Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/119

The Russians must be beaten. Nothing else mattered. So, half an hour later, with his company, he was entrained once more and under way, toward the East this time, until one day the railroad tracks ended suddenly in a disconsolate, pathetic mixture of red-hot sand, twisted steel, and crumbling concrete.

They marched, horse, foot, and the guns, North, Northwest.

"Where to?" ran the question from regiment to regiment.

Then the answer:

"To Russia!"

And cheers. For, while they had heard vaguely of England and France and America, Russia alone expressed to them all they hated and feared; and, gradually, their doubts and misgivings disappeared as time and again they passed long columns of prisoners in the familiar bottle-green of the Tsar's soldiery, and as day after day the road tilted higher and the sharp scent of the foot hills boomed down on the wings of the morning wind and the ragged crags of Anatolia limned ghostly out of the purplish-gray welter.

Mehmet el-Touati was kept busy explaining to the men in his company, Southern and Western Turks all but himself.

"It's the North," he said. "It's my own country. Russia is over yonder—" sweeping a hairy, brown hand toward the hills that rolled down in immense, overlapping planes, blue and orchid and olive green, while the high horizon was etched with the lacy finials of spruce and fir and dwarf oak.

"My own country," he went on. "I can smell it, feel it. My heart is heavy with longing."

A terrible nostalgia was in his soul. Too, day after