Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/122

gute Sitten—bad examples spoil good morals! If we let the Kurds do what they please, some day, when we least expect it, these stolid Turks of yours will take the bit between their teeth, and then there'll be the devil to pay! No! I am a Prussian. I will have discipline. Discipline is going to win this war. I shall make an example of these fellows!"

Then a firing squad. Blood stippling the dusty ground.

And Gottlieb Krüger was right. Perhaps, as the months dragged along on weary, bleeding feet and there was no end to suffering and dying, it was his slogan of discipline—with its obbligato accompaniment of courtmartial and death which kept the Seventeenth as a fighting unit fully as much as the ancient fear and hatred of the Russian.

Then, one day, Mehmet el-Touati overheard a few words not meant for his ear; and, with a suddenness that to a Westerner would have seemed dramatic, even providential, but that to him, Turk, Moslem, was merely a prosy sending of Kismet to be accepted as such and used, a veil slipped from his eyes and slowly, in his grinding, bovine mind, he dovetailed what he overheard into relationship with himself, his own life, his past and present and future.

It was late in the afternoon and the company was camping in a little grove, spotted with purple lilac trees and walled in with the glowing pink of the horse-chestnut. The soldiers had loosened the collars of their tunics and lay stretched in the checkered, pleasant shade, sipping quickly brewed coffee, smoking acrid Latakia tobacco, talking of home, and Mehmet el-Touati, on the way to a little spring to fill his water canteen, happened to pass the tent where the