Forty Days of Musa Dagh (34 page)

 

 

"No, no . . . Father . . . You mustn't send us away. I want to stay . . .
stay with you!"

 

 

What was it that looked at the father out of his son's almond-shaped eyes?
This was no longer a child whose life one arranges, but an adult impelled
by his will and blood, a destiny fully shaped, no longer susceptible to
moulding. He had grown and developed so much in the last few weeks. And yet
this new perception did not exhaust the thing which his father encountered
in Stephan's eyes. He dissuaded feebly: "What's coming, Stephan, won't be
child's play."

 

 

Stephan's cry of alarm changed to a defiant challenge: "I want to stay
with you, Father . . . I won't go away."

 

 

I, I, I! Jealous rage had hold of Juliette. Oh, these Armenians!
How they stuck together! She herself had ceased to be there. Her child
belonged to her, as much as to him! She wasn't going to lose him. Yet,
if she stood up for her rights, she'd lose Stephan. She came a decisive,
almost an enraged, step nearer father and son. She caught Stephan's hand
to pull him towards her. But Gabriel knew only that Juliette had come to
them. "And so that's what you really thought of me?" In that malicious
question there had still lurked a hint of indecision. But this angry step
was decisive for Gabriel. He drew wife and child within his embrace.

 

 

"May Jesus Christ be our help! Perhaps it's better this way." As he strove
to calm himself with these words, he was invaded with a kind of dull horror,
as though the Saviour he invoked had caused some door to shut against
Stephan and Juliette. Before their embrace had achieved any real warmth
and life, he let fall his arms, turned away, and left them. He stopped
again in the doorway. "It goes without saying, Maris, you can have one
of my horses for your journey."

 

 

Gonzague deepened his attentive smile. "I should accept your kindness
most gratefully if I didn't have another request. I want you to allow
me to share your life up on Musa Dagh. I've already talked it over
with Krikor. He's been asking Ter Haigasun's permission for me, and he
hasn't refused."

 

 

Bagradian considered this. "I suppose you realize that later on the best
American passport won't help you in the least."

 

 

"I've lived here so long, Gabriel Bagradian, that I shouldn't find it easy
to leave you all. And, besides, I'm a journalist, you know. I may never get
another chance like this."

 

 

Something in Gonzague gave Bagradian a sense of hostility, repelled him
even. He tried to think how to refuse the young man. "The only question
is, will you ever get the chance of making any use of what you write?"

 

 

Gonzague answered not only Gabriel, but all the people in the room:
"I've often found that I could rely on my intuition. And I feel almost
certain that things will turn out all right for you in the end. It's
only a feeling. But it's the kind of feeling I can trust." His alert
velvet eyes glanced from Hovsannah to Iskuhi, from Iskuhi to Juliette,
on whose face they rested. And Gonzague's eyes seemed to be asking Madame
Bagradian if she didn't find his reasons convincing enough.

 

 

 

 

 

 

7. THE FUNERAL OF THE BELLS

 

 

For two days and nights Gabriel stayed up on the Damlayik. Even on
the first evening he had to send Juliette word not to expect him.
A variety of circumstances forced him to remain so long on this mountain
ridge. Suddenly the Damlayik had ceased to be that idyllic mountain
slope familiar to Gabriel, first as a place on which to dream, intimate
in spite of its ruggedness, then as a strategic possibility. For the
first time it showed him its true, unvarnished face. Everything on
earth, not man alone, shows its reality only when we make demands on
it. So too the Damlayik. That after-glow of Paradise, those solitudes
whose laughing well-springs made them alive, had vanished now off its
wrinkled, forbidding aspect. The defence terrain chosen by Gabriel
comprised a surface area of several square kilometers. This surface,
as far as the fairly level town enclosure, was a difficult up-and-down
of hills, depressions, knolls, and gullies, which roughly made one
aware of its inequalities once it was necessary to visit its various
points many times a day. Gabriel wanted to avoid the waste of time
and energy entailed in any not absolutely necessary descent into the
valley. All the same, he had never felt so toughly vigorous in his whole
life. His body, too, now that unsparing demands were being made on it,
showed him both what he was and of what he was capable. By comparison
the weeks he had spent as a front-line soldier in the Balkan war seemed
slack and boring. In those days one had been mere human material, to be
pushed forward under fire, seemingly by some natural force, or to drift
back in the same constant danger, with the same will-less passivity. In
the past few years Gabriel had often suffered from stomach trouble and
palpitations. These derangements of a pampered body were now as though
blown away by a single breath of necessity. He no longer knew that he
had a heart or a stomach, and simply did not notice the fact that three
hours' sleep on, or under, a blanket fully sufficed him, that a roll
and some kind of tinned food stilled his hunger for the whole day. But,
even though he thought very little about it, this proof that he was
really a strong man filled him with a glow of pride. It was the pride
which tingles through our substance only when our minds have defeated it.

 

 

His was occupied with much else. Most of those men intended as fighters
had already forgathered on the mountain, together with a few of the
stronger women and a few half-grown boys to be used as workers. All the
rest had been shrewdly kept in the valley. There daily life was to seem to
be going on quietly as usual, so that no rumor should spread of deserted
villages. And these villagers had undertaken the task of getting as many
stores as possible up the mountain in the dead of night. These could not
all be loaded on to mules. The long beams and struts of old Tomasian's
workshop, for instance, had to be carried up on their own shoulders by
his apprentices. This wood was to build the altar, the government hut,
and the hospital. The younger of the people's representatives, above all
Pastor Tomasian and the teachers, were needed by Gabriel on the Damlayik,
while the General Council, under Ter Haigasun, continued its business
in the valley.

 

 

At that time there were about five hundred men encamped on the Damlayik.
With the shock troops and elite, it was a question not only of spurring
on this work to the exhaustion point, but of fanning to higher and higher
flame the passionate fighting-spirit already in them. When at night with
exhausted bodies they gathered round the fires in the town enclosure,
Pastor Aram, in long exhortations -- which had, however, little of the
sermon in them -- would explain the real meaning of this resistance. He
proclaimed the divine right of self-defence, spoke of the mysterious way
of blood which Armenians have trodden all through the ages -- of the
value of this one brave attempt, as an example which might fire their
whole people to resist and so save itself. He described all the cruelty
of the convoys, all he had himself seen or heard described, giving
such atrocities as an instance of the way in which these thousands of
villagers would have been certain to perish in the end, and, with equal
conviction, he kept assuring them that the great deed in which they were
united was a certain way to freedom and victory. To be sure, he was never
very explicit as to how they were to gain their victorious liberty. Nor
did anyone ask him. The very sound of his stormy words was enough to
fire the blood of the young men; the meanings behind them mattered less.

 

 

Sometimes Gabriel spoke instead of the pastor. He was less rhetorical,
more exact. They must never, he urged them, waste a second, eat one
unnecessary mouthful; must concentrate every pulse-beat on the one
aim. Let them think less of inevitable misfortune than of the sorry
pain and degradation with which the Turks were befouling their Armenian
subjects. "If once we manage to drive them down off the mountain, we
shan't have merely wiped off this insult, we shall have humbled and
dishonored the Turks forever. Because we're the weak, and they're the
strong. They despise us as a set of merchants and always boast of being
soldiers. If we beat them once, we shall have poisoned their self-esteem
and given them a lesson they'll never get over."

 

 

Whatever Gabriel and Aram may really have been thinking at this time,
they insisted again and again on the glorious outcome of resistance,
hammering fanatical belief and, more important still, fanatical discipline,
into young, impressionable minds.

 

 

No more than Gabriel had ever been aware that he possessed an iron
constitution, had he suspected his gifts as an organizer. In the milieux
in which he had so far lived "sound practical sense" had always connoted
limited and acquisitive thinking. Therefore he had striven all too
successfully to be on the side of the unpractical. But now, thanks to
preliminary work, he succeeded in the first few hours in building up the
most feasible division of his army into skeleton "cadres," into which
reinforcements from the valley could very easily be incorporated.
He built up three main divisions: a fighting-formation; a big reserve;
and a cohort of youth, for all half-grown lads of from thirteen to
fifteen, only to be used as a last resort in case of very heavy losses
on a harassed front, but otherwise to act as scouts, observation corps,
and liaison runners. The full strength of this front line of defence
worked out at eight hundred and sixty men. This, not including the less
fit, the totally unfit, and a certain number of the most indispensable
"experts," comprised all the men from sixteen to sixty. All others,
elderly men still able to work and a certain proportion of girls and
women, were lumped together as reserve -- so that his second strength
was somewhere between a thousand and eleven hundred. The third branch,
the scouting-brigade of his cohort of youth, the cavalry of the Damlayik,
consisted of over three hundred boys. On the second day Gabriel sent his
adjutant Avakian down to the valley to fetch Stephan. He was not certain
that Juliette would let him go so easily. But the student punctually
returned with a radiant Stephan at his heels, to be enrolled at once as
a scout by his father. Of the eight hundred and sixty men of his main
defence, it is true that not more than three hundred could be armed with
what infantry rifles they had. Most, unfortunately, had either ordinary
hunting guns or the romantic flint-locks to be found in nearly every
house in the villages.

 

 

Gabriel had ordered every gun from his brother's chests that was in
any sort of working order, to be distributed. Luckily most of the men,
not only those who had served as Turkish conscripts, knew how to handle
a rifle. Yet, for all that, the main defence was lamentably armed. Four
platoons of regular infantry, even without the usual machine gun, would
have been a far superior force. The most essential part of the defence
had naturally not been thought of as one vaguely uniform mass; Gabriel
had split it up strategically into definite sections of ten men each,
that is to say, minute battalions, which could be moved and disposed
independently. He had also taken care that each of these decads should
be composed of men of the same village, if possible of the same family,
so that comradeship might be as strongly cemented as possible.

 

 

The command presented greater difficulties, since one in each of these
ten must be given authority, just as the bigger units must have their
commanders. Gabriel chose these leaders from among men of various ages who
had seen service. The invaluable Chaush Nurhan undertook the business of
general, chief ordnance officer, fortress engineer, and sergeant-major
all in one. The twisted ends of his grey, wiry moustache bristled, the
huge Adam's apple on his stringy throat worked up and down. Nurhan seemed
heartily grateful to the Turks for having arranged a few deportations
and so provided his opportunity, so passionate was the zeal with which he
hurled himself on military duties so long forgone. For hours he drilled
those men who were not at work, without once resting or letting them
rest. He had the notion, with the help of Armenian quick-wittedness, of
working in a few days through the whole Turkish drill-book, as laid down
for an infantry training of several years. His main preoccupations were
fighting-maneuvers, heads "up" and "down," quick entrenchments, the use
of terrain, and storm attack. He was disgusted with Bagradian for having
forbidden any rifle practice, even though it was most understandable,
and not merely to save munitions. Elderly as Nurhan was, he raced from
one drilling company to the next, instructing each platoon instructor,
shouting and raving in the bluest of barrack-room Turkish. Armed to
the teeth with sword, army revolver, rifle, cartridge-belt, he had
also slung on the infantry bugle, scrounged from a quartermaster's
store, and used its kicking, strutting bugle calls at any instant to
rally his men. A startled Gabriel hurried the whole long way from the
north ridge to the drilling-ground to put a firm stop to these reckless
tootings. Was it absolutely necessary, he asked, to give the saptiehs and
Mohammedan villages of the neighborhood strident warnings of maneuvers
on the Damlayik?

 

 

During the first day all the deserters on Musa Dagh had begun to join
forces with the garrison. In the course of the next few days their number
increased to the very respectable figure of sixty. Nurhan's bugle seemed
to have rallied these lads from the hills around, from Ahmer Dagh and
the barren Jebel el Akra. To Gabriel, although they were well armed, they
were welcome, yet unwelcome, reinforcements. There could be no doubt that
this pitiful mob contained not only the usual recalcitrants -- cowards,
bullied men, haters of discipline -- but sinister elements, fellows
with as much to fear from the civil authorities as the military. There
were crooks among them, who spuriously assumed the deserter's halo,
whose real profession was that of foot-pad, who seemed to have come,
not from any barracks in Antakiya, Aleppo, or Alexandretta, but from
the jail at Payas. It was hard to distinguish sheep from goats in
this reinforcement of sixty-odd, since all looked equally scared, shy,
famished. It was not surprising that they should, since day and night
they had had to keep a look-out for gendarmes and could never venture
down into the villages before two or three in the morning to beg a crust
from their scared compatriots. The skeletons of these deserters -- they
could scarcely any longer be said to have bodies -- were hung with the
rags of desert-hued uniforms. What still was visible of their faces,
under a matted growth of hair and bristle, was tanned almost black with
sun and dirt. Their Armenian eyes expressed not only the general pain,
but with it a peculiar agony, the sullen pain of the shady outcast slowly
sinking back to the level of beasts. The pack looked as though humanity
had cut it off. Only to the deserter Sarkis Kilikian, whom they called
"the Russian," was this inapplicable, outwardly at least, though he of
them all seemed the most irrevocably cut off from the safety of the
human family. Gabriel recognized him at once as the ghost which had
risen that night in "Three-Tent Square." The problem of enrolling these
sixty vagrants without imperilling the gradually forming discipline of
the rest was one that could not be solved immediately. For the present,
in spite of their disillusioned grimaces, they were sent to drill under
the iron supervision of Chaush Nurhan, who made them sweat for their keep
through the very same drill-book, to avoid which they had escaped. More
essential even than Nurhan's drilling was the other task of these wildly
industrious days -- the building and digging of fortifications. The blue
and brown lines marked by Gabriel on Avakian's map were being changed
into realities. Since for the time being the Damlayik had more hands
than spades, shifts of diggers were formed. Bagradian's eventual aim was
to use only the reserve for labor -- that is to say, the eleven hundred
men and women who would not be at their posts unless there was fighting,
and whose task would otherwise be all the necessary work of the camp.
But these people were still down in the villages.