Another Sad Chapter for Armenia : Ethnic strife: Funeral dirges replace martial music. Yerevan mourns those killed in the fighting with Azerbaijanis.

The nationalist music that filled the air last week when hundreds of Armenian volunteers went off to fight Azerbaijanis has been replaced by the traditional music of mourning as Yerevan honors its dead.

The deaths, along with the blockade of the railway into Armenia and the resulting shortages, brought a quick end to the exuberance Armenians felt when the volunteer militias marched off.

“Up until this point, it was like it was a play,” Araik Papian, 35, said as a funeral procession made its way past his home. “We did not understand that we are in a real world. Now we do.”

The people of Yerevan seem to be weeping not just for their dead but also for themselves as a nation. They are not just learning the reality of war but are living another chapter in their sad history.

Artavazd Khatchikyan, 20, a senior at Yerevan State University, told a visitor: “I was standing in the street the other day, looking at a puddle, and I was thinking that all my life I have heard about the horrible massacres of 1915 (a reference to Turkey’s attacks on Armenians). I always said, ‘Oh, that’s too bad,’ but it was so distant. Now, I feel the horror. I stand on a street and look at that puddle and feel that I am going to be pushed right in.”

Last week, four of Khatchikyan’s friends took a bus to the Armenian-Azerbaijani border to fight. They had one shotgun among them. Khatchikyan, who did not go because he was sick with the flu, said he worries about his friends and wishes he were with them. He said he is no longer able to keep his mind on his studies.

The Armenia All-National Movement, which recruited heavily among university students for its militia, appears to have enough volunteers for now.

On a recent afternoon, a group of students were sitting in an upstairs cafe, watching a funeral procession for one of the fallen. His name was Yervand Sahoumian, he was 32, and until his death the previous Friday, he was just a man from Yerevan with nothing that set him apart from the others. But now everyone in Yerevan knows Sahoumian’s name. It is heard on the radio, and his funeral procession was seen on television.

The procession was led by a truck with Sahoumian’s plain wooden coffin on the open bed. A soldier marched alongside, carrying a portrait of the dead man.

“There is a sad feeling for everyone,” Vera Mouradian, 50, said as she walked along a few yards behind the coffin. “It makes no difference whether he is our son or not. He is the child of everybody.”

At least four men from Yeraksh are believed to have been killed this week in the fighting. In a sense, the number is small, but the psychological impact has been substantial.

“It is hard to find some force in your soul just to stay young, to not become mentally disabled like the old men here,” Khatchikyan said in the cafe. “I want to think about girls, fun, the things young men think about. But I can’t just now.

“This is the Armenian syndrome, a kind of feeling that everyone is against you. It is very hard to fight it.”

A few miles away, Zare Papian was watching television in a darkened room. Papian, 28, is a painter. He says he is not a political man, that he prefers to worry about colors and canvas and how to find good Georgian wine.

But now he spends much of the time following the news. He is out of paint, and because of the blockade, he cannot buy any more. He says he could not paint now anyway, that it does not seem important.

“I don’t understand this whole situation,” Papian said. “It is very difficult for us now. We don’t know what is to become of us.”

The blockade has made it worse. There is an acute shortage of fuel, and street lights are dimmed to the lowest level or simply turned off in order to use the minimum of electric power. Electric signs that normally advertise restaurants and cafes are dark. Many homes are without heat.

Television programming normally begins at breakfast time, but now there is no television until 7:30 p.m. People are being discouraged from switching on electric stoves even to heat water for tea.

Also, there is fear that Soviet troops might move into Yerevan as they did at Baku, in Azerbaijan, to re-establish the central government’s authority. Over the weekend, military convoys moved through the streets of Yerevan and helicopters could be heard landing at the airport.