Forty Days of Musa Dagh (54 page)

 

 

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 obstacle, 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.

 

 

It was not two hours before the guns, in spite of the incredibly difficult
terrain, had been set up where Gabriel wanted them. He had been given a short
account of Stephan's deed. But the fear still thudding in his heart would not
let him speak of it. He could not praise his son. This scatter-brained
daring, the escapade of a half-grown schoolboy, was, he felt, a dangerous
example not only to the other boys, but to the decads as well. If everyone
now began to want to be heroic, that would be the end, on the Damlayik,
of the only power -- unified discipline -- which might, at least for a time,
guarantee the survival of the camp. Deeper still was his anxiety for Stephan.
So far his luck had been incredible. Really the boy must be off his head!
And you couldn't lock him up, on Three-Tent Square. . . . But Gabriel
did not follow out these thoughts, since now his whole mind was set
on the howitzers. Their type was familiar to him; the battery he had
served in the Balkan war had had guns of the same calibre. They were
Austro-Hungarian 10 cm. howitzers, of the 1899 pattern, delivered to
Turkey by the Skoda factory. The lockers in the gun-cart of the second
still contained thirty shells. Gabriel found all he needed, and tried to
remember exactly how to use it -- the aiming-apparatus for firing from
behind cover, a box of firing instructions, and schedule, in the trail
box. He began to remember all he had learned, reckoned out the distance
to Bitias, strove to get the exact position of the Turkish encampment,
screwed at the rear sights to determine the given field of direction,
took stock of the elevation of his enplacement, raised the barrels, with
the little wheel, to center the bubble, and only then pulled out the
breech, set the fuses of two shells with the key ring, shoved the round
projectiles into the bore, and pressed in the cartridges after them. His
unpractised hand took very long to do all this, and Chaush Nurhan could
do next to nothing to help him. As the sun came up, Bagradian, having
retested all these aiming factors, knelt with Nurhan, as regulations
directed, one on either side of the gun carriage, watch in hand. Two
short, terrific cracks, bang upon bang, rent the air to shreds. The gun
kicked, embedding itself deep in the ground. These shells had been badly
aimed; they dropped far wide of Bagradian's target, somewhere in the
valley. But this mere gesture was enough to apprise the whole Mohammedan
countryside of the new victory of the Christians, the loss of Turkish
artillery, the impregnability of the Damlayik, and the fact, now public
property, that the Armenian swine had entered into a compact with the
jinn, known of old as the evil spirits of Musa Dagh. The chettehs had all
vanished in the night, and a section of saptiehs, not attached to this
nahiyeh, along with them. Now the few survivors of the companies were
convinced that even a full division would be routed, if it assailed
this devil's mountain. The bimbashi could not have ordered a fresh
attack without risking a mutiny from his young troops. Nor did he even
consider such foolhardiness, occupied with a far more modest problem:
how to get the long line of carts, full of dead and wounded, back to
Antioch, unperceived, as he had given strict orders they should be. The
old man's cheeks had no more color in them. It was all he could do to sit
his horse, after two sleepless nights and the strain of battle. His fate
was sealed. The bimbashi's very limited powers of reflection, which, even
in peaceable times, were far too desultory, could conceive no method of
pulling down to destruction along with him the cursed Kaimakam and his set
of rascally, foxy civil servants who were really responsible for it all.

 

 

The two thunderclaps, almost in their ears, seemed to those within the
Town Enclosure like the menacing signs of divine assistance. The toughest,
dourest among these peasants embraced, with tears in their eyes. "Perhaps
Christ really means to save us, after all." Never before had their sunrise
greetings sounded so heartfelt. As to the Bagradians, their kingly rank,
doubly proved, seemed for ever established. Some of the peasants came to
Gabriel, begging his permission to confer on Stephan the title "Elleon"
-- "Lion." Gabriel rather sharply refused. His son was still only a
child, without any real notion of danger. He didn't want him to get
conceited, or stuff his head with a lot of foolery, which might only end
in disaster. So that Stephan, through his father's severity, was balked of
public recognition, and had to content himself with the flatteries which,
for a few days, surrounded him on all sides. In after-years those Armenian
chroniclers who described the battle on the Damlayik wrote only of "the
heroic action of a young sharpshooter" without naming him. But of what use
would even the most explicit praises have been then, to Bagradian's son?

 

 

Gabriel had long been a different man, and Stephan too had changed
completely. The gently nurtured cannot do butcher's work unpunished,
though right may be a thousand times on their side. On this boy's delicate
forehead some savage god of Musa Dagh was already setting his dark seal.

 

 

 

 

This great night of August 14 witnessed yet another, though far less
memorable, event. Sato had gone creeping dawn through the twilight,
to her friends in the valley. They must hear the whole tale of battle,
learn how sixteen corpses lay covered on the bare earth, how the shrieks
of the wounded rose and rose -- loudest of all when the stupid hekim,
Altouni, dabbled brown water on their wounds. Sato, that walking
newspaper, alike of mountain- and of grave-dwellers, could, tonight,
revel in sensationalism, earning her social keep for days ahead. When
Sato could satisfy her clients, and feel herself a beloved child,
her eyes seemed to change into slits of flickering light, and her
throaty jargon proclaimed sensation with joyous zest. The churchyard
folk rejoiced along with her -- old Manushak, old Wartuk, and Nunik,
the oldest of them all, or so she said. They wagged knowing heads. Deep
self-importance possessed them. No longer superfluous outcasts, they had
an office to perform, incontestably theirs, through all human memory. The
dead had need of them. Sixteen dead awaited them on the Damlayik. And,
once they came about their business, their arch-enemy, Hekim Altouni,
would have lost his power. No "enlightener" dared molest keening-women.

 

 

So Nunik, Wartuk, Manushak, and a score of other beggar-women besides,
set forth, with the slow, dignified tread of functionaries, for their dens,
dug in the earth mounds of the graveyard. They dragged forth the crammed
and filthy sacks upon which they laid their beggar-women's heads. What
it was that rotted in these sacks, in dense and permanent corruption,
passes description. The miscellaneous rubbish of fifty years' picking
up off the ground. The collector's itch of all old, poor women in every
land, the itch to save up moth-eaten remnants, scrape together mildewed
garbage -- this usual, jealously guarded treasure-trove of rags and
rottenness had taken on the dimensions of a veritable orgy of stinking
uselessness. Yet behold, these old women's sacks seemed, besides their
tatters, their cloth patches, empty boxes, stony crusts and cheese rinds,
to contain the professional equipment of Nunik, Wartuk, Manushak. Each of
them plunged in her hand, to draw the same out of her luckybag -- a long,
grey veil, a pot of greasy salve. They squatted down, and began to smear
their faces, like mimes. It was a dark purple face-stain, which they
worked into their deep-cut wrinkles, changing their incredibly ancient
faces into timeless and imposing masks. Nunik especially, with the lupous
nose and strong white teeth gleaming out of her dark, lipless visage,
quite justified her romantic reputation as the "eternally wandering"
medicine-woman. It took her a long time to make up. Suddenly they broke
off their preparations and puffed out their stump of candle end, the
wick flame, in the rancid oil cup set up before them. Hoofs and voices
came scurrying past. This was the instant when the bimbashi and his staff
rode away to Suedia. When the sounds had petered out in Habibli, the wood
village, the women rose, enveloped their grey, matted heads in the veils,
took each a long stick in her hand, and their broken, clappering shoes
set out. Their stringy, old women's legs seemed to manage surprisingly
long strides. Sato came after, scared at their majesty. As, plying their
staves, they went on in silence under the moon, these keening-women had
almost the look of the masked leaders of a Greek chorus.