by Franz Werfel
Not only Gabriel, every Armenian fighter in the second trench, knew what they risked. The mind, the life, the body of each one of them was a dark night, centered round one unendurably burning focus -- to aim straight. Here leader and led no longer existed, only the petrifying consciousness: behind me the open camp, the women, the children, my people. And it was so. . . . They waited, as usual, till not one bullet could miss its mark. Gabriel, too, and Aram Tomasian, fired for the first time with complete concentration on their purpose, as though in a dream. What happened then happened independently of them all, or of Chaush Nurhan -- that is to say their will was fused into the general will. They did not reload when they had fired their round of five cartridges. As though obeying one collective impulse, the Armenians swung out over the top. It was all quite different from what it had been on August 4. No blood-lust, not one shout, could force its way through tight-set lips. Heavy, benumbed, four hundred men of all ages fell upon their terrified Turkish assailants, who suddenly woke from their dream of victory. A bitter hand-to-hand encounter, man against man, swung this way and that. What use were the long bayonets on the Mauser rifles? Soon they strewed the earth of that strip of ground. Bony Armenian fingers blindly sought the gullets of their enemies; strong teeth fastened themselves like the fangs of beasts of prey, unconsciously, in Turkish throats, to suck the blood of vengeance out of them. Step by step, the lines of the company retreated. But the saptiehs, whom the old bimbashi -- no longer rosy, but now apoplectically violet in the face -- wanted to throw into battle, let him down. The gendarmerie was not, their chief declared, a fighting unit. It was there to keep order, and nothing more. It was not obliged to take part in assaults against a fully armed enemy. Also it was subject to civil, not military, law. This naturally so good-tempered bimbashi shouted, like a man bereft, that he would have the police chief shot by his policemen. Who was responsible for the whole filthy Armenian business in the first place? Officials, and their stinking curs of saptiehs, so useful against helpless women and children, otherwise good for nothing except to loot. But not all his anger helped the poor old man. The outraged saptiehs vacated the trench, and withdrew to the counter-slope. Yet even so, had not help come at just this minute, it is hard to say how this grappling fight might not have ended.
When news reached the Town Enclosure of the miraculous landslide and total destruction of the south division, the whole people went mad with the lust to kill. Not Ter Haigasun nor the Council could keep them back. Their souls, in blasphemous presumption, became certain that God was on their side. Meanwhile the orderlies came in, to tell them of the northern retreat. The reserve caught up its iron bars, mattocks, and pickaxes. Men and women shouted at Ter Haigasun: "To the North Saddle." Today they'd show these Turkish hounds! There was nothing left for the priest but to place himself at the head of this bellowing horde. The freed decads also came streaming northwards. These superior, although undisciplined, numbers brought the decision within a few minutes. The Turks were hurled back, past the conquered trench, as far as their original position. Bagradian shouted to Ter Haigasun to get the reserve immediately back into camp. If once the howitzers started shelling them, they might do unpredictable damage, in these dense crowds. The priest succeeded with great difficulty in driving back his stampeding flock. Meanwhile, dripping with sweat and blood, the defenders feverishly began to block up gaps in their main trench. Gabriel's rasped nerves expected the first shell at any minute. There was still more than an hour to twilight.
The shrapnel, whose thin howl Bagradian fancied he kept hearing, still did not come, except in his mind. But another, quite unexpected thing happened. A long bugle call. A lively stir along the wooded edge of the counter-slope, and very soon the scouts came in, to report that the Turks were in quick retreat, by the shortest way, into the valley. There was still enough light to watch them encamp on the church square at Bitias, and see their colonel riding with his staff, at a sharp canter, towards Suedia, via Yoghonoluk and the southern villages. This day had been more victorious, above all, more blest, than August 4, and yet, that night, there was no festivity, not even any warm jubilation, in either the entrenchxnents or the Town Enclosure.
They had brought in the dead. Now they lay in a row, covered over, on the flat square of meadowland which Ter Haigasun, because of the depths of its soil, had chosen for their mountain burial ground. Since the day of encampment on Musa Dagh, only three old people had so far died, whose recent graves were marked with the roughest limestone blocks, painted with three black crosses. These fresh graves must suddenly be increased to sixteen, since eight had been killed in the hand-to-hand fighting or by shellflre, and five others had in the last hours died of wounds. The relatives squatted beside each body. There were only low whimperings, no loud cries. All round the hospital hut lay wounded, with crumpled faces and sunken, questioning eyes. Inside, there was only room for a few. The old doctor's hands were full of work, to which he felt himself quite unequal, either by his strength or science. Besides Mairik Antaram, he had Iskuhi, Gonzague, and Juliette to help him. Juliette, on that day especially, worked with an almost frantic self-abandonment, as though, by serving its wounded, she could atone for her lack of love for this people. She had brought out her well-stocked medicine chest, filled, before they left Paris, under the supervision of the Bagradian family doctor. Her lips were white. She kept stumbling as if she might collapse. Then her eyes would seek out Gonzague. She did not see in him a lover, but a pitiless monitor, forcing her to put out more strength than she had. Apothecary Krikor had also, as behooved him, brought supplies. He had only two remedies for wounds -- a few bandages and three large bottles of tincture of iodine. These were at least useful, because the iodine helped to keep from festering those wounds over which old Bedros Altouni was forced to growl, and leave them to nature, to heal or not to heal. Krikor dealt out his panacea with a miserly hand and, as the solution kept diminishing, diluted his iodine with water.
Stephan, who with Haik and his gang, was straying about over the battlefields, in the graveyard, and round the hospital hut, watched all this piteous confusion. It was his first sight of death and dying, of maimed, and of screaming or groaning wounded. These horrors made him older by years, but calmer. His ardent, immature face clouded with a new kind of hostility. Now, as he stared out in front of him, he had taken on the look of Haik, his rival, yet with a dash of strained, overwrought excitement. When it was dark, he reported, as his duty was, to his father, in the north trench. The Leaders sat in a ring round Gabriel. He had the fuses of a grenade and a shrapnel in his hand, and was explaining the method of setting them off. On the grenade the ring was notched with the letter P, that is to say the shell was designed for a percussion fuse. The notching on the shrapnel fuse showed the figure 3, denoting a three-thousand-metre range, the distance between the mouth of the gun and the aiming point. This fuse had been picked up about half a mile behind the front-line trench. So that one might, without being too far out, calculate the howitzer emplacement as about two thousand metres beyond the Saddle. Gabriel passed round the map of Musa Dagh. He had marked the possible point. The guns, if one thought it out, could have been set up only in the treeless gully which, even towards the north, precipitously skirted Musa Dagh. Only that narrow, but open, strip would offer a good field of fire to artillery. Everywhere else there were high trees impeding it, which would have required an impossible elevation for the gun barrels. Stephan, Haik, and the other boys had squatted down behind the men, and were listening breathlessly. Nurhan "the Lion" suggested the possibility of attacking the battery. Gabriel rejected it at once. Either, he said, the Turks would give up the attempt, and remove these howitzers to the valley, or they had a new plan of attack, and would shift the emplacement in the night. In either case, to attack the guns would be unnecessary, and highly dangerous, since a strong protecting force, perhaps even a whole infantry platoon, with plenty of cover, could practically wipe out the attackers. The Turks had shown what it meant to attack in the open
. But he, Bagradian, refused to risk another Armenian life. Nurhan still stubbornly clung to his idea. It led to a vehement dispute, this way and that, till Bagradian sharply closed the discussion:
"Chaush Nurhan, you're fagged out, and so are we all, and no good for anything. That's enough! Let's get some sleep. In a few hours we'll see what else we can do."
But the boys were not fagged out; they were ready for anything. Stephan got leave to spend the night in the trenches. His father, who had already spread out his rugs, gave one to him. Gabriel had lost all desire for a bed and enclosed space in which to sleep. Tonight it was too stuffy to breathe freely even in the open. The exhausted men slept like the dead. One of them trod out the fires before they lay down. The double guard of sentries went to their posts, to keep a sharp look-out on every inlet to the Saddle. The boys, like a noiseless flight of birds, sped away among the rock barricades. A bright August moon was already well in its second quarter. They stood in its sharp light in a close ring, among chalky boulders, chirruped and whispered. At first it was mere aimless, pointless chattering, in the bright, sharp light. But they, too, in the depths of their adventurous sods, were restless with the same itching purpose that filled young Stephan. It began in mere childish curiosity -- "to have a look at the guns." Haik's band comprised a few of the brightest of the scouts' group. Couldn't one go on a reconnoitring expedition, without having expressly been given orders by Hapeth Shatakhian or Avakian? Stephan threw out the enticing question. His first mad sally into the orchards had raised his prestige to the height of Haik's. Haik, with the ironical indulgence of the invincibly strong, had begun to tolerate the rise of the Bagradian brat. Sometimes, in his mocking protection, there was even a faint suggestion of amiability. Haik signed to the rest to wait for him without getting excited. He wanted first to see what was on, up there. He, whose clear affinity with nature was far stronger than that of any among them, quietly dismissed would-be companions. He vanished soundlessly, to appear again suddenly in the swarm, not half an hour later, with the news that you could see the guns as clear as if it were daylight. His eyes glinted as he said it. They were big, beautifully golden-looking things, with a distance of about six paces between them. He had not counted more than twenty gunners, all asleep, and not one officer. There was only one sentry post.
Haik had counted accurately. And the fate of these howitzers was the reason why the poor, rosy-cheeked bimbashi was obliged to consider himself lucky that he could end his days as a paymaster's official, attached to the Anatolian railway, instead of as a General-Pasha. He swore a hundred oaths before the court martial, by Allah's mercy, that he had posted all the usual guards, as set down in the Sultan's regulations; that criminal saptiehs and chettehs had gone lounging off without his leave. This truth could be proved, but it did not help the poor old gentleman in the least. Had it not been his duty to post a platoon of regulars round his guns? But the bimbashi's bad luck had not been confined to this single blunder. The artillery lieutenant, in direct contradiction of orders, without having left one decently trustworthy non-commissioned officer, had followed the infantrymen, and gone down to the valley to fetch up next day's ordre de bataille. In addition to which, the donkeymen, pressed into service as gun-draggers, had all wandered back to their villages, having drawn the very logical conclusion that nobody could want them during the night. Such discipline in the field, not to mention its unheard-of results, made the sentence an unusually mild one. Strangely and fortunately enough, Jemal Pasha, "the sour-faced, humpbacked swindler," who as a rule insisted on having everything explained to him in detail, refrained from investigating personally. This may have been due to that general's preoccupation with Suez -- or to some other reason, connected with the ugly Jemal's attitude towards Enver, the popular idol of Istanbul.
Haik and his two best scouts crept on cats'-feet along the narrow shelf of rock on the farther side of the Saddle. Stephan followed them, rather more clumsily. The one-legged Hagop had naturally had to stay behind. This time it had been Stephan, his friend, who sharply told that ambitious cripple to stop pestering. That night no Sato hung around the edge of the pack. She had something better to do. Stephan and Haik carried guns and cartridges, borrowed from the piled-up arms and cartridge belts of the decads. This day was to decide their chronic rivalry, a dispute which had gone on some time. Whenever Stephan, insisting on his excellent marksmanship, had boasted that at fifty paces he could shoot the face out of a playing card, Haik had displayed the coldest scorn: "Can't ever stop bragging, can you?" Here was a chance to show the cocksure Haik that Stephan might have bragged vainly of much else, but at least not of being a good shot. And of this Stephan gave gruesome proof.
Haik guided the town-bred Stephan through rhododendron thickets to the very edge of the battery emplacement. Ten paces off them snored the sleepers. Sentries gazed vacantly up at the night sky, starless in the bright moonlight. Time and space extended infinitely, without misgivings, and full of patience. First Stephan tried several branches, to get a really comfortable rest for his barrel. He aimed very long, and without excitement, as though the flesh-and-blood figures over there had been wooden dummies in the shooting-booth of a country fair. This child of European culture was impelled by only one sensation -- the desire to get the human, white, moon-lit forehead of a guard before his barrel, well between the sights. He pulled the trigger without a qualm, calmly heard the report, felt the kick and, delighted with himself, saw the man sink down. As the sleepers stumbled to their feet, not yet quite knowing what had happened, he aimed more quickly, but not a jot less steadily, pulling the trigger twice, three times, four times, tugging at the breech with a quick, strong jerk. These fifteen Turks were redifs, elderly men, who scarcely knew the meaning of the campaign. They ran about in confusion. Five already lay in pools of blood. No visible enemy. These staid, respectable peasants, forced into the army, did not seek cover -- they rushed, in the wildest pell-mell, into the wood -- far, far, never to return! Haik wildly shot off his whole five bullets after them. Not one hit -- as Master Stephan could note contemptuously. The howitzers, the limber, the dragging-cart, the shell-locker, the rifles, the mules, were all abandoned. Thus did one fourteen-year-old schoolboy, with five cartridges, avenge the million-fold decimation of his race upon harmless peasants forced into arms -- upon the wrong people, as is always the case in war revenge.
When the outpost sentries heard shots crackle through the quiet of this moony night, they aroused their chief. But the schoolboys, huddled among the rocks, awaiting Haik and Stephan, became panic-stricken. They felt responsible. With loud cries and waving arms, they came rushing out. But only Hagop, with all his frenzied, stubborn nimbleness, came hopping to Gabriel, who had started up, still dazed with alarm. The cripple pointed wildly at the counter-slope, with repeated cries: "Haik and Stephan -- over there." Gabriel did not grasp what had happened. He knew Stephan was in danger. He rushed off like a madman, where Hagop pointed. A hundred men caught up their rifles and followed their chief. The "Lion," Chaush Nurhan, was naturally one of them. But when, arrived at the emplacement, Bagradian saw the dead, and Stephan unharmed, he jerked his son so roughly to him that he might have been intending to shoot him too. All the rest were dazed. No one so much as noticed the two young heroes, those capturers of guns who, with such huge, new bronze toys to amuse them, had forgotten all the reality around, how little time they had to waste, and even the weltering death under their feet. For an instant the Armenian men stood breathless. This incredible thing was too huge to grasp, this booty too absurdly unattainable, for any among them to find time to ask how the fight had come about. Quick -- get hold of the guns before the Turks come! Two hundred arms got to work on it. The teams, the limbers, the munition box were rushed up the slope, the howitzers slung to the limbers. Every man of them pushed or tugged at the ropes, or put his shoulder to the wheels. The guns went jolting on, up the fissured, pathless earth of the mountain. But night melted jutting rocks and bushes, the hard resistance of every ob
stacle, into soft flexibility. For a while it seemed as though the howitzers, borne on this mad strength of gripping hands, were hovering along above the earth.
