by Franz Werfel
"No, no . . . Father . . . You mustn't send us away. I want to stay . . . stay with you!"
What was it that looked at the father out of his son's almond-shaped eyes? This was no longer a child whose life one arranges, but an adult impelled by his will and blood, a destiny fully shaped, no longer susceptible to moulding. He had grown and developed so much in the last few weeks. And yet this new perception did not exhaust the thing which his father encountered in Stephan's eyes. He dissuaded feebly: "What's coming, Stephan, won't be child's play."
Stephan's cry of alarm changed to a defiant challenge: "I want to stay with you, Father . . . I won't go away."
I, I, I! Jealous rage had hold of Juliette. Oh, these Armenians! How they stuck together! She herself had ceased to be there. Her child belonged to her, as much as to him! She wasn't going to lose him. Yet, if she stood up for her rights, she'd lose Stephan. She came a decisive, almost an enraged, step nearer father and son. She caught Stephan's hand to pull him towards her. But Gabriel knew only that Juliette had come to them. "And so that's what you really thought of me?" In that malicious question there had still lurked a hint of indecision. But this angry step was decisive for Gabriel. He drew wife and child within his embrace.
"May Jesus Christ be our help! Perhaps it's better this way." As he strove to calm himself with these words, he was invaded with a kind of dull horror, as though the Saviour he invoked had caused some door to shut against Stephan and Juliette. Before their embrace had achieved any real warmth and life, he let fall his arms, turned away, and left them. He stopped again in the doorway. "It goes without saying, Maris, you can have one of my horses for your journey."
Gonzague deepened his attentive smile. "I should accept your kindness most gratefully if I didn't have another request. I want you to allow me to share your life up on Musa Dagh. I've already talked it over with Krikor. He's been asking Ter Haigasun's permission for me, and he hasn't refused."
Bagradian considered this. "I suppose you realize that later on the best American passport won't help you in the least."
"I've lived here so long, Gabriel Bagradian, that I shouldn't find it easy to leave you all. And, besides, I'm a journalist, you know. I may never get another chance like this."
Something in Gonzague gave Bagradian a sense of hostility, repelled him even. He tried to think how to refuse the young man. "The only question is, will you ever get the chance of making any use of what you write?"
Gonzague answered not only Gabriel, but all the people in the room: "I've often found that I could rely on my intuition. And I feel almost certain that things will turn out all right for you in the end. It's only a feeling. But it's the kind of feeling I can trust." His alert velvet eyes glanced from Hovsannah to Iskuhi, from Iskuhi to Juliette, on whose face they rested. And Gonzague's eyes seemed to be asking Madame Bagradian if she didn't find his reasons convincing enough.
7. THE FUNERAL OF THE BELLS
For two days and nights Gabriel stayed up on the Damlayik. Even on the first evening he had to send Juliette word not to expect him. A variety of circumstances forced him to remain so long on this mountain ridge. Suddenly the Damlayik had ceased to be that idyllic mountain slope familiar to Gabriel, first as a place on which to dream, intimate in spite of its ruggedness, then as a strategic possibility. For the first time it showed him its true, unvarnished face. Everything on earth, not man alone, shows its reality only when we make demands on it. So too the Damlayik. That after-glow of Paradise, those solitudes whose laughing well-springs made them alive, had vanished now off its wrinkled, forbidding aspect. The defence terrain chosen by Gabriel comprised a surface area of several square kilometers. This surface, as far as the fairly level town enclosure, was a difficult up-and-down of hills, depressions, knolls, and gullies, which roughly made one aware of its inequalities once it was necessary to visit its various points many times a day. Gabriel wanted to avoid the waste of time and energy entailed in any not absolutely necessary descent into the valley. All the same, he had never felt so toughly vigorous in his whole life. His body, too, now that unsparing demands were being made on it, showed him both what he was and of what he was capable. By comparison the weeks he had spent as a front-line soldier in the Balkan war seemed slack and boring. In those days one had been mere human material, to be pushed forward under fire, seemingly by some natural force, or to drift back in the same constant danger, with the same will-less passivity. In the past few years Gabriel had often suffered from stomach trouble and palpitations. These derangements of a pampered body were now as though blown away by a single breath of necessity. He no longer knew that he had a heart or a stomach, and simply did not notice the fact that three hours' sleep on, or under, a blanket fully sufficed him, that a roll and some kind of tinned food stilled his hunger for the whole day. But, even though he thought very little about it, this proof that he was really a strong man filled him with a glow of pride. It was the pride which tingles through our substance only when our minds have defeated it.
His was occupied with much else. Most of those men intended as fighters had already forgathered on the mountain, together with a few of the stronger women and a few half-grown boys to be used as workers. All the rest had been shrewdly kept in the valley. There daily life was to seem to be going on quietly as usual, so that no rumor should spread of deserted villages. And these villagers had undertaken the task of getting as many stores as possible up the mountain in the dead of night. These could not all be loaded on to mules. The long beams and struts of old Tomasian's workshop, for instance, had to be carried up on their own shoulders by his apprentices. This wood was to build the altar, the government hut, and the hospital. The younger of the people's representatives, above all Pastor Tomasian and the teachers, were needed by Gabriel on the Damlayik, while the General Council, under Ter Haigasun, continued its business in the valley.
At that time there were about five hundred men encamped on the Damlayik. With the shock troops and elite, it was a question not only of spurring on this work to the exhaustion point, but of fanning to higher and higher flame the passionate fighting-spirit already in them. When at night with exhausted bodies they gathered round the fires in the town enclosure, Pastor Aram, in long exhortations -- which had, however, little of the sermon in them -- would explain the real meaning of this resistance. He proclaimed the divine right of self-defence, spoke of the mysterious way of blood which Armenians have trodden all through the ages -- of the value of this one brave attempt, as an example which might fire their whole people to resist and so save itself. He described all the cruelty of the convoys, all he had himself seen or heard described, giving such atrocities as an instance of the way in which these thousands of villagers would have been certain to perish in the end, and, with equal conviction, he kept assuring them that the great deed in which they were united was a certain way to freedom and victory. To be sure, he was never very explicit as to how they were to gain their victorious liberty. Nor did anyone ask him. The very sound of his stormy words was enough to fire the blood of the young men; the meanings behind them mattered less.
Sometimes Gabriel spoke instead of the pastor. He was less rhetorical, more exact. They must never, he urged them, waste a second, eat one unnecessary mouthful; must concentrate every pulse-beat on the one aim. Let them think less of inevitable misfortune than of the sorry pain and degradation with which the Turks were befouling their Armenian subjects. "If once we manage to drive them down off the mountain, we shan't have merely wiped off this insult, we shall have humbled and dishonored the Turks forever. Because we're the weak, and they're the strong. They despise us as a set of merchants and always boast of being soldiers. If we beat them once, we shall have poisoned their self-esteem and given them a lesson they'll never get over."
Whatever Gabriel and Aram may really have been thinking at this time, they insisted again and again on the glorious outcome of resistance, hammering fanatical belief and, more important still, fanatical discipline, into young, impressionab
le minds.
No more than Gabriel had ever been aware that he possessed an iron constitution, had he suspected his gifts as an organizer. In the milieux in which he had so far lived "sound practical sense" had always connoted limited and acquisitive thinking. Therefore he had striven all too successfully to be on the side of the unpractical. But now, thanks to preliminary work, he succeeded in the first few hours in building up the most feasible division of his army into skeleton "cadres," into which reinforcements from the valley could very easily be incorporated. He built up three main divisions: a fighting-formation; a big reserve; and a cohort of youth, for all half-grown lads of from thirteen to fifteen, only to be used as a last resort in case of very heavy losses on a harassed front, but otherwise to act as scouts, observation corps, and liaison runners. The full strength of this front line of defence worked out at eight hundred and sixty men. This, not including the less fit, the totally unfit, and a certain number of the most indispensable "experts," comprised all the men from sixteen to sixty. All others, elderly men still able to work and a certain proportion of girls and women, were lumped together as reserve -- so that his second strength was somewhere between a thousand and eleven hundred. The third branch, the scouting-brigade of his cohort of youth, the cavalry of the Damlayik, consisted of over three hundred boys. On the second day Gabriel sent his adjutant Avakian down to the valley to fetch Stephan. He was not certain that Juliette would let him go so easily. But the student punctually returned with a radiant Stephan at his heels, to be enrolled at once as a scout by his father. Of the eight hundred and sixty men of his main defence, it is true that not more than three hundred could be armed with what infantry rifles they had. Most, unfortunately, had either ordinary hunting guns or the romantic flint-locks to be found in nearly every house in the villages.
Gabriel had ordered every gun from his brother's chests that was in any sort of working order, to be distributed. Luckily most of the men, not only those who had served as Turkish conscripts, knew how to handle a rifle. Yet, for all that, the main defence was lamentably armed. Four platoons of regular infantry, even without the usual machine gun, would have been a far superior force. The most essential part of the defence had naturally not been thought of as one vaguely uniform mass; Gabriel had split it up strategically into definite sections of ten men each, that is to say, minute battalions, which could be moved and disposed independently. He had also taken care that each of these decads should be composed of men of the same village, if possible of the same family, so that comradeship might be as strongly cemented as possible.
The command presented greater difficulties, since one in each of these ten must be given authority, just as the bigger units must have their commanders. Gabriel chose these leaders from among men of various ages who had seen service. The invaluable Chaush Nurhan undertook the business of general, chief ordnance officer, fortress engineer, and sergeant-major all in one. The twisted ends of his grey, wiry moustache bristled, the huge Adam's apple on his stringy throat worked up and down. Nurhan seemed heartily grateful to the Turks for having arranged a few deportations and so provided his opportunity, so passionate was the zeal with which he hurled himself on military duties so long forgone. For hours he drilled those men who were not at work, without once resting or letting them rest. He had the notion, with the help of Armenian quick-wittedness, of working in a few days through the whole Turkish drill-book, as laid down for an infantry training of several years. His main preoccupations were fighting-maneuvers, heads "up" and "down," quick entrenchments, the use of terrain, and storm attack. He was disgusted with Bagradian for having forbidden any rifle practice, even though it was most understandable, and not merely to save munitions. Elderly as Nurhan was, he raced from one drilling company to the next, instructing each platoon instructor, shouting and raving in the bluest of barrack-room Turkish. Armed to the teeth with sword, army revolver, rifle, cartridge-belt, he had also slung on the infantry bugle, scrounged from a quartermaster's store, and used its kicking, strutting bugle calls at any instant to rally his men. A startled Gabriel hurried the whole long way from the north ridge to the drilling-ground to put a firm stop to these reckless tootings. Was it absolutely necessary, he asked, to give the saptiehs and Mohammedan villages of the neighborhood strident warnings of maneuvers on the Damlayik?
During the first day all the deserters on Musa Dagh had begun to join forces with the garrison. In the course of the next few days their number increased to the very respectable figure of sixty. Nurhan's bugle seemed to have rallied these lads from the hills around, from Ahmer Dagh and the barren Jebel el Akra. To Gabriel, although they were well armed, they were welcome, yet unwelcome, reinforcements. There could be no doubt that this pitiful mob contained not only the usual recalcitrants -- cowards, bullied men, haters of discipline -- but sinister elements, fellows with as much to fear from the civil authorities as the military. There were crooks among them, who spuriously assumed the deserter's halo, whose real profession was that of foot-pad, who seemed to have come, not from any barracks in Antakiya, Aleppo, or Alexandretta, but from the jail at Payas. It was hard to distinguish sheep from goats in this reinforcement of sixty-odd, since all looked equally scared, shy, famished. It was not surprising that they should, since day and night they had had to keep a look-out for gendarmes and could never venture down into the villages before two or three in the morning to beg a crust from their scared compatriots. The skeletons of these deserters -- they could scarcely any longer be said to have bodies -- were hung with the rags of desert-hued uniforms. What still was visible of their faces, under a matted growth of hair and bristle, was tanned almost black with sun and dirt. Their Armenian eyes expressed not only the general pain, but with it a peculiar agony, the sullen pain of the shady outcast slowly sinking back to the level of beasts. The pack looked as though humanity had cut it off. Only to the deserter Sarkis Kilikian, whom they called "the Russian," was this inapplicable, outwardly at least, though he of them all seemed the most irrevocably cut off from the safety of the human family. Gabriel recognized him at once as the ghost which had risen that night in "Three-Tent Square." The problem of enrolling these sixty vagrants without imperilling the gradually forming discipline of the rest was one that could not be solved immediately. For the present, in spite of their disillusioned grimaces, they were sent to drill under the iron supervision of Chaush Nurhan, who made them sweat for their keep through the very same drill-book, to avoid which they had escaped. More essential even than Nurhan's drilling was the other task of these wildly industrious days -- the building and digging of fortifications. The blue and brown lines marked by Gabriel on Avakian's map were being changed into realities. Since for the time being the Damlayik had more hands than spades, shifts of diggers were formed. Bagradian's eventual aim was to use only the reserve for labor -- that is to say, the eleven hundred men and women who would not be at their posts unless there was fighting, and whose task would otherwise be all the necessary work of the camp. But these people were still down in the villages.
By Gabriel's reckoning there were thirteen different points at which the Damlayik could be threatened. The most open point of attack was in the north, that narrow indentation he called the North Saddle, which separated the Damlayik from the other portions of Musa Dagh which lay dispersed in the Beilan direction. The second, but far more vulnerable, spot was the wide path above Yoghonoluk up through the ilex grove. Further danger zones on the western extremities of the mountain resembled this in a lesser degree, wherever, in fact, the slopes became less steep, and where flocks and herdsmen had trodden out a natural track. The only points of differentiation were the strong, towering rocks to the south, the "South Bastion" of the map, which dominated the broad, stony slopes rising out of the plain of the Orontes in abrupt, terraced ridges. Down in the plain stood the remnants of a fallen human world, the fields of Roman ruins of Seleucia. These stony leavings of a civilization crashed to earth aped the southern flank of the mountain, with its tier upon tier of heaps
of stone. Under Samuel Avakian's supervision and Bagradian's precise directions two fairly high walls composed of great blocks of stone had been put up, not only on this rocky incline itself, but right and left of it. The student marvelled that such complete walls should be thought necessary for the mere purposes of cover. His strategic insight was still very imperfect in those days, and he seldom understood his master's intentions. But the hardest work was that demanded in the north, the most vulnerable point of the defence. Gabriel Bagradian himself worked at the long trench -- several hundred paces long -- with all its chevrons and supports. In the west it was backed by the rocky confusion of the side overlooking the sea, which, with all its obstacles, natural entrenchments, caverns, formed a labyrinthine fortress. Eastwards Bagradian strengthened his entrenchments with outposts and tree-entanglements. It was lucky that the greater part of this terrain should have been composed of soft soil. Yet the spades kept jarring against big blocks of limestone and dolomites, which impeded the progress of the work so that they could scarcely hope to complete these trenches in less than four working days. While muscular diggers, aided by a few peasant women, turned up the soil, boys with sickles and knives felled the scrubby undergrowth at certain points in front of the trench, that the fire-zones might be unimpeded. Bagradian stayed there all day, supervising. He kept running up to the indentation and the counter-slope of the saddle to make sure, from every conceivable angle, that the trench was being properly dug. He gave orders that the thrown-up earth was always to be flattened into the soil again. His whole aim was to assure himself that this wide groove should be fully camouflaged, that the thick-shrubbed slope along which it ran should seem to be still untouched by human hands. When it is remembered that, aside from the reserve trench in the next wave of ground, there were still to be completed twelve smaller positions, Bagradian's stubborn concentration here must have filled every intelligent observer with anxiety.
