Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/121

Why fight any more, had been their sneering comment, since their pockets were lined with Syrian and Armenian gold and they had their fill of Syrian and Armenian blood?

So they had snapped their fingers derisively and had glided into the night shadows like ghosts, relying on the hereditary, kindly negligence of their Osmanli overlord. But they had reckoned without the fact that the latter was no longer master in his own house—that the brevet-major of the company was a Prussian drill sergeant, reared and trained with the Prussian ramrod, the Prussian code.

"Rücksichtslos—inconsiderate of everything except duty!" was his watchword, and his slogan was:

"I shall make an example—for the sake of discipline!"

He had halted the marching column—he drove them afterwards to make up for the time he had lost—until the deserters, one by one, had been recaptured, courtmartialed, sentenced to death.

The melancholy Turkish staff officer who was attached to the Seventeenth to act as a sort of philosophic, good-natured yeast, had tried to argue the point, to reason; had said that Brevet-Major Krüger was making a slight error, that he did not know these people.

"They are like homing birds, these tribesmen," he had said. "If a few of them want to go, let them. We can always get more, and you cannot catch the winds of heaven with your bare hands. These deserters are Kurds, nomads, unreliable cattle, while the bulk of the army is Turkish. You know yourself that the real Turk is patient and obedient."

"Makes no difference! Schlechte Beispiele verderben