Forty Days of Musa Dagh

by Franz Werfel

  Yoghonoluk, grandfather's house. A wide, damask cloth, laid out for breakfast, on the soft turf of the lawn. Everyone in respectful attendance on the arrival of old Avetis Bagradian, to this ceremonious first meal of the day. The silver kettle steams on a tripod. Baskets piled up with apricots and grapes, melons on their flat dishes. Wooden platters, with new-laid eggs, honey, and "apricot leather." Thin cakes of bread, waiting under a spotless napkin to be broken by the master of the house, after prayers. Gabriel is eight, and wearing the same kind of entari-kilt that Stephan wears today. If only they'd hurry up with breakfast! Then he could sally forth, on to Musa Dagh, to hunt out great secrets. Meanwhile he looks down shyly at the damask folds. Perhaps a big snake is hiding under them! A golden rustle announces Grandfather's approach. And, strangely, his grandfather is himself no more than this -- this golden sound; he gives it forth, he never emerges from it. His gold lorgnon on its ribbon, his white pointed beard, his black and yellow morning robe, his red Russia-leather shoes, never come into sight; his image remains hidden, though forcefully present. On the other hand, Gabriel could clearly see all the women slowly lifting their veils above their heads, reverently turning their backs on the master, as custom ordains. Had this been a real memory, or only a dream made up of fragments pieced wrongly together? Gabriel could not be sure. But in any case, for no apparent reason, Iskuhi had managed to weave herself into this carpet of his childhood. She sat facing him on the grass. He, lost in the study of her face, took a long time to remember that he must say something.

  "I suppose you're fonder of your brother than you are of anyone else in the world?" He made it almost sound as though he were blaming her.

  The first Turkish shell dropped a hundred feet south of the Town Enclosure, under the foremost, jutting point of the Damlayik. He hurried there, in long, swift strides. On the way he met Dr. Altouni, riding a donkey. The old man had to get down. Bagradian thrashed and kicked this beast till it brought him to North Saddle, at a most unusual gallop.

  This time the Turks had prepared their stroke. The bimbashi-commandant of Antioch, that comfortable, boyishly rosy gentleman, with the little, elderly, sleepy eyes, led the onset in person. Strangely enough, his adjutant, the hatchet-faced and resolute yüs-bashi, had taken short leave at about this juncture, and gone to Aleppo, to be quite clear of responsibility. Since the bimbashi's wise and peaceable suggestions had not prevailed in council against the Kaimakam, nothing now remained but to sally forth, in all possible haste, against Musa Dagh. His annoyance and rancor against his enemies lent the comfortable gentleman energy and unexpected élan. He spent nearly the whole of one day in the telegraph office at Antakiya. Its Morse apparatus was set in motion in three directions, Alexandretta, Aleppo, and Eskereh, to muster up all the small local garrisons and gendarmerie posts situated within the district frontiers. In four days the portly colonel had drummed together a fair contingent -- about a thousand rifles -- to back his artillery. It was composed of the two companies of regulars, detached, in the Antakiya barracks; two platoons of the same regiment, from smaller towns; a big posse of saptiehs; and lastly a number of sharpshooters, chetteh irregulars from the mountain around Hammam. He made use of the half-battery which had recently trundled into the garrison.

  Meanwhile scouts had investigated the trenches on the Damlayik, if not reliably and completely, at least in part. The superstition was still unbroken that there were twenty thousand armed Armenians. So the bimbashi had enough arms and saptiehs at his disposal to make the smoking-out of this rebels' nest a possible matter of hours. His tactic would consist in a fully covered advance and sudden attack. That was essential. And both covered advance and sudden attack were well contrived. Every observer on Musa Dagh had been deceived. The colonel had split up his forces into approximately equal divisions, which were to operate independently of each other. The first marched on the night of August 13 with every possible precaution into Suedia and encamped, neatly disposed and concealed, in the ruins of Seleucia, under the South Bastion. The other corps, comprising the commander and his artillery, came along a stretch of the highroad, Antakiya-Beilan, and turned off it up wretched mule tracks into the mountains. But here the bimbashi's strategic plan failed to "click." It proved very difficult to get the two big howitzers uphill, even though two men were kept continually shoving at the spokes of either wheel, while others had to toil with the heavy barrels of unlimbered guns for fifteen miles on the arduous hillside. The sumpter mules, used as team, had proved themselves almost useless for gun-dragging. It meant a delay of ten hours. This force, which had begun its march half a day earlier than the other, only reached those heights of Musa Dagh which extend northwards of the Saddle towards midday on August 14, instead of in the night of the previous day. So that the double attack, timed for the first hour after sunrise, was not delivered. The captain in charge of the southern corps, who had not dared to let them show their faces outside their hiding-holes in the scorching ruins, till they got the pre-arranged signal (the first shell), was already fagged out by their long vigil in the pitiless sun. A fifteen-hour march up mountain tracks, without having rested the night before, only interrupted by three short halts, lay behind it. The colonel should have said to himself: "I'll give them a rest for today, and send word to the captain at Suedia to put off the attack till early tomorrow." And, considering how easygoing he was, anyone might have betted a hundred to one that this would be the old gentleman's decision. Yet exactly the opposite happened. Easygoing people are often also the impatient ones. If they find themselves entangled in something they dislike having to do, they get it over as quickly as possible. This bimbashi ordered the artillery mülasim to bring his guns at once into position, had a very hasty meal served out to the men, and, an hour later, led his companies, in long, thin skirmishing order, against the Armenian Saddle trenches, where first they kept a very respectful distance as quiet as mice, in the gullies, behind rocks and trees.

  The bimbashi cursed the Kaimakam, the yüs-bashi, the general in charge of transport, who, instead of proper mountain artillery, had sent him these huge, unwieldy howitzers -- above all did he curse His Excellency Jemal Pasha, for a "sour-faced, humpbacked swindler." In his opinion all these political officers of Ittihad were nothing but a set of jumped-up traitors and scum. It was they who had conspired against the old Sultan, and were keeping the new one prisoner in his palace. Ridiculous subordinate officers, who promoted themselves generals, Excellencies, pashas! Once fellows of that description wouldn't have got as far as yüs-bashi! And all this disgraceful pother with the Armenians was simply due to Ittihad swine. In Abdul Hamid's golden days there might, of course, have been an occasional set on the Armenians, but never the sort of thing that such a highly placed officer as he, the bimbashi, would be asked to command. The tired and irritable old gentleman waited with his staff for the first shell. He had ordered the lieutenant in charge of the howitzers to begin by dropping a couple into the living quarters of the Armenians. Not even the so-called war-office "maps" of these Ittihad swindlers were accurate, and the shells had to be aimed at the Damlayik by the distances marked on these. The bimbashi reckoned that shells in the camp would cause panic among the women and children, and so diminish the men's morale.

  This calculation was shrewd enough. The howitzers, however, succeeded more by accident than aim. Out of twelve shots, three fell into the Town Enclosure. These shells not only damaged some of the huts but wounded three women, an old man, and two children, luckily not very seriously. But the direct hit of a shell destroyed the grain depot, set fire to, and burned up, all that was left of the cereals, together with what remained of tobacco, sugar, and rice. The depot crackled and blazed; it was a miracle that the flames did not spread to the huts, a little way off. And the people's confusion was even worse than this disaster. On the decads also the fire worked a ten-fold alarm. All who were off duty rushed to their posts. Nurhan, "the Lion," within ten minutes had the trenches entirely on the defensive. The orderlies and spies of the
cohort of youth were soon assembled behind the lines. When Gabriel came galloping on his donkey, he found all parts of his machine in full working order. A few minutes later the first scout came running in with reports from the South Bastion. So that this Turkish raid had not quite succeeded. It encountered surprised, but resolute, defenders.

  This was the day of Sarkis Kilikian's triumph, and of that of the South Bastion. In this region the enemy was still without experience. Turkish spies had not dared to advance too far into the wide, bare half-circle of this declivity, with its stony slopes and terraces of boulders. The captain in charge did not even know whether, behind the jagged blocks of these dominant rock towers, there was a garrison. The Mohammedan population of the thickly peopled plain of the Orontes, the inhabitants of the market towns of Suedia, El Eskel, and Yedidje, excited by this war on the mountain, affirmed that, for many days, nothing had stirred among these rocks, that no fire was seen at night there. But the company leader was cautious, and assumed Armenian entrenchments, at any rate on the southern edge of the Damlayik, even though appearances might suggest none. He had long since divided his men into frontal attackers and a surrounding-party. The first was to be composed of regular troops, the second of chettehs and saptiehs. While the ones climbed straight up the slope, the others, directly opposite, where the half-circle of mountain verged on the sea, above the hill-nest Habaste, were to descend on the rear of what they supposed the Armenian positions. The Turkish captain did not spread out his men in skirmishing order, but disposed them in long single file, to present as narrow a surface for fire as possible. Since the temple ruins of Seleucia, which had given cover to the troops, stood on a wide ridge, about two hundred feet above sea level, the attackers had only a bare heap of stones, of about the same height, to get across, to come to the edge of the strong slope crowned by the South Bastion. This slope was not unassailably steep, afforded firing cover on every inch of it, and was therefore, in the opinion of the bimbashi, far better designed for attack than any of the wooded sides of the Damlayik, which behind each tree stem gave firing-cover to the Armenians. And besides, from the village street, visible at every point of the mountain, the advance up the hill could not have been camouflaged.

  In the South Bastion the command was still very unstable, a grave defect in Bagradian's general scheme of defence. In his view, because of the steep, barren ground below it, this part was far less menaced by attack than either the North Saddle or the ilex gully. Therefore its fairly numerous garrison contained the undependable underworld of the Damlayik, those deserters and pseudo-deserters whom he wanted to keep as far as possible from the people. The section leader was an ex-regular from Kheder Beg. A slow, phlegmatic peasant, unable to assert his authority against these quick-tempered recalcitrants. Teacher Oskanian, the general superintendent appointed by the war committee, had made himself ridiculous on the first day by his pedagogic ruthlessness and pomposity. The exacting dwarf was quite unable to inspire in these hard-bitten men, with whom life itself had dealt so drastically, the respect he considered his due. It is therefore obvious that the strongest personality of this sector, Sarkis Kilikian, should gradually have gained the upper hand.

  His humiliation by Bagradian seemed to have worked a change in the Russian. He no longer played at being a guest without obligations, consenting to live in camp for the time being, but submitted without a murmur to its discipline. More, he busied himself in his sector as a very inventive fortress engineer. He strengthened and raised the loosely piled up blocks of limestone, which served as the parapet of their trench, though the work took several days of restless industry. He had also contrived a primitive but effective machine, which increased to annihilation point their power of repelling an attack. Behind each of the three walls facing the hillside, at a fair distance from one another, he had constructed rectangular, gallow-like erections, made of oak stems. To the crossbeam of each of these gallows there hung level, fastened by strong ropes, a thick battering-ram, with at the end a kind of gigantic table top, or iron-studded shield. The ropes which worked this mechanism could be lengthened or shortened, so that the point of impact of the battering-ram might be thrust full against the wall. When the very heavy shield-plate came hurtling, from a certain distance, pendulum-wise, against the stone heaps, it gained a driving force that no human strength could have achieved.

  At the moment when the howitzers opened fire and scouts ran in to report that Turkish rifles were beginning to clamber up the slope from above the temple ruins of Seleucia, the commandant appointed by Bagradian lost his head completely. He crouched down before a chink in his wall of stones, and stared at the slope, but could not manage to give an order. The doughty little Hrand Oskanian turned white as paper. His hands shook, so that he could not manage to pull back the lock of his carbine, to insert the first cartridge. His stomach turned, and the giddy Oskanian nearly toppled. Ten minutes ago a threatening Mars, the somber teacher had no strength left, even to get out of the way. His voice failed. He followed Sarkis Kilikian like a puppy. So that the leader, with chattering teeth, stood begging orders of his subordinate. The Russian's agate eyes were as dead as ever. Deserters, and the rest of these decads, gathered round him at once, as their natural head. No one paid any further attention to the slow-witted peasant from Kheder Beg. Kilikian said almost nothing. He strode into the midst of this knot of defenders and pointed out those amongst them whom he designed to man the rock towers, stone parapet and supports. Platforms on high heaps of stone had been set up behind the battering-rams. Two men climbed each of these, to let the rams hurtle against the walls at a sign of command. The Russian followed the same tactic as Bagradian on August 4. He waited for the crucial second. But his dead, patient impassivity was a hundred times steadier than Gabriel's. As, at last, the advance-guard of the Turks appeared on the edge of the stone slope, he took out his primitive tinderbox, to try to light a cigarette. Oskanian beside him twitched and panted: "Now, Kilikian -- now! Right away." Having striven in vain to set light to his strip of tow, Kilikian's free hand gripped the teacher, to prevent his jumping up too early, to give the sign. The Turks, lulled into security by their safe clamber, and the utter quiet of the mountainside, had begun to get slack. They came into line, gossiped and formed wide groups. Not till they were midway up the slope did Kilikian let out a long whistle. The battering-rams with their huge shield-plates came thundering down on the loosely built-up walls. The lighter stones of the uppermost layers, spurting up in a cloud of dust, whizzed down like cannonballs, while the heavy limestone blocks of the upper structure toppled slowly over, and crashed after them, in great, wild leaps, among the Turks. Even these first effects were terrible. But now the Armenian mountain itself took a hand, to complete the decimation, so cruelly that this natural landslide will not be forgotten by future generations along the Syrian coast. The defence walls had been built between jagged pyramids of rock. The force of the rams shook even the natural limestone crown to its foundations, and tore huge sections of jagged rock down into the valley. The force of this indescribable, stony assault was too much for the many loose boulders which strewed the face of the incline. With all the terrific hissings and cracklings of some never before experienced surge of breakers, they began to slide, tearing down, in a monstrous deluge of lime and chalkstone, all who were still alive among the Turks. It was more than a ghastly avalanche of rock. The Damlayik itself seemed to have broken loose from its anchor, and to be sliding down. This hailstorm spattered on over the ruins of the upper town of Seleucia, overturning columns, crushing in ivy-covered walls. For ten whole minutes it still looked as though the mountain itself were seized with an impulse to advance on Suedia -- to the very mouth of the Orontes. The western group of the Turkish corps was grazed by this avalanche, just above the village of Habaste. Half the men were lucky enough to get clear. The other half were killed or maimed, the village itself in part destroyed. In fifteen minutes a silence, as of death, lay over everything. The avalanche stood peacefully and slyly in the
glare. Dull, crackling thuds from the howitzers came from the direction of the Saddle. When every pebble had come to rest, Kilikian blew his whistle a second time. The amazed deserters and their comrades began to advance. The whole garrison of the South Bastion, led by the Russian, strolled down the slope and, without haste, slaughtered the Turkish wounded and stripped them bare. It was done with the most nonchalant thoroughness, without a thought for the fierce battle which their comrades in the north had to sustain. Sarkis Kilikian changed his rags. He put on a brand-new Turkish infantry uniform and, in this new kit, in spite of the smears of blood on the dead man's tunic, postured as though he felt himself reborn. But Hrand Oskanian, who had climbed the highest point in the line of rocks, was firing in the air like a lunatic, to establish his personal share in this victory. It surprised him more and more, as he let off this imposing clatter, to consider what a trifle bravery is -- to a brave man.

  Neither Gabriel nor the bimbashi was yet aware of the disastrous end of the south division. In the clatter of rifles around them they had both only heard the long rumble of the landslide as a faint thunder in the distance. Here, on the North Saddle, the fight was by no means such an easy one, and was going against the Armenians. Whether these howitzers were skilfully manned or merely lucky, the fact remained that in one hour of slow bombardment, four direct hits had blown away part of the chief communication trench, and that several mortally wounded men were lying about. Gabriel had several times been nearly killed by flying splinters. His skin felt as rigid as damp leather. He could clearly perceive that this was not one of his good days. Ideas and decisions did not come automatically as they usually did. He might -- the thought seared him -- have avoided these losses. He had delayed too long in giving Chaush Nurhan orders to retreat. But at least he had had the intelligence to carry out that retreat on the rocky side. The Turks had managed to set up an observation post, in a high tree, from which they could overlook part of the trench, and correct the aim of their artillery. But the stone barricades to the right were beyond their survey. Remembering their defeat on August 4, they still feared the steep and pitiless cliffs of Musa Dagh, and no longer dared to attempt envelopment. The defenders left their trench one by one, and went ducking, with their heads well down, past the boulders and jutting rocks of the labyrinth, till they came to their second line of entrenchments, also dug along an indentation. This second trench was today unoccupied, since Gabriel had not dared to withdraw so much as a decad from defence positions, along the edges of the mountain. He was fairly certain that the Turk would try to attack at a third point. His blood froze as he remembered that, if this reserve trench, too, should be lost, there would be nothing left to prevent the best-thought-out slow death of five thousand men and women the world had known. The Turkish observer did not seem to have noticed their retreat. Shells kept crashing down into the first trench at one-minute intervals. Since now nothing seemed to stir in it, the bimbashi considered it ripe for assault. There was an endless pause before, in the thick woods of the counter-slope, there arose a wild drumming and blare of bugle calls. Bellowing non-coms and officers urged forward the extended lines. Their shouts mingled with the not entirely fearless shouts of the men. Most of them were recruits, snatched away from their Anatolian ploughs, who, after a few weeks of hasty training, were under fire for the first time. As, however, they saw that their attack seemed to be encountering no resistance, their courage rose to the point of valor; the wildest of all herd emotions invaded them. They came racketing up the shrub-grown slope, strewn with impediments, and stormed the big main trench with rollicking shouts. The colonel saw that things seemed well under way and, knowing that this youthful impulse to victory must not be allowed to cool off, he left this trench in the hands of the second line of saptiehs, and drove these intoxicated storm troops forward again, in clustered lines. But he did not venture to shift his howitzer-fire any farther forward, since he did not want to imperil himself and his men.