . . ."

  The attentive general listened scrupulously, though his languid pose most clearly indicated: This is the kind of rigmarole one has to hear at least twelve times a day. "All very regrettable. But the supreme commander of a great military power is responsible for the security of his war areas."

  "War areas?" Lepsius cried out -- and at once controlled himself, trying to manage Enver's calm. "'War areas' is the one fresh nuance. All the rest -- Zeitun, high treason, intrigues -- was there already. Abdul Hamid made masterly use of all that, if the Armenians cared to believe it all over again. I'm an older man than you are, Excellency, and I saw it all on the spot. But when I think of these deportations, I almost want to apologize to that old sinner. He was a bungler, a harmless child, compared to this new method. And yet, Excellency, your party only took power because it wanted to replace the bloodshed of the old Sultan's time by justice, unity, and progress. The very name of your Committee proclaims it."

  This stroke was daring, indeed rash. For an instant Johannes Lepsius sat expecting the war lord to stand up and conclude the interview. Yet Enver sat quietly on, not the lightest shadow clouding his suave serenity. He even bent forward, confidentially. "Dr. Lepsius, may I show you the other side? . . . Germany, luckily, has few, or no, internal enemies. But let's suppose that, in other circumstances,
she found herself with traitors in her midst -- Alsace-Lorrainers, shall we say, or Poles, or Social-Democrats, or Jews -- and in far greater numbers than at present. Would you, Herr Lepsius, not endorse any and every means of freeing your country, which is fighting for its life against a whole world of enemies without, from those within? . . . Would you consider it so cruel if, for the sake of victory, all dangerous elements in the population were simply to be herded together and sent packing into distant, uninhabited territory?"

  Johannes Lepsius had to hold on tight by both hands to keep himself from springing to his feet and giving full rein to his indignation.

  "If my government," he said very distinctly, "behaved unjustly, unlawfully, inhumanly" ("in an un-Christian way" was the expression on the tip of his tongue) "to our fellow countrymen of a different race, a different persuasion, I should clear out of Germany at once and go to America."

  A long, wide-eyed stare from Enver Pasha. "Sad for Germany if many other people think as you do there. A sign that your people lacks the strength to enforce its national will relentlessly."

  At this point in the interview the pastor was overcome by a great fatigue. It was born of the sensation that, in his way, this little, closed-up fellow was in the right. The hoary wisdom of the world is always, in its way, right against Christ's wisdom. But the worst of it was that Enver's rightness infected, at this instant, Johannes Lepsius, and lamed his will. The uncertain destiny of his fatherland descended on his soul with the weight of a mountain. He whispered; "It's not the same thing."

  "Quite right. It's not the same thing. But it's we who gain by the comparison. We Turks have a hundred times harder struggle to assert our rights than you Germans."

  Lepsius, tortured and absent-minded, pulled out a handkerchief, which he held up like a parliamentary banner. "It isn't a question of protecting yourselves against an enemy in your midst, but of the planned extirpation of another race."

  This he jerked out in a sullen voice; his eyes, no longer able to endure Enver's coo1 detachment, strayed towards the study with its three heroes on the wall. Had Monsignor Saven, the Patriarch, no right there? Lepsius suddenly remembered that he was here to discuss economics. Quickly he gathered strength for a fresh encounter: "Excellency. I won't presume to waste your time in empty discussion. But may I venture to draw your attention to certain rather grave drawbacks, which you yourself perhaps may not yet have considered very carefully -- naturally enough, weighed down as you are by your burden as commander-in-chief. I may perhaps know the interior, Anatolia, Cilicia, Syria, better than you do, since I worked for years under difficult conditions in all that territory. . . ."

  And so, in hurried words -- he felt time ebbing away -- he developed his plea. The Turkish empire, without the Armenian millet, would be bound to go to pieces economically, and its army would, as a consequence, be endangered. Why? He did not care to insist on the export trade, ninety per cent of which was in Christian hands, and His Excellency knew as well as he did that most of the foreign trade was conducted by Armenian firms, so that in consequence one of the most essential branches of war industry, the provision of raw materials, as well as of manufactured goods, could only be successfully managed by these firms -- for instance, by such a world-established business as Avetis Bagradian and Sons, which had branches and representatives in twelve different European cities. And as to the interior itself, he, Lepsius, years ago, on his journeys there, had seen that Armenian agricultural methods in Anatolia were a hundred times ahead of Turkish small landholding. In those days Cilician Armenians had imported hundreds of threshing-machines and steam-ploughs from Europe and, by so doing, given the Turks a strong incentive to massacre, since they not only slaughtered the ten thousand inhabitants of Adana but also broke up the machines and ploughs. In that alone, and nowhere else, lay the real mischief. The Armenian millet, the most progressive and active section of the Ottoman population, had for years been making vast efforts to lead Turkey out of its old-fashioned, primitive methods of agriculture into a new world of up-to-date farming and budding industrialization. And it was for just this very beneficent pioneering work that Armenians were being persecuted and slaughtered by the vengeful violence of irritated sloth.

  "Let's admit, Excellency, that craftsmanship, trade, and peasant industry, which in the interior are almost exclusively Armenian, could be taken over by Turks -- who is to replace all the numerous Armenian doctors, trained in the best universities in Europe, who care for their Osmanli patients with the same skill as for their own people? Who's to replace all the engineers, all the solicitors, all the export traders, whose work so indefatigably drives the country forward? Your Excellency will perhaps tell me that, at a pinch, a people can live without intellect. But it can't live without a stomach. And at present the stomach of Turkey is being slit open, yet you hope to survive the operation."

  Enver Pasha heard this out, his head inclined gently on one side. His whole aspect, incisive, youthful, subdued only by that hint of shyness in him, displayed as few unintentional creases as did his uniform. The pastor, on the other hand, was already beginning to look dishevelled. He was sweating, his tie was askew, his sleeves worked their way up his arms. The general crossed his short but slim legs. The glittering riding boots fitted as though they were on trees.

  "You speak of the stomach, Herr Lepsius." He smiled effusively. "Well, perhaps after the war Turkey may have rather a weak one -- "

  "She won't have any stomach left at all, Excellency."

  Unruffled, the commander continued: "The Turkish population is forty millions. Well, now -- try to see it from our point of view, Herr Lepsius. Is it not a great and worthy policy to try to weld these forty millions together and establish a natural empire, which henceforth will play the same part in Asia as Germany does in Europe? This empire is waiting. We have only to grasp it. I agree that among Armenians one finds an alarming proportion of intelligence. Are you really so much in favour of that kind of intelligence, Herr Lepsius? I'm not. We Turks may not be very intelligent in that way, but on the other hand we're a great and heroic people, called to establish and govern a world empire. Therefore we intend to surmount all obstacles."

  Lepsius twisted his fingers but said not a word. This spoilt child was the absolute master of a great power. His finely modelled, attractive little head brooded on such statistics as might have amazed all who knew the reality. He could produce none to blind Dr. Lepsius, who was precisely aware that in Anatolia there were scarcely six million pure-bred Turks; that, if one went into Northern Persia, to the Caucasus, to Kashgar and Turkestan, he would not be able, even by including all nomad Turkic tribes, the vagrant horse-thieves and steppe-dwellers spread across a land as wide as the half of Europe, to trump up as many as twenty millions. Such dreams, he reflected, the narcotic of nationalism engenders. Yet at the same time he was moved to pity for this porcelain war god, this childlike Antichrist.

  Johannes Lepsius' voice became soft and surcharged with wisdom: "You want to found a new empire, Excellency. But the corpse of the Armenian people will be beneath its foundations. Can that bring you prosperity? Could no more peaceful way be chosen, even now?"

  Here for the first time Enver Pasha laid bare his deepest truth. His smile had no longer any reserve in it, a cold stare had come into his eyes, his lips retreated from a strong and dangerous set of teeth.

  "There can be no peace," he said, "between human beings and plague germs."

  Lepsius came down on this in a trice: "So you openly admit your intention of using the war to extirpate the Armenian millet?"

  The War Minister had decidedly said too much. He retired at once within his impregnable fortress of discourteous courtesy. "My personal opinions and intentions are all contained in the memoranda published by our government on the subject. We are acting under the force majeure of the war, in self-defence, after having waited and observed as long as we could. Citizens who work to destroy the state render themselves liable in all countries to be dealt with by the sharp
process of law. So that our government is within its legal rights."

  They were back at the beginning. Johannes Lepsius could not manage to stifle a sound like a groan. He could hear Monsignor Saven's voice: "Don't moralize! Be matter-of-fact! Arguments!" Oh, if he could but remain matter-of-fact and use oniy arguments keen as razor blades! But this very necessity to keep sitting, the impropriety of springing to his feet to answer, set his nerves despairingly on edge. He, the born speaker on committees, at public hearings, needed room, freedom to move in.

 

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