Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/116

who were lined up for parade review, in halting Turkish with a strange, guttural accent.

Mehmet el-Touati did not understand the whole of the harangue. But he caught a word here and there: about Islam being in danger, and the Russian at the door; too, something about a great Emperor in the North, Wilhelm by name, who, like themselves, was a good Moslem and coming to their rescue.

Thus Mehmet el-Touati cheered until he was hoarse. So did the others. And hereafter foreigners—Prussians, they called themselves—took the places of the Osmanlis as officers and drill sergeants in many of the regiments, including the Seventeenth. They said that they were Moslems—which was odd, considering that their habits and customs were different from those of the Turks. But—said the priests—they belonged to a different sect, and what did that matter in the eyes of Allah, the All-Knowing?

On and away, then!

Kill, kill for the Faith!

For days at a time they were loaded on flat, stinking cattle cars pulled by wheezy, rickety, sooty engines, until they lost all ideas as to direction and time and distance. East they were shipped—and fought, losing half their effectives, quickly replaced by raw village levies, until the Seventeenth was like a kaleidoscope of all the many provinces of the Turkish Empire, with Mehmet el-Touati the last surviving soldier of the Anatolian mountain district in his company.

Again they were loaded on flat cars, then unloaded, rushed into battle, bled white. Back on the cars once more—South, East, North, West!

The Russian—Mehmet el-Touati wondered—was he