Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/113

with their dead and dying, amongst them the colonel of the Seventeenth, Moustaffa Sheffket Bey; and talk of treason in exalted places, of a renegade Saloniki Jew by the name of Enver Bey throttling the ancient Osmanli Empire and handing it over, tied hand and foot, to a Potsdam usurper.

Greeks and Syrians and Druses had spread the hushed, bitter tale through the ranks of the retreating army. But the grave Turkish peasant soldiers had slowly shaken their heads.

Leaky-tongued babble, that!

They had never heard of either Enver Bey or the Potsdam usurper. Their very names were unknown to them. They were fighting because Islam was in danger.

Had not the green-turbaned priests told them so?

They had been defeated. What of it? That, too, was Fate—Fate, which comes out of the dark, like a blind camel, with no warning, no jingling of bells.

At first they had won, and presently they would win again. They would conquer as of old. It was so written.

They would return to their quiet, sleepy villages and once more till the fields. Once more they would harrow on the strips of fallow, shouting to their clumsy, humped oxen. Once more they would hear the creaking song of the water wheels, the chant of the mullahs calling the Faithful to prayer, and the drowsy zumming of the honey bees. Once more, on Friday, the day of rest of all God's creatures, they would stroll out with their women and children into the sloping hills and smoke their pipes and eat their food and sip their coffee and licorice water beneath the twinkling of the golden crab apples that clustered