Forty Days of Musa Dagh (49 page)

 

 

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 any 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.

 

 

The cohort was continually on duty. A group of orderlies had always
to be within call of the thirteen teachers; others around the numerous
observation posts. Teacher Shatakhian inspected his scouts every day,
and gave unexpected practice-alarms. So that a major, unofficial
enterprise could only be carried out in the sheltering dark, when the
boys were off duty and not being supervised. In the course of this
same day on Musa Dagh, Stephan was already explaining his scheme to the
ever-unapproachable Haik. How miraculous that a foreigner should have
thought of it, not a real Armenian! Since the villages moved up on to
Musa Dagh one or two daring people had already ventured down into the
valley, in the hope of completing supplies. Always they had come back
empty-handed, since strong patrols of saptiehs paraded the villages,
day and night. Stephan's plan was that the cohorts should replenish
the diminishing common stock by a night raid into the orchards. Haik
eyed his ambitious rival thoughtfully, as a finished artist might an
amateur, who has no idea of the real difficulties. Then he at once
began to organize this secret rally and pick out raiders. Stephan was
naturally afraid lest his father should get to hear of the scheme and
curtail his liberty. He admitted his fears. But Haik, who seemed to have
forgotten that the whole suggestion had come from Stephan, answered in
the insufferable voice which he knew so perfectly how to use:

 

 

"You'd better stay up here if you're scared. I think that's the best
thing you could do."

 

 

These words pierced Stephan to the quick and made him resolve not to give
his parents' anxiety another thought. About ninety boys stole sacks,
barrows, baskets, all they could find. At ten in the evening, when the
campfires were all extinguished, they crept in twos and threes past
the sentries and over the barrier. In long lines they raced down the
mountain and had reached the outlying orchards within three quarters of
an hour. Till one in the morning, by the soft light of a sickle moon,
they picked like mad -- apricots, oranges, figs. Here was a chance
for Stephan to show his strength, though he had never done such work
before. Haik the leader had managed to untether three donkeys and bring
them along. They were loaded up at furious speed. And each of the boys had
a heavy burden. But they managed to be back in camp by close on sunrise.

 

 

These vagrants, who had risked their lives for a trifle, without
really knowing the danger, were received with scoldings, even blows,
and yet with pride. Stephan darted away from the rest before they got
to the Town Enclosure, and slipped into the sheikh's tent, which he
shared with Gonzague Maris. Gabriel and Juliette never heard of this
escapade. Its results were scarcely worth mentioning in a population
of five thousand. All the same it gave Pastor Aram Tomasian the
notion of going down, three evenings later, with a hundred reservists,
guarded by decads, to make a similar attempt. Unluckily the yield was
small. Mohammedan peasants in the neighborhood had meanwhile raided all
the orchards, stripping away the good fruit harvest, and leaving only
unripe and rotting windfalls.

 

 

 

 

Gabriel had made the most of the grace allowed him by the Turks. By now
his defence-works could really be described as completed. The men of
the decads, the workers of the reserve, had had to sweat as hard during
this week as even before August 4. By now these trenches had all been
lengthened and deepened down, and the foreground areas strengthened with
encumbrances. Connecting trenches linked up with the second line, as well
as with the advanced sniping-points, which were well camouflaged with
branches, to enable the hardiest defenders to snipe an attack in the rear,
or shoot down stragglers. Gabriel was forever racking his brains to invent
new methods of defence, snares, entanglements, and feints. He wanted to
make the issue of an attack depend less and less on the human factor. His
casual training in the officers' school at Istanbul, his experience in the
artillery battles at Bulair, helped him less than an old infantry manual,
issued by the French War Office, bought, in sheer, idle curiosity, at a
secondhand stall along the Paris quays. The sight of this book, now so
unexpectedly a treasure, produced a strange philosophical sensation in
Gabriel. It was too vague to be called a thought.

 

 

"I bought this book without ever knowing I should use it, simply because
I liked the look of the title-page, or because the unknown subject vaguely
attracted me, though in those days military science didn't attract me
in the least. And yet, at the instant in which I bought it, quite
independently of my will, my fate was predetermining itself. Really one
would almost think that my kismet is mapped out from A to Z. Since in
1910 it made me stop at the secondhand stall on the Quai Voltaire simply
because it needed this book for its future purposes.

 

 

This was the first meditation to which Gabriel had succumbed for many
weeks. He shook it off as an encumbrance. Even in Yoghonoluk, at the
time when he was preparing his defence, he had noticed how his sense
of reality dimmed, the instant he let himself give way to his natural,
meditative bent. He came to the instant conclusion that the true man
of action (which he was not) must, of necessity, be mindless. As to
this technical handbook, it furnished him with numerous warnings,
hints, diagrams, calculations, which he could use on a small scale
in any circumstances. Chaush Nurhan (they had named him "Elleon,"
the Lion, as a reward for his feats on August 4) drilled the decads to
exhaustion-point all day. Gabriel set innumerable tactical exercises,
so that every man might know the ground by inches, and be fully armed
against all possible methods of assault. The alarm signals, too, had
been perfected to the uttermost. In just an hour, notwithstanding the
considerable distances, each point could now be occupied and surrounded,
and the movements of troops, on their largest scale, be carried through.

 

 

 

 

The camp itself was not merely divided into communes, its huts were arranged
in lines of "streets," all leading towards the big Altar Square. This Town
Enclosure was built over rocky, uneven ground, but these settlement streets
were so disposed that the ups and downs had been fairly mitigated. The
Altar Square, the central point of this primitive but crowded encampment,
made an almost magnificent impression. When the mukhtar, Thomas Kebussyan,
succeeded in getting his special wooden "town hall," his six colleagues,
no less in dignity, would not be pacified till they too had obtained
the right to have similar huts around the altar. But Father Tomasian's
masterpiece was, and remained, the big government building, which had
not only real doors and windows but a shingle roof, supplied from his
stock. That solid structure stood as a kind of symbol for the bold
hopes inspiring these defenders. It had three rooms; a big center
room, the session-room, and two little cabins at the sides. The right
side-room was separated off from the session-room by a thick wall. This
large-sized kennel was intended as the communal jail, in case there should
be serious crime to deal with. Ter Haigasun was convinced it would never
be used. The left-hand kennel had been assigned to Krikor, who meanwhile,
between himself and politics, had erected a solid wall of books, behind
which stood his bed. He passed in and out through a narrow gap in it. His
decorative jars, retorts and vases had been set up on shelves against the
wall, while, to his deep personal satisfaction, petroleum tins, bales of
tobacco, and ironmongery had all been impounded by the commune. So that
the government barrack had not only the character of a Ministry and
parliament house, but also of a court of justice and even a university
and state library. For here Krikor received his disciples, the teachers.

 

 

This tiny sample of humanity, the five thousand souls encamped on Musa Dagh,
had therefore caught up again, in one bound, with civilization. A small store
of petrol, a few candles, only the most essential tools -- such was their
entire cultural heritage. The first hailstorm had almost ruined their
wretched provision of mats, covers, bedding, the only remaining comforts
they possessed. And yet, not the lowest human necessity had sufficed to
extinguish in their souls those higher needs, for religion and order,
for reason and intellectual growth. Ter Haigasun said mass as usual
on Sundays and feast days. School was taught on the school slope. The
seventy-year-old Bedros Altouni, and Mairik Antaram, had succeeded in
setting up a model hospital, and bickered with all the other leaders
for the best food to give their patients. Compared to what was usual
in the valley, the general standards had even risen. These worn, pale
faces even expressed a certain peace.