Ismail Kadare - The Siege

The Quartermaster General and Saruxha walked away without saying a word. The sun was setting. The first tumbrels bearing the dead were now coming back into the camp. In some cases, there was blood dripping through the planks on to the wheels. The camp was virtually lifeless. A battalion of sappers, bearing shovels and picks, passed by. Presumably they were off to dig graves.

A voice greeted them from behind, but neither man paid any attention to it at first.

“Hail there, effendis,” Sirri Selim repeated, for it was he, striding hurriedly along.

“Hallo,” the Quartermaster answered.

“What is the matter?” the doctor asked.

No answer.

“I’m going straight to the Pasha,” Sirri Selim answered without having been asked. “I’ve thought of another way of robbing them of their water.”

They didn’t respond to that remark either. The doctor was now beside them and his shadow, distorted by the evening light, seemed monstrously oversized. Bizarrely, his face and long neck had gone purple.

“You think war is made only with cannon and calculations!” he blurted out bitterly, accelerating his pace. Then, when he was already several strides ahead of them, he turned around to confront them with a question.

“What about rats, effendis? Haven’t you ever thought about rats?”

“He must have had too much sun,” the Quartermaster muttered.

Saruxha said nothing.

They were now in the heart of the camp. They had never seen it so empty. A team of doctors was just coming out of Kurdisxhi’s great tent. Another squad of sappers was on its way to the mass grave.

They launched a furious attack on us, like the first time, and, like the first time, we repulsed them. We were dazed by the merciless heat and were dying of thirst. But in spite of that we held on .

At the worst point of the battle, fate decreed that one of their cannon — the most fearsome of all — not only failed to shatter our inner gate, but fell in the midst of their own men. Upon which, the attack was abandoned .

For some days now jackdaws have been circling above the ramparts and also lower down. The dead have been removed from the field, but apparently the smell of blood still hangs in the air. The sight of these birds and their screeching disturb us, but we have too little water to use it to wash away the blood .

From here we can see their exercise grounds where their men are trying out new kinds of ladders. They run up and down, wave their arms and hang on the rungs with a diabolical sort of grappling-iron. They sometimes do their training with a torch in one hand. It looks as if they are preparing for a night attack .

For our part, we have thought about all possible eventualities. We have had the remains of our fallen incinerated. Their ashes have been placed in urns, which we have buried deep underground, so that, whatever happens, our enemies will not be able to find them and desecrate them, as is their wont .

They know we are agonisingly short of water, but to increase our suffering they have installed a kind of fountain at the spot where they cut the aqueduct. Naked soldiers splash and play shamelessly in the water all the scorching day long .

To undermine our morale, or else to boost their own, they sometimes use childish tricks. For example, yesterday they came up to what is now the open space in front of our main gate bearing a white flag. They stopped as if the gate really was still there in front of them, and they pretended to knock at the door, but obviously they were knocking on thin air. When our sentries drew their bowstrings, they closed the visors of their helmets, and the way our arrows bounced off them told us that under their silken tunics they were wearing chain mail .

The Pasha paid no attention to what they were saying. Each spoke in turn of the losses their own units had taken, then gave his opinion of the appropriate means to be used to carry the fight forwards, and also his view of the latest suggestion from Sirri Selim, who was attending the war council for the first time. But the Pasha’s mind was exclusively occupied with the Alaybey’s latest report, which had reached him that very morning. As he read the close-packed lines of the scribe’s small, neat hand, he thought he could hear rising from them the deep-throated, rousing swell that his army had made but two months before, but with a sound that was now more rough and resentful, and beneath the cheering he could make out more clearly what he had only dimly perceived at that earlier stage, and that was the sound of what people call war-weariness. His long experience of campaigning had taught him to lend an attentive ear to that chord. On all the many expeditions he had led, he had always waited for it to emerge, like an old but fearsome acquaintance. Nothing frightened him more: not the failure of his attacks, nor acts of indiscipline, nor the insubordination or the infighting among his captains, nor blasphemy against the name of Prophet, nor insults hurled at his own person, nor fear itself, nor even the first symptoms of plague — nothing scared him more than this black cloud silently closing in and raining down on the faces, eyes, hands, voices and weapons of his men. Of course he knew it would come, on this as on all campaigns, even though he had done everything in his power to keep it at bay as long as possible. The first signs had appeared some six weeks before, straight after the failure of the first attack, but had dissipated fairly quickly. Summary judgments, rumours about secret investigations, the discovery and sentencing of the spies who had had their eye on the new gun, the squabbles over the women captives, a ghost said to be prowling late at night by the river bank, the arrival of performers from the capital (the star dancer had fallen in love with a soldier in the death squadron and both of them were in despair that they could never marry) and especially the hunt for the aqueduct and its final discovery — all these things had no doubt helped to put off the black cloud. But the Pasha knew that the weariness in question could not be held at bay for ever. It was always in the offing, somewhere near, all around. He had never feared its coming so much as he did now. And it was indeed upon them. He hadn’t seen premonitory signs of the sort he had noticed six weeks earlier. He could now see war-weariness before his eyes, an all-pervading dust as ancient as war itself.

They were talking about the next assault. The Quartermaster General declared himself emphatically in favour of renewed and repeated assaults so as to give the exhausted and desiccated Albanians no opportunity to recuperate. The Pasha was well aware that the Quartermaster’s main worry was that their own supplies of food were running low. Skanderbeg’s night raid had spoiled some of their stocks, particularly their vats of honey and rice. The Quartermaster spoke scathingly about those among them who, though they were surely right to consider it important to protect the part of the camp where the cannon, the elite troops and the leaders’ tents were located (“my own included,” he added), were criminally indifferent to the fate of the storehouses, as if they belonged to nobody. On the night of the raid, he went on, the honey had been spilled on the ground and it broke his heart to see it all messed up by horses’ hooves.

“May I presume that this was not a clever ploy invented by one of our commanders to slow down the enemy’s advance?” he asked in a clearly sarcastic tone.

The officer in charge of camp security went pale. In a confused and sour attempt at self-justification, he declared himself amazed that members of the war council put the same price on a mere foodstuff such as honey as they did on the blood of Turkish soldiers. With an expression of disgust on his face, the Quartermaster told the man they were at a meeting of the war council, not at a hotair contest. Since he looked as though he was about to say something even harsher, the Alaybey stepped in and declared that never before had such parallels been made at a council meeting. He added that seeing that the rules of the Empire required the allocation of a ration of honey to every soldier immediately prior to an attack, to give him strength, it was clear that this mere foodstuff was of military value, and that was the point that the Quartermaster had intended to make.