THE SABRES OF PARADISE, Conquest And Vengeance In The Caucasus

THE SABRES OF PARADISE, Conquest And Vengeance In The Caucasus ~ Lesley Blanch
The Caucasians wrote love-poems to their daggers, as to a mistress, and went to battle, as to a rendezvous. Fighting was life itself to these darkly beautiful people — the most beautiful people in the world it was said. They lived and died by the dagger. Battle-thrusts were the pulse of the race. Vengeance was their creed, violence their climate.



Vengeance and violence; such was the Caucasus throughout its dark history, reaching its apogee during the first half of the nineteenth century, when the invading Russian armies marched eastwards acquiring their Asiatic and near-Eastern provinces and met their first check among the Caucasian mountains. All the warring Moslem tribes banded together in one terrible force, and under one man, Shamyl, the Avar, their Prophet and Warrior. In 1834, he sprang on to the scene in a flash of steel, a clap of thunder, like some flamboyant Prince of Darkness, the dramatic nature of his legend and his black banners matched by his back-cloth of towering mountains, perpendicular rock cliffs topped by eagle’s nest aôuls, or fortified villages, hung over ravines slit so deep no light ever penetrated the abyss where torrents raged, and a never-ceasing wind howled down the passes. This was his birth place — the wild mountains of Dagestan, an almost unmapped rock waste, set between the Black Sea and Caspian.

A hundred years or more ago, leading European newspapers devoted columns to Shamyl’s exploits: questions were asked in the House of Commons as to Britain’s commitments in the Caucasus, his bravery was extolled from public platforms, and English ladies were sewing an elaborate piece of bunting designed to become his flag. Shamyl’s heroic stand was interpreted with gratification as a deliberate check to Tzarist designs on India. The Caucasus barred the overland route to Delhi: it was clear, this man was an ally, ‘a really splendid type who stood up to tyrants … and deeply religious, even if he did have several wives…’ Thus the ladies of the parish sewing circle, fortified by tea and pound cake, as they stitched away at an appliqué of scarlet stars on a white ground and dreamed of it fluttering from some dark Caucasian peak. There was no doubt Shamyl had captured England’s imagination.

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Although at first glance, it seems unlikely there was any similarity between the people of mid-Victorian England and those of the Caucasus, yet it is to be traced in their approach to religion — to suffering, which, in each case, was offered up with relish. Caucasians, both the exalted mystics and the people, were sustained by a stoic discipline, and humility, feeling themselves part of some Divine pattern which nullified individual anguish. They offered up their suffering almost impersonally, with a sense of fatality, for Allah! And, however violent their sufferings, whatever sacrifices Shamyl, in the name of Mahommed, demanded or imposed, they retained a certain austerity, unlike the noisy, self-indulgent mid-Victorians expressions of Christianity.

The pious English of this moment were more egotistic, and actuated by conviction of their own worth, which made them sometimes refer to God with a proprietory air, rather as a faithful retainer, always there, to sustain them when needed. Their Christianity was an exclusive raft, saving, first, the classes, then the masses; but saving, first of all, those who suffered most.

The nation, from Queen Victoria down to the most insignificant schoolgirl, expressed their conviction in their letters and journals. Religion was part of daily life, as it was not in either the materialistic eighteenth nor the scientific twentieth century. Sunday school, Scriptural readings, family prayers, collective hymn singing, an exchange of tracts, were part of everyday life: while letters dwelling on an interpretation of the Scriptures often passed between schoolboys, or that strange and wholly sincere race of military mystics who were among the heroic phenomenon of the age.