Garegin Nzhdeh – The Will to Death

“Homeland gives one a sense of just pride, the deepest suffering, the most integral of confessions, and the holiest of deaths. One invocation call from the depths of the pagan centuries still resonates in my blood.

‘Soldiers of Armenia, if we do not drown the enemy in these waves, we will no longer have a homeland’ (Parilli).

This means that the one who retreats before mortal danger accepts that death has power over life. This means that one who runs when his homeland is in struggle betrays everything sacred in this world. He abandons the ideal embedded in him – which is Homeland – and is destroyed morally.

The Armenian commander, says Parilli, ‘did not wish to live after the defeat. He galloped towards the enemy and died heroically. With the last blow of his sword, he crushed the helmet and head of the enemy commander.

His warriors, furious, piled on the enemy to defend the body of their commander. The battle was desperately hopeless, and everyone died.’

This was how the Armenians loved their homeland even before the adoption of Christianity.

In those days, the foreign author says, a proverb circulated in Armenia, saying that an elderly warrior cannot lie or say anything reckless.

What a high sense of morality! How similar the Armenian warrior is to his ‘wise and brave gods’! It is said a thousand times rightly that ‘the weapon is not for the cunning but for the brave.’”

Garegin Nzhdeh