Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/111

gone forth, leaving their all behind, stabbed on the horns of Fate; with no Red Cross, no doctors, no ambulances, to look after their wounded or to ease the last agonies of their dying; with sleek, furtive-eyed Levantine government clerks stealing the pittance which the war office allowed for the sustenance of the women and children and feeble old men who tilled the fields and garnered meagre crops with their puny arms while the strong, the lusty, the bearded, were away battling for the Faith; with none to praise their patriotism or sing epic pæans to the glory of their matter-of-fact courage; with neither flags waving nor brasses blaring; with no printed or spoken public opinion to tell them that they were doing right, that they were heroes; with nobody back home to send them encouragement or com forts or pitiful little luxuries.

They had gone forth, unimaginative, unenthusiastic, to kill—as a matter of duty, a sending of Kismet.

For Islam was in danger. The Russian was clamoring at the outer gate, beyond Erzeroum.

Turks, they. Cannon fodder. Bloody dung to mulch the fields of ambition.

Had come long months of fighting and marching and fighting again. Victories, soberly accepted. More marching, through a hot, sad land speckled with purple shadows.

And they had wondered a little, and one day Mehmet el-Touati, as spokesman of his company, had asked a question of his colonel, Moustaffa Sheffket Bey, who, in time of peace, was the civilian Pasha of his native district.

The colonel had smiled through white, even teeth.

"Yes, Mehmet el-Touati," he had replied. "We are going South."