Forty Days of Musa Dagh (57 page)

 

 

The Kaimakam's report was a masterpiece of political insight. Should he
obtain only a portion of his requests, he would be the most independent
district governor in Syria. A well-trained official heart of the last
generation would no doubt have fluttered in apprehension at the rather
challenging tone of this huge dispatch. Not so the Young Turk. Such blunt
decisiveness was attuned to the ears of the present authorities. They
were on their knees before the progressive West, and so, in superstitious
awe of such words as "initiative" and "energy," even though the voice
that spoke them was somewhat harsh.

 

 

Simultaneously the ruined bimbashi, whose rosy cheeks had certainly faded
out for ever, was scrawling a long dispatch to the base commandant, his
immediate superior. It was verbose, full of prolix accusations against
the Kaimakam, who had forced him to this disastrous undertaking, without
having allowed him any time to make the necessary preparations. The
bimbashi's tone was doleful, subdued, ceremonious, and consequently as
wrong as it could be. The broken old man was removed within twenty-four
hours and summoned to attend a court martial. He vanished through the
night into obscurity, from the scene of many years' comfortable activity,
the most innocent victim of Armenian success in war.

 

 

But His Excellency the Wali of Aleppo was so impressed with the suggestions
of the Kaimakam of Antioch that he had them telegraphed on to Istanbul,
with a strong personal recommendation, to the Ministry of the Interior.
This subordinate had touched, with his finger tips, a very sore spot in
his superior. Ever since the great Jemal Pasha, with the unrestricted
powers of a Roman proconsul, had been commanding in Syria, all walis
and mutessarifs had shrunk to the stature of minor deities. Jemal Pasha
treated these mighty ones as so many commissariat officials attached
to his army. They were given curt orders to deliver at such and such a
point so and so many thousand oka of grain, or, in a given time, to put
this or that high-road in faultless repair. This general seemed to regard
the whole civil population as an onerous set of unnecessary parasites,
and civil government as a quite unnecessary evil. His Excellency of
Aleppo was therefore delighted with the chance to rap this iron pasha
over the knuckles, and apprise the Istanbul authorities of the wretched
failure of arrogant fire-eaters.

 

 

Talaat Bey, however, read the Kaimakam's masterpiece with mixed feelings.
It was his job to protect the civil arm against encroachments by the
military. And to him these Armenian deportations were a matter of far
greater urgency than the boring ambitions of discontented officers. He
stroked his white piqué waistcoat with his great paws, several times,
as his habit was. At last the nimble fingers of the telegraphist,
attached to these mighty paws, clipped the sheets together, scribbled,
and attached the slip: "Urgently request immediate settlement."

 

 

The dossier wandered without delay on to the desk of the Minister of War.
It was Enver Pasha's habit never to refuse a request of Talaat's.
That evening, when they came together at the Endjumen, the smaller
cabinet meeting, Enver came straight to his friend. The young war-god
smiled demurely, and blinked long lashes. "I've sent Jemal an urgent
wire about Musa Dagh. . . ." And without awaiting Talaat's thanks, with
a daintily mischievous moue: "I'm sure you ought all of you to thank me
for having sent that mad creature to Syria -- well out of mischief!"

 

 

 

 

There was an Arab hotel before the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem. Its windows
looked out over the David citadel, with the towering minaret. In this
hotel General Jemal Pasha, the general in command of this particular army,
had set up his temporary headquarters. Here he read the dispatches from
Enver, the Wali of Aleppo, and other functionaries, imploring him to
provide for the instant quelling of this wretched Armenian revolt.
(In those days it was the habit of all Young Turkish potentates to wire
volumes to one another. It was more than a matter of mere urgency.
It sprang from a barbaric joy in the use of talking electricity.)
Jemal Pasha sat alone in the room. Neither Ali Fuad Bey nor the German,
von Frankenstein, his two chiefs of staff, were with him. Only Osman,
the head of the bodyguard, stood at the door, a valiant and romantic
mountaineer, who gave the effect of a uniformed dummy in a war museum.
Jemal's bodyguard served two objects. Their barbaric splendor was a
concession to Asiatic love of display, which could not otherwise be
indulged, in the mechanized drab of modern warfare. At the same time they
served to allay a fear -- one which all through the ages has distinguished
dictators from their less successful fellow men -- of assassination.
Osman had orders never to leave the general alone, especially not with any
caller from Istanbul. For Jemal by no means felt it to be impossible that
his brethren, Enver or Talaat, might send him some highly recommended
expert -- in the art of death. The general scanned the dispatches,
especially Enver's, with close attention. Though really this seemed a
trifling matter, it turned his sallow face sallower still; the lips,
pouting out through the black beard, turned white with rage. The general
sprang to his feet, began pacing up and down. He was as short as Enver,
but stockily, not daintily, built. He hunched his left shoulder a little,
so that people who did not know him well thought him deformed. Heavy red
hands hung down limp, out of the gold-striped sleeves of his general's
tunic. The mere sight of them was enough to explain the rumor that this
was the grandson of a former Istanbul executioner. Enver was composed of
the lightest substance, Jemal of the heaviest. If the one was all dreamy
caprice, the other was all arid, passionate brooding. Jemal loathed the
silken favorite of the gods, with all the detestation of physical underlings.
He had had to sweat for everything which dropped into Enver's lap --
martial celebrity, luck, women's favor. Jemal took up the dispatch again,
and tried, through its official impersonality, to get the tones of Enver's
coquettish voice. Throughout these minutes the fate of the seven communes
on Musa Dagh was more in the balance than ever previously. A chit from
Jemal would have sufficed to send two full battalions of infantry,
machine guns, a mountain battery, against the Damlayik. That would
have settled matters in an hour, in spite of all Bagradian's valor.
As Jemal read the dispatch a second time, his anger seemed to simmer up
to boiling point. He snapped at the disconcerted Osman to get out, and,
on pain of death, not disturb him again. Then he went across to the window,
but drew back at once, fearful of showing the world his naked soul, Oh,
if he could only dispose of Enver! That society beauty of the war! That
inflated little drawing-room pet! That climber, who never in all his life
had done one really masculine act, who'd wangled his reputation as a general
by retaking Adrianople with his cavalry -- sidling into it, when the whole
business was really settled. And a Jemal had to play second fiddle to this
vain, insignificant playboy of the Ottoman empire! That cunning sissy
dared attempt to rid himself of a Jemal, by fobbing him off with the
Syrian command -- Jemal's rage against the Mars of Istanbul deepened by
several fathoms of the soul. An absurd trifle had released it. Enver's
telegram began with the words: "I beg you to take immediate measures."
No thought of addressing him as "Your Excellency," not even with the simplest
"Pasha"! And Jemal was a stickler for forms, especially when in contact
with an Enver. He would use the most pedantic ceremony, even in their
intimate conversations. Feverishly touchy, he watched lest Enver should
fail in due respect or abate one jot of his martial dignities. This wire,
with its insolent beginning was the last drop in Jemal's cup of hate,
which was running over. Enver, for several months, had made monstrous
demands on the general, who had always complied without a word. First
Jemal had been commanded to send back his third and tenth divisions to
Istanbul, later even his twenty-fifth, and finally the whole Thirteenth
Army Corps, which had been moved to Baghdad and Bitlis. At the moment
the dictator of Syria commanded no more than sixteen to eighteen shabby
battalions, and this in a huge war area extending from the heights
of the Taurus to the Suez canal. All this was Enver Pasha's work --
the war situation was merely a pretext. Of that the rabid Jemal was
persuaded. The general-in-chief, with his usual pickpocket methods,
had disarmed him, drawn his teeth, at the same time depriving him of
any possibility of a victory. A hundred scurvy, treacherous details,
seen with the full lucidity of hate, stood out in Jemal Pasha's mind,
all so many further proofs of the low-down way in which Enver had always
treated him. He and his clique had constantly kept Jemal at arm's length,
failed to inform him of their most important resolutions, to invite him
to intimate sittings. This relationship, from the very first, had been a
train of carefully thought-out snubs and -- worse, most disgraceful of
all -- Jemal could not assert himself against Enver! The fellow's very
presence and personality made him feel irretrievably second-rate, although
he knew himself far superior, both as a leader and a general. Jemal Pasha,
hunching his left shoulder, still wandered round and round the table.
He felt quite powerless. Crazy juvenile schemes flashed into his mind:
Move on Istanbul with a new army, take prisoner this insolent puppy,
open the Bosporus to the Allies, make peace with the present enemy. For
the third time he took up the dispatches, but at once slammed them down
on the table again. What would be the most poisonous mischief he could do
to Enver and his clique? Jemal knew that in the Armenian deportations they
saw their most sacred patriotic mission. He himself had often referred to
them as that. But he would never have endorsed that typical piece of Enver
amateurishness which made of Syria the cloaca for Armenian corpses. The
Minister of War had been careful not to ask him to sittings in which the
deportation law was discussed. If he had, not a shred would have been
left of darling little Enver's pretty schemes. Another reason in that,
why the soapy swindler had moved him southeast, out of the way. Now,
in his wild itch for revenge, he wondered whether to bar the eastern
frontier, drive the convoys back to Antioch, and so bring to nothing
the whole great work.

 

 

As he was thinking this, his German chief-of-staff, Colonel von Frankenstein,
knocked at the door. Jemal at once put to flight the larvae of his heated
imagination. He was again the steadily reflective, almost scrupulous general
known to his entourage. Pouting Asiatic lips retreated into the meshes of
the black beard. He was always particularly careful to give this German
general the impression of grumpy, very objective logic. Von Frankenstein
met the most stonily casual of Jemal's commanding officer's stares. They
sat down to the table. The German opened his portfolio, drew out notes,
and began a report on the disposition of fresh troops in Syria. He noticed
the heap of dispatches. Enver Pasha's instructions lay on the top.

 

 

"Your Excellency has had an important courier?"

 

 

"Don't disturb yourself, Colonel," Jemal replied. "Nothing that really
matters here depends on the Minister of War, but solely on me." One
red hand gripped Enver's dispatch, which the other tore into minute
shreds, and strewed them out of the window, as far as to the citadel
of David. Gabriel Bagradian had found an involuntary ally. This touchy
potentate neither answered, nor would he send one cannon, one machine gun,
to Antakiya, to smoke out Musa Dagh.

 

 

 

 

Jemal Pasha's refusal to intervene had saved the mountain camp from sudden
destruction, not from a slower, constricting process. The dictator of Syria
and Palestine might himself refuse to take a hand. But there were other,
subordinate commands, with powers to act independently. The keen,
hatchet-faced major reigned in Antakiya in place of the poor cashiered
bimbashi. He contrived to get the general in Aleppo to detach several
companies from the garrison there. The Wali also wrote to the Kaimakam,
to expect the arrival of a large reinforcement of saptiehs. So that
the Kaimakam had had success from his move in the Aleppo quarter.
And success stimulates ambition.

 

 

Bagradian, as he stood at his observation post, had often felt as though
the Damlayik were a dead point in a wide vortex, a center of absolute
rigidity, in a swirling and very hostile world. And today, as oxcarts,
loaded mules, and crowds came streaming into the valley, the movement
round this one dead point began to take most visible form. What was the
meaning of the flood? . . .

 

 

The Kaimakam, who saw the hour approach when outstanding political services
should place him in the forefront of the party, had contrived to weave a
new, strong thread of destruction into the mesh that bound the Armenian
people. He had taken advantage of the Arab nationalist movement, which
for some time past had kept Syrian officials with their hands full. Such
widely extensive secret societies as El Ahd, "the Oath," and the "Arab
Brotherhood" were disseminating fiery propaganda against Istanbul with
the object of uniting all Arab tribes into one independent state. Here,
as everywhere else in the world, nationalism had set to work to break up
the rich, indeed profoundly religious concepts of the state into their
paltry biological components. The Caliphate is a divine idea, but Turk,
Kurd, Armenian, Arab denote only terrestrial accidents. The pashas of former
days knew well enough that their concept of all-embracing spiritual unity --
the Caliphate -- was nobler than the uneasy itch of pushful entities
for "progress." In the indolence and vice of the old empire, its
laisser-aller, there lay concealed a cautious wisdom, a moderating,
resigned governing principle, which entirely escaped short-sighted
westerners striving after quick results. The old pashas knew with the
subtlest instinct that a noble, even if ruined palace will not bear
too much renovation. But the Young Turks managed to destroy the work
of centuries in a breath. They did what they, the chiefs of a state
comprising several races, never should have done. Their mad jingoism
aroused that of subject peoples. Yet let us be just to the world's
fools. It is a dull eye that can see no author behind the play. Men want
what they must. The vast, supernatural ties of empire are loosened. It
only means that God has swept the chessboard clear, and begun a new game
against Himself.