Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/120

day, as the weeks of fighting had grown into the drab, sad cycle of years, he felt more old and lonely and tired. There was something ludicrously pathetic, something almost tragic, in the picture of this middle aged, bearded, rheumy peasant shouldering a musket and fighting and killing.

But he did not complain, not even in his own heart. He marched on, patient, stolid. First there must be a victory. The Russian must be vanquished, the house of the Osmanli made safe.

Then peace—and the creaking of the water wheels, the chant of the mullahs, the happy laughter of the little children playing in the sun.

By this time, since the roads were narrow, mere trails made by stray cattle and wild beasts, the army corps had split into a number of columns, each composed of a half company with its complement of light mountain guns, taken into pieces and carried on the backs of small, mouse-colored mules; and the half company to which Mehmet el-Touati belonged was the rearmost column, winding along hot, jagged roads where occasional thickets threw fleeting moments of shade, up steep hillsides where thick, purplish-gold sun shafts cleft the black rags of the fir trees, through valleys sweating with brassy, merciless heat, past fields of young corn that spread beneath the pigeon-blue sky like dull, sultry summer dreams.

On, while their feet chafed and bled, while the knapsacks cut their shoulders, and the rifles felt like hundredweights!

A few of the Seventeenth, Kurdish tribesmen mostly, nomads drafted on the way from amongst the black felt tents, had tried to desert.