Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/114

high up in the hedges and the greenish elderberries on their thick, purple-blue stalks.

Meanwhile more fighting, marching, suffering.

Torch and rope and scimitar had done the work. The Armenians had died by the thousands.

The land was a reeking shambles.

And—what of the Russian?

With the Armenians strung up in front of their own houses, or buried in shallow graves, there was only the Russian left to fight.

And he did fight, with long-range guns and massed machine-gun fire and airplanes and blazing white shells that screamed death from afar.

Daily he took toll, gave toll.

"But," said Mehmet el-Touati, voicing the sluggish, gray doubts of the Seventeenth Infantry which, in its turn, voiced the doubts of the army—"why is the Russian here, in the South? How did he come down from behind the snow ramparts of the Caucasus and is facing us here, in the flat lands, the yellow lands, the fertile lands? Also, I fought the Russian, twenty, thirty years ago, when I was a youth, with no gray in my hair and never a crack in my heart. Then the Russian was heavy and bearded and dressed in green. Now he is tall and lithe and slim and ruddy of skin and—" he pointed at an English prisoner—"dressed in khaki brown. I cannot understand it. Is there then truth in the bazaar babble that treason has crept into the Osmanli house on silent, unclean feet?"

Thus he spoke to the new colonel of the Seventeenth, Yakub Lahada Bey.

The latter was a monocled, mustached dandy from Stamboul, who had learned how to ogle and speak