Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/117

then all around them? Was he attacking the house of the Osmanli from all sides?

Hard, hard Fate! But—fight for the Faith! Islam was in danger—and on, on, along the never-ending road of suffering and death!

Followed days of comparative quiet while the engines rushed their armed freight to the North; and Mehmet el-Touati, who had not complained when the food was wormy and the water thick with greenish slime, who had not complained when bits of shrapnel had lacerated his left arm and when a brutal German student-doctor had treated the wound, with no anesthetics, no drugs, with just his dirty fingers and dirtier scalpel Mehmet el-Touati complained to the Prussian officer in charge of his company while they were camping on both sides of the railroad track.

"Bimbashi!" he said, salaaming with outstretched hands. "We are clean men, being Moslems. There is no water with which to make our proper ablutions before prayer."

"Schnauze halt en, verdammter Schweinehund!" came the reply, accompanied by the supreme Teutonic argument: kicks and cuffs; and a detailed account in halting, guttural Turkish of what he, himself, brevet-major Gottlieb Krüger, thought of the Moslem religion, including its ablutions and prayers.

"Go and make your ablutions in—"

Then a frightful, brutal obscenity, and the soldiers who had accompanied Mehmet el-Touati drew back a little. They questioned each other with their eyes. They were like savage beasts of prey, about to leap.

"Bashi byouk, begh; ayaghi byouk, tchobar—" purred one of them, in soft, feline, minatory Turkish.

A knife flashed free.