Forty Days of Musa Dagh (66 page)

 

The Kaimakam said good-night, went a few paces followed by his lantern
bearers, came uphill again. "Don't misunderstand my question, Major.
But can I be quite certain that nothing unexpected will happen in the next
few hours?"

 

 

The major, who had not come down to meet him, but stayed where he was,
with his head half averted, repressed an angry reply. This civilian
meddling was insufferable. He growled: "Naturally I've taken all the
usual precautionary measures. Although my poor fellows need their rest,
I've set very strong outpost lines. You needn't have bothered to come
back, Kaimakam. I've also made up my mind to send out patrols to beat
up the country all round our camp."

 

 

And as the major said, so it was done. But these patrols, exhausted corporals
and men, went stumbling half asleep past the rigid Armenians, whose eyes
shone feline out of the leaves. They were soon back to report to the
officer in charge that the country all round was clear and in order.

 

 

 

 

Bagradian threw down the flaming matchstick with which he had just lit a
cigarette. Little flames darted along the grass, and set fire to a tuft
of it. Iskuhi, still at his side, trod out the greedy flames.

 

 

"How dry everything is," she said.

 

 

It was this match that inspired the impossible thought in Bagradian:
He stood there, lost in it. The notion was double-edged. It might do his
own people as much damage as the enemy. Bagradian held out his handkerchief,
to test the direction of this strong wind. West wind, sea wind, driving
branches downwards towards the valley. Neither he alone nor the Council
could make the decision. Ter Haigasun, the supreme head of the people,
must say yes or no.

 

 

After an instant's silence Ter Haigasun said: "Yes."

 

 

Meanwhile the whole armed force had vacated the altar square and Town
Enclosure. Both storming parties breathlessly awaited the signal. Between
the surrounded trench and the rock barricades the whole mass of reservist
villagers. But that was not all. It must unfortunately be recorded
that Stephan, long since escaped from his mother, was very elated and
pleased with life, in spite of imminent catastrophe. This creeping and
whispering in the dark, this close proximity of so many bodies on the
alert, these sudden gleamings and extinguishings of hooded lanterns,
and a hundred more such adventurous uncertainties, keyed up young
Stephan's excited nerves to the sensation of having been transported
into the midst of a pleasantly thrilling world of dreams. All this was
enhanced by the very unusual order just issued to the cohort of youth,
and their pride in being allowed, as the last defense of the encampment,
to share in plans still not divulged. It is therefore easily understood
that, even from their present exhausted state, Stephan and his comrades
had been roused to irrepressible excitement.

 

 

This strange order concerned the stores of oil. All the oil casks on
the Damlayik, including those of the Bagradian family, were being rolled
without further explanation on to the altar square, as well as whatever
branches, sticks, and cudgels could be got together from the sites of
the extinguished fires. First Stephan and his comrades, then the women,
and all children of nine and over, were ordered from these piles of
brush-wood to pick out as strong and thick a branch as possible. The
teachers and Samuel Avakian, who supervised this distribution, had all
they could do to prevent noisy quarrelling. They struck with their fists
and whispered: "Quiet, you silly devils." It was the same round the oil
casks. The branches must be dipped to the middle in the thick liquid,
and twirled round in it. There were at least three thousand of them. It
took a very long time. The people were still crowding round the casks
when a whistle blast gave the signal and the hidden attackers opened
fire on those trenches taken by the Turks. Its sounds were echoed at
once a hundredfold by hollow din out of the gully, interspersed with
drowsy long-drawn cries of alarm, so hoarse as hardly to be human.

 

 

Gabriel Bagradian stood on a little summit of rock entanglements.
During the sudden, crackling tumult of battle, a sound entirely different
from that of any previous attack, the leader, in a kind of dream-like
expectancy, had said nothing at all to the people waiting behind. Several
minutes went by. The crackle of small arms sounded thinner. Gabriel
could scarcely realize that the first act of his surprise attack had
succeeded so quickly. But Chaush Nurhan was already giving the signal
-- a few vehement flourishes with his lantern. The trench was back
in the hands of its first defenders, who overflowed it, rushing down
the slope after the enemy. Some of the Turkish infantrymen got lost in
the dark and fell into the hands of pursuing decads. Some of them ran,
stumbled, leapt downhill, towards the shouting gully and were bayoneted,
or felled by their pursuers' rifle-butts. Gabriel sent Avakian back to
the reserve. "Ready and forwards." He waited till the whispering shoals
approached the rock on which he stood; than he ran forward and headed
them. Slowly they crowded onwards down the slopes, through the thick
shrubs, past the dead, down toward the din-filled grove.

 

 

There it was like a hunt in full cry. The bravest among the officers,
onbashis, and soldiers might try, again and again, to come up close
to the brushwood conflagrations around their camp and douse them --
they extinguished their own lives. The ring of komitaji rifles drove
them back into the center of the gully. Officers yelled contradictory
orders. No one heard. Infantrymen and saptiehs ran about bellowing to
find their rifles; yet, when they had them, they found them impossible to
use. Every shot they fired might have killed a brother or a comrade. Many
flung away their arms, which impeded them, as they ran or leapt through
this thorny pathlessness. The very inner life of Musa Dagh seemed to
do its share in this gruesome destruction. The revengeful thicket grew
rankly luxuriant. Trees became treacherously taller. Whipping twigs and
plants twined like lashes round the sons of the Prophet and brought them
low. Those who fell, lay on. The indifference to death which marks their
race descended on them. They buried their heads in thorny nests. The
yüs-bashi, by dint of his own cool energy and many strokes with the
flat of his sword, had collected round him a little knot of utterly
flabbergasted infantrymen. When sergeants, corporals, and old soldiers
grew aware of their officer, in a feeble glimmer of dying campfire,
they joined the rest. The major, thrusting his sword towards the heights,
yelled: "Forward!" and: "After me!" With an odd excitement he noticed his
phosphorescent wristwatch. Suddenly he remembered the words which he had
said last night to the Kaimakam: "I don't want to go on living if tomorrow
that Armenian camp still isn't cleared." And truly at that moment, he did
not want to live. "After me!" he yelled again and again. He could feel
the whole force of his own will power, able by its single strength to
transfer this rout into a break-through. His example had its effect. And
even their longing to be out of this inferno of a wood urged the soldiers
on. They roused themselves to leave the cover of their own apathy and,
bellowing, followed their commander. They came scatheless to the upper
end of the gully. With thudding hearts, utterly exhausted, having lost
all consciousness of reality, they went on, lurching up the mountainside,
into the light of lanterns, the fire of decads, which received them. They
were flung back like so many lifeless dummies. The yüs-bashi did not at
first perceive his wound. He felt very surprised at suddenly finding
himself so isolated. Then his right arm felt heavy. To feel the blood
and pain pleased, almost delighted, him. His shame, his loss, had become
far less. He dragged himself back, with his eyes shut. . . . " Fall down
somewhere," he hoped, "and forget it all."

 

 

When, from recaptured trenches the din of battle retreated downhill,
that was the sign for the Town Enclosure. A tongue of fire shot up. One
of the oil-soaked torches began to crackle into flame and, within a few
minutes, had passed it on to a thousand more. Most of the villagers had
followed the example of Haik, Stephan, and the other boys, who then, with
a torch in each hand, moved off in a long, extended line. Earth had never
seen such a torchlight procession. Each one who bore these spluttering
candles at arm's length was startled by this incomprehensible clarity,
which seemed to light up his very soul. The light was not, as single
flames are, an intensification of endless dark, but, like the light that
fires a whole people, it shot a glorious breach in the dark of space. The
long, far-flung lines and groups moved onwards slowly, ceremoniously, as
if they were on their way, not to a battlefield, but to a place of prayer.

 

 

Down in the villages, in Yoghonoluk, Bitias, in Habibli, Azir, in Wakef
and Kheder Beg -- yes, in the north, in Kebussiye even, the honey village,
not one new tenant could get to sleep. When the wild clatter of the
surprise attack reached these villages, their armed inhabitants snatched
up rifles, set out, and now garrisoned the low ridges, though they did
not venture too near the gully. But their women stood in the gardens, or
on the roofs, avidly and fearfully listening to the furious yelping of the
bullets. Suddenly, at one in the morning, they saw the sun come up behind
the Damlayik. Its black ridge stood sharply outlined; behind it spread a
tender, rosy glow. This unearthly vision, this never-to-be-equalled sign
and wonder, worked on these credulous women's spirits like the trump of
doom. And when, a short while later, the whole edge of the mountain burst
into flames, it was too late for natural explanations. Jesus Christ,
the prophet of unbelievers, had let the sun of His might rise behind
the mountain; the Armenian jinn of Musa Dagh, in alliance with Peter,
Paul, Thomas, and the other worthies of the Evangel, were protecting this
people. The ancient myth of supernatural powers behind the Armenians had
found its completest confirmation. More than these simple women became
imbued with it. The mullahs, too, watching the miracle from the round
gallery encircling the church dome of Yoghonoluk, took flight out of
this mosque that had been the Church of Ever-Increasing Angelic Powers.

 

 

Less magically, but far more terribly, were those Turkish soldiers still
on the mountain-slope appalled by this irresistible line of lights.
It gave the impression of vastly superior numbers, sprung up out of nowhere,
as though the whole Armenian nation, all the convoys dispersed over Turkey,
were gathered at that time and in this place to avenge, with torches and
balls of fire, on a mere handful of their oppressors, the monstrous wrongs
they had endured. The little garrisons of Turks before each defense-sector
raced back down the slopes. No officer could manage to hold them. All still
alive in the cursed region of the ilex gully had fought their way, heedless
now of bullets, through thickets, and come out on the lower slopes. The
Armenians were not numerous enough to box-barrage the mouth of the gully.
A few valiant officers and men, missing their bashi from among them, had
once again forced their way out, to snatch up that wounded, unconscious
officer just as he was about to be taken prisoner. They carried him down
to Villa Bagradian headquarters. During which painful journey he came
to himself. He knew now that everything was over, that the Christians
had scattered his whole power, that for him there could be no return,
no reinstatement. From the depths of his soul he cursed the bullet
which had only shattered his right arm, and not done its business
more efficiently. He only longed to faint again. That prayer, however,
remained unanswered. The clearest, coldest perception of precisely what
this would mean worked on and on in him.

 

 

The procession of fire had no more enemies left to face. Slowly the
long lines of incendiaries approached the ilex gully, the woods around
it. About half-way down the slope Ter Haigasun halted the long lines and
gave the order (passed from one to the other) to cast flaming stumps into
the undergrowth. The flames sank down in the smoking shrubs. From all
sides, in a few minutes, there came an endless crackling, as of pistol
shots, as if the whole Damlayik would explode. Flames shot high in many
places. The woods were on fire. Woe, if the wind should veer in the next
few hours. The Town Enclosure, which lay nearest the edge of the mountain,
would have been the prey of flying sparks and tongues of flame, borne down
the wind. It was fortunate that Gabriel Bagradian should have cleared a
glacis before these sectors. This forest fire ate its way so quickly, so
instantaneously, up the sun-dried flanks of the Damlayik, that what stood
here in a roaring mass of flame looked like no earthly fire, no earthly
fuel. There was scarcely time for komitajis and decads lower down the
slope to rescue the spoils of the attack; more than two hundred Mauser
rifles, abundant munitions, two field-kitchens, five sumpter mules with
their fodder, bivvy sheets, rugs, lanterns and much besides.

 

 

 

 

When the real sun came up, a stony sleep lay on the Damlayik. The fighters
slept where they had fallen. Only a very few had had the strength to drag
back into cover. The boys slept, coiled in heaps on the bare earth. Women
in the Town Enclosure had sunk down lifeless on their mats, unwashed,
tousled, without a thought of their tiny children who whimpered hungrily.
Bagradian slept; so did all the leaders. Even Ter Haigasun had not
the strength to complete his Mass of thanksgiving. Towards the end of
it, overcome with exhaustion, he had sunk down like a drunkard before
the altar. The mukhtars slept, without having picked the day's sheep
for killing. The butchers slept and the milkmaids. No one went to work.
No fires were lit in the kitchen square, nor water carried from the
wellsprings. No one could attend to the many wounded still lying in agony
in their trenches, nor to those who in the course of hours had managed to
drag their way to the hospital hut. All who are summarized so impersonally
in that one colorless word "wounded" lay strewn about in horrible reality:
faces without eyes or noses, chins mushed into bleeding pulp, bodies
smashed by dumdum bullets, yelping men with stomach wounds, dying of
thirst. Only death, not Bedros Hekim, could help these wretched. But
till he bent compassionately over them, they too were helped through
dragging hours by some narcotic, feverish half-sleep.