WEAVING his heroic story against the grim tragic background of the Armenian sufferings at the hands of their diabolically cruel Turkish masters, Franz Werfel has evolved a novel which for richness of narrative detail and skillful completeness has few peers. The pitiful plight of this downtrodden Christian people reached its climax during the early years of the World War when the young Turks set their oriental cleverness to the organization of their nation as solidified national unit on the Western pattern.

The Armenians were a harmless folk but they were an alien body within the Turkish body politic and when the years of starvation and oppression following 1870 failed to wipe them out the Turkish government resolved to utilize its strength as an ally of the Central Powers and to eliminate the Armenians completely from the picture. The Armenian villages were uprooted and the people pushed on a horror-filled march which led only to starvation, rape, murder and eventual death for all. Village by village the Armenians were driven into nothingness until the Ittihad pointed at the villages about the mountain of Musa Dagh on the northern Syrian coast. Here under the leadership of Gabriel Bagradian, a wealthy Armenian who was caught in the maelstrom when he returned to his birthplace after years in Paris, the Armenians resisted deportation and withdrew to the rocky fastness of a plain high upon the ancient mount. For forty days the courageous band held out and fell only after many had been rescued by a French cruiser.

Werfel's story is the tale of these forty days of hardy struggle against the Turkish forces from without and the equally fearsome forces of starvation and chaos from within. The story is a grand one and so inspired has Werfel been with his material that he had attained truly epic reaches in his telling of it. His occupation with narrative details is at times responsible for overlength and unnecessary minutia. He also errs in neglecting the personalities of his characters who become sculptured impersonations rather than human beings. These faults are unfortunate limitations on the greatness of the work but the story of it is so magnificent and so enthralling that it must rank as one of the most-worthy of the recent novels.