Armenian Epic

THE FORTY DAYS OF MUSA DAGH--Franz Werfel--Viking ($3).

To the ordinary U. S. reader, "Armenian" suggests Levantine rug-dealers, massacres, Michael Arlen. But last week Author Franz Werfel gave the word a new and heroic significance. In The Forty Days of Musa Dagh he recited an Armenian epic founded on an actual incident of the World War. Humanizing one more bloody no-man's-land, this 817-page novel immediately takes its place, with All Quiet on the Western Front and The Case of Sergeant Grischa, as one of the War's big books.

The Armenian Christians of the Turkish Empire were accustomed to occasional persecution; under Abdul Hamid they had even suffered sporadic massacres. But in 1915, with Turkey at war and the Young Turks in power, they faced complete extinction. Dapper Enver Pasha, Turkey's Minister of War, planned nothing less. All Armenian villages were to be evacuated, the inhabitants driven far into the desert to concentration camps where plague and famine would finish off the survivors. Able-bodied men were to be sent to work on the roads; their job done, a firing squad would pay them off.

To Gabriel Bagradian. rich Armenian back home in Syria after 23 years in Paris, nothing of this scheme was known. With his French wife and young son he had returned to his family estate just in time to be caught by the outbreak of the War. As an officer of Turkish artillery, he expected to be called up, was prepared to go. But significant incidents and rumors soon showed him how the wind was blowing. While he was waiting for the storm he racked his brain to find a possible shelter. On Musa Dagh, seagirt mountain overlooking the village, he found it. When the expected order came for all Armenians to evacuate the valley, Bagradian had made his plans. Night before the Turks came to clear them out, 5,000 Armenian villagers moved up to the heights of Musa Dagh. They expected nothing but death, but they preferred to receive it fighting.

Bagradian had laid his plans well. When the Turks discovered where the rebels were and went after them, they stumbled on carefully hidden trench systems manned by desperate sharpshooters. Three times, in increasing numbers, the Turks attacked. When they brought artillery Bagradian thought it was all over, but a night sortie captured the guns. For 40 days the Armenians held out. Both they and the Turks knew famine would get them in the end, but the Turks' military honor was at stake: they planned a final annihilating stroke, with regulars, machine guns, mountain artillery. Bagradian knew it was the end, hardly cared. His only son had been captured and brutally killed. His French wife had turned against him. He himself had fallen hopelessly in love with an Armenian girl. Just as the final assault began, something happened that seemed to Bagradian an anticlimax. But to Ter Haigasun, the priest, and to the remnants of the 5,000, it was a miracle.

Though Author Werfel's scene centres on a Syrian mountain top it takes in glimpses of a wider view. In Istanbul, Berlin and Antioch German missionaries and consuls, God-fearing Moslems, meddle dangerously with high-tension wires to save a race condemned by cold policy. Not all his Turks are smoothly smiling villains nor all his Armenians embattled heroes. More than a stirring tale, a passionate defense of a persecuted minority, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh has implications that make it unwelcome in Germany.*

The Author. A Viennese Jew, Franz Werfel was born a Bohemian in Prague, studied philosophy in Germany, and was teaching in the University of Leipzig when the War called him to the Russian front. Settled in Vienna after the Armistice, he has lived there quietly ever since, proclaiming in poems, essays, plays and novels his tragic philosophy: the brotherhood of man. Great frequenter of cafes, he is fond of lapsing into Oriental calm, seeking inspiration while in that state. Beethoven-locked, corpulent, 44, Author Werfel is known in Austria primarily as a poet. Some of his U. S.-translated novels: Verdi, The Man Who Conquered Death, Class Reunion.

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh is the December choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

*Not actually banned by the Hitler Government, it is listed as ''undesirable," is sold only surreptitiously.

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