Forty Days of Musa Dagh (53 page)

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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.