Forty Days of Musa Dagh

by Franz Werfel

  The old, good-tempered bimbashi with the rosy cheeks put on his glasses, although there was nothing for him to read. He may simply have wanted to point out that he was the most farsighted man in the room. He nodded severely at the mülasim. "This misfortune is the direct result of your stupidity and carelessness. It's down in regulations that you've got to reconnoitre any enemy position before advancing on it. But, now that it's got so far, I ask the Kaimakam: What's to be done about it? Must we sacrifice even more of our men? Or shall we leave these cursed swine in peace, to starve on their mountain? What harm do they do us? This deportation is your business, not ours. Why don't you civilians get on with it? If they really have got ten thousand rifles . . . ?"

  The red-haired müdir raised his hand to speak. "They haven't five hundred, not even three -- I ought to know, since I'm in charge of that nahiyeh, and went to the villages."

  The bimbashi took off his glasses, as purposelessly as he had put them on. "I think it would be best to suppress the incident. They've deported themselves. What more do we want? You've got all sorts of people along the coast, Greeks and Arabs. . . . Am I to be asked to make myself ridiculous by waging a little war under their noses? If I sweep up every detached unit in the kazah, I shan't get together four regular companies. And the Chettehs, the Kurds, and whatever other scum I could lay hands on wouldn't only go for the Armenians -- they'd go for us! Believe me, it's far wiser to say no more about it."

  The morose yüs-bashi with the deep-set eyes had for an hour lit one cigarette from the last. He had not said a word. Now he stood up, and respectfully fronted his superior. "Bimbashi Effendi, will you allow me please to express my most respectful surprise at what you've just said? How can we possibly hush this matter up when a company commander, three officers, and a hundred men have all been slaughtered? Even now I suggest it's unforgivably slack of us to have delayed so long with our report. The instant this conference is over, I shall have to draw it up, at your orders, to be sent on to G.H.Q."

  The bimbashi collapsed. His cheeks turned rosier still; first because the major was right -- he always was -- and second because he was a Satan.

  Now at last the Kaimakam seemed to rouse himself from his long, impersonal meditations: "I shall liquidate this affair within my own province."

  This was his astute bureaucratic way of proclaiming a highly involved decision, to which fear of the Wali of Aleppo mainly contributed. Sharp daily instructions kept demanding that the deportation order should be enforced with an almost apoplectic zeal. The resistance of these seven villages might break the Kaimakam, since it implied slack surveillance and incomplete disarmament. Should the Wali receive a plain unvarnished tale of the affair, the Kaimakam might look for the worst from him and from Ittihad. His civil report would have to be most delicately phrased.

  The old bimbashi remarked obtusely: "How can you liquidate it, when your saptiehs are all on convoy duty, and your soldiers all at the front?" He blinked, and glowered at the major. "As for you, Yüs-Bashi, I order you, in your report to G.H.Q. to ask for four battalions and field artillery. We can't surround a huge great mountain of that sort without troops and without guns."

  The yüs-bashi did not seem to notice the old man's rage. "Bimbashi Effendi, I quite understand your order. His Excellency General Jemal Pasha has all such matters personally explained to him. I think you may be certain he'll back you up. These Armenian deportations are, after all, the work of his friends. He certainly won't let a few lousy Christian peasants play about with you."

  The Kaimakam, who meanwhile seemed to have fallen asleep again, had already decided his course of action. He must ally himself with the strongest man in the room, the major, and, to that end, throw the old bimbashi to the wolves. So the Kaimakam nearly yawned his head off, and rapped the table with the ivory handle of his cane: "I dismiss this session, and would request a few minutes' private conversation with the yüs-bashi, to decide on our joint report to the civil and military authorities. Bimbashi Effendi, I'll submit mine to you for endorsement."

  Next day two long and involved accounts left Antioch. The very severe acknowledgments took five more days in which to arrive. Musa Dagh, so these orders ran, must be taken with what material was to hand, and instantly cleared, whatever happened. The only concession to the bimbashi was the loan of a couple of 10 cm. howitzers, already on their way to Aleppo from Hama, and now to be diverted to Antakiya. It was seven days before this artillery arrived. A very callow young lieutenant, three corporals, twelve old reservist artillery men, and a few filthy privates for dragging purposes, composed the crew. It would be almost impossible to use howitzers of this pattern in the mountains.

  In a sense Stephan had a more difficult time of it than his father, whose earliest memories linked him to Musa Dagh. Yet Stephan, in this short time, seemed to have forgotten his previous life, his fourteen years of Europe. He had sunk, if one is to call it sinking, back into his race. But not so Gabriel. Gabriel's very marriage had placed him between two blood-streams. At first he had even felt it rather tactless that he, a foreigner, should force a plan to save them upon these natives. Perhaps that was the deepest reason for those solemn, yet disconsolate emotions which invaded him on the night of August 4.

  Stephan was different. Though two blood-streams ran in his veins, his mother's seemed to have lost all influence. He had become what all the others he mixed with were -- an oriental schoolboy. Why? He could not have asserted himself among them otherwise. These pompously conceited, apishly pliant schoolboys were not in the least impressed by the well-brought-up young Stephan's western attainments. The most fluent written and spoken French was no use here. When he told them of European cities, they only ragged him. Howls of derision greeted his habit of carrying school books under his arm instead of on his head as they did. What other way could you possibly carry books? Had Stephan been soft, he would at once have gone running to his father and begged to be taken away from school. As it was, he took up the challenge. He had had to quarrel for several days with his mother to get permission to wear Armenian dress. In his new clothes Stephan, who was a handsome boy, looked like the young prince on a Persian miniature. This Juliette could feel, but she felt more strongly that this prince had nothing to do with Stephan, her boy. So they struck a bargain. Stephan might go to school in "fancy dress," but must wear ordinary clothes at home. Since after the flight to the Damlayik there was no longer any "home" to be normal in, the contract fell through.

  Yes, Stephan was completely changed. But no one knew what efforts it had cost him to go back, in this fashion, to the primitive. He could wear the same clothes as the others. But at first they were disastrously clean, and without one rent in them. This cleanness was a serious drawback -- and he admitted that he had only himself to thank. He still found it hard not to dislike himself for having dirty hands and feet, thick black nails, and uncombed hair. When one day, still in Yoghonoluk, he had managed to get lice in his head, so that Maman, with squeamish hands, tied a napkin soaked in petrol round his hair, he had felt thoroughly miserable. Stephan had permanent disadvantages, as compared to the other village boys. His feet, for instance, no matter how much trouble he might take with them, dabble them as he would in slime and dust -- to how many dangerous climbs had he not exposed them? -- remained white and pampered. He could achieve no more than tan, blisters, kibes, which, besides being very painful, gave Maman her pretext for keeping him in the house. How he envied the other boys their impervious feet; brown, shrunken claws, vastly superior to his. Stephan had really to suffer before he could establish his position. The village boys let him feel he was not their equal, that not all the splendors of Villa Bagradian, including Avakian and the household staff, impressed them enough to make him acceptable. What assets had Stephan to strengthen him in this curious struggle? Ambition, energy, which he usually turned against his own body, and one other quality which these village boys did not possess. Even Haik, already past fourteen, muscular, tall, and well set up, the undisputed head
of the gang, could not boast the purposeful concentration, the planned logical thought, which Stephan had brought with him from Europe. As a rule these Orientals forgot a scheme before they had half carried it through; they were swirled about by their short-lived notions, instinctive urges, like leaves in the wind. Anyone watching them after school might have fancied them a pack of excited young animals, rushing here and there to no end, impelled by one vague impulse after another. When, like a swarm of birds, they alighted on some wide, unguarded orchard, this might be considered a purposeful enterprise -- but far more often they would all go darting off into mountain thickets, urged on by demons, or cluster about a stagnant pond, or rush through the fields, to twirl and wallow in their sensations. Such excursions often ended in a religious, or better, a kind of pagan ritual, but of this they themselves were, of course, unaware. it began by their forming a ring, clasping each other, humming faintly, till their heads began to loll, till their voices, their swaying rhythm, rose and rose, till at last they all burst forth in a howling tumult, beyond description. On many this rite was of such potency that their eyes turned up, and foam stood out on their lips. They, in their simplicity, only practised the ancient, well-known attempt of certain dervishes to get into secret touch with the primal force of the universe, by means of such epileptic self-conquest. They had seen no grown-up do anything like it, but their need for such exultant self-conquest was in the very air of this countryside. Naturally Stephan, the European, was the puzzled, hopeless spectator of these ecstasies. He, of necessity, lacked one strength -- the very faculty most predominant in the lives of all these other boys -- a kind of clear-sighted rapport with nature, impossible to put into words. Just as a good swimmer can lie, sit, stand, walk, or dance, entirely "in his element," in the waves, with a physical ease that is indescribable, so were these children of Musa Dagh indescribably "in their element," in the country that lay around it. They were interwoven with the very nature in which they lived. Their hills were as much a part of them as their flesh, so that to differentiate between outward and inward became impossible. Every leaf that stirred, every fruit that dropped, the rustling of a lizard, the faint plash of a far-off waterfall -- these myriad stirrings had ceased to be mirrored by their senses; they formed the very heart of those senses themselves, as though each child were himself a little Musa Dagh, creating it all with his own body. These bodies were like carrier pigeons, whose inhuman sense of direction can never err. They were like slender, pliant dowsing-rods; their twitchings proclaimed the hidden treasures of the earth. Young Stephan, who for far too long had had his feet upon dead pavements, had, it is true, an adroit and active, but a numbed, body by comparison.

  But when the villages set up their camp on the Damlayik, when these aimless rovings came to an end, and discipline and purposeful activity were required of schoolboys, Stephan's prestige increased by leaps and bounds. The reflected glory of his father's leadership contributed. This cohort of half-grown boys ranged from ten to fifteen years of age. Of the few girls none were older than eleven, since girls of twelve in eastern villages are already considered to be ripe. And Ter Haigasun had given orders that even the elder among the boys must go to school in their hours off duty. They seldom managed it, since either their masters were in the trenches, or shirked classes, which they considered entirely unnecessary. Hapeth Shatakhian led the scouts' group, Avakian set the orderlies their tasks, but, apart from these, the three hundred or more boys of the "cavalry" were left to their own devices most of the day. They strayed about the Damlayik plateau, making every knoll, crevice, gully insecure. They would even dare to play in the trenches and embitter the lives of the decads, drilling under Nurhan's scourge, by inquisitive and sardonic hanging about. These aimless wanderings were forbidden. Then they grew impudent, and began to break the bounds of the camp, strayed off on to the heights beyond the Saddle, which faced the valley, or into the rocks and stream beds of the coast side. It was strictly forbidden on the Damlayik to go outside the Town Enclosure. But the gang managed never to be caught. Stephan and Haik, of course, were involved. Sato, too, had slipped in among them and now she was not to be got rid of. Although the Bagradian family had given shelter to this strange bastard, the villagers still objected to having her in contact with their children. So that Sato depended entirely on the good, or bad, temper of the gang. One day they thrashed her, the next they let her come along. She lived on the verge, here as everywhere. She scurried over sticks and stones with them, never close behind the rest, but always a good way to the side. When the gang squatted together in the ilex gully, or in any other place out of bounds, bragging, thinking vaguely of new schemes, or only, as its habit was, intensifying the quality of existence by wild, collective swayings of the body, Sato's thirsty eyes would stare across from out of her solitude. Then the eternal, gabbling pariah mingled her voice with that of the choir and, still apart, gave imitations of their wild swayings.

  There was another doubtful member besides Sato. His name was Hagop, and Stephan protected him. Hagop's right foot had been amputated a few years previously by the army doctor in Aleppo. Now this boy hopped on a rough crutch; it was only a stick with a wooden crosspiece. But, in spite of this rickety support, Hagop could move with a certain vehement eagerness, the wild nimbleness of gait often to be seen in cripples. He was refusing to let these two-legged boys get the better of him, and when he followed their stormy chase there was not a hand's breadth between him and the last of them. Hagop's parents were well-to-do, and he was related to Tomasian. He had thoughtful eyes and, what was very rare among the villagers, dark yellow hair. He read avidly whatever he could lay hands on, stories in almanacs and so forth. But he did not want to be a scholar. He wanted to run, play, climb, and swagger and, since this was wartime, do the same scout duty as all the rest. Stephan, already attracted by his light hair, protected him, and not merely out of pity. But Haik toughly opposed all Hagop's ambitions. Without the slightest sentimental compunction he made him feel that cripples are not worth considering.

  Haik was a case apart. At fourteen and a half he was already fully representative of that dour being, the Armenian mountaineer. His deliberate slouch, muscular slimness, the huge hands which swung so heavily at his sides, expressed all the overweening pride of this firmly self-sufficient race -- a physique which set him well apart from the other members of the gang, with their rippling, eastern restlessness of body. The Armenian living in the cities of his diaspora may have all the pliancy of Ulysses -- it is not for nothing that the Odyssey makes cunning and homelessness go together in its protagonist -- the Armenian mountaineer, the pick and core of the whole race, is arrogant and impatient. These very exasperating traits he opposes, together with unremitting industry, to the lazy dignity of the Turk. Such a clash of fundamentals explains a good deal.

  Haik's family came from the north, from the Dokhus-Bunar mountains. His mother, the widow Shushik, a blue-eyed giantess, was by no means popular in her village, indeed people shunned her almost in terror. Though she had lived for years under Musa Dagh, she still counted as a stranger. The story went that once Widow Shushik had throttled with her bare hands an impudent assailant of her virtue. Whether this was true or false, her boy Haik had in any case inherited both her muscular body and flinty, arrogant disposition. Arrogant people always diminish others' self-esteem. Haik did this constantly to Stephan. It was because of him that the young Bagradian forced himself to one exploit after another, to make quite certain he was genuine. This urge to convince the dour, sceptical Haik took, as it always does in ardent natures at such an age, the most poignantly self-lacerating forms. Samuel Avakian, as his tutor, kept an eye constantly on Stephan, anxious lest he should get into dangerous mischief. This fussy carefulness of his elders shamed young Stephan in his own eyes, and in Haik's degraded him to the level of a pampered, sheltered mother's darling. Haik refused to be convinced, in spite of Stephan's constant, strenuous efforts, that Bagradian's son could really be "all right." The worst of it all was that an
y preference shown to Stephan made Haik a little more cocksure, since Widow Shushik's son had a searching eye, not to be taken in by mere externals. When Stephan, as often happened about that time, lay tossing from side to side in his tent, kept awake by his own doubts and questionings, his restless mind burned with the one question: "Oh, God, what can I do to show Haik something!" But this fIght for Haik's esteem was only one front in a war waged for its own renown by the ambitious soul of the young Bagradian.

  At about this time -- it was now the ninth day of Musa Dagh -- the camp began, at first without really knowing it, to suffer from its unmixed diet of meat, the almost total lack of fruit and vegetables. A drastic order had already restricted the milk ration so that only invalids, hospital patients, and children under ten now drew their share of the thin goat's milk still available, leaving over a very small quantity for cheese and butter-making. Everyone growled at having to pool supplies, and in fact, by some incomprehensible law, that summary measure seemed to have worsened the general stock and diminished rather than evenly distributed it. Though Juliette, now that she worked with Dr. Altouni, had placed at the disposal of his hospital more than a fair share of her supplies, her tinned food, her sugar, her tea and rice, she still had enough cake and biscuits to enable her, and those who lived with her, to supplement this diminishing bread ration. Stephan had not yet suffered the least privation. Haik, on the other hand, was already beginning to growl at the eternal, stringy mutton he had to gulp down. It was not even hung, it was half raw. There was nothing to go with it. "Oh, if we'd only got a few figs or apricots." Steplian had a vision of the wide orchards around the foot of Musa Dagh. But he still said nothing.