THE SOUL OF A TURK
That night, with no hatred in his heart but with a Moslem's implacable logic guiding his hand, he killed the Prussian drill sergeant who, scarlet tarbush on yellow-curled, flat-backed skull, was breveted as major to his regiment, the Seventeenth Turkish Infantry.
His comrades saw him creep into the tattered, bell-shaped tent where the Prussian was sleeping the sleep of utter exhaustion. They heard the tragic crack of the shot, and saw him come out again smoking revolver in his right hand. Calmly squatting on their haunches, they watched him go to the commissary, help himself to slabs of spongy, gray bread, dried apricot paste, and a bundle of yellow Latakia tobacco leaves, fill his water canteen, and take the road toward the giant breast of the Anatolian mountains, studded here and there with small, bistre-red farms, like brooches clasping a greenish-black garment.
"Allah's Peace on you, brother Moslems!" he said piously, turning, the fingers of his left hand opening like the sticks of a fan, then closing them again, to show the inevitability of what he had done.
"And on you Peace, Mehmet el-Touati!" came their mumbled reply, tainted by just a shade of envy, because they told themselves that soon Mehmet el-Touati would be in his own country while their homes were far in the South and West, and they did not know the roads.
They were neither astonished, nor shocked. They understood him, as he understood them.
For, like himself, they were simple Turkish peasants, bearded, middle-aged, patient, slightly rheumy, who had been drafted into the army and thrown into the frothy, blood-stained cauldron of European history in the making, by the time honored process of a green-turbaned priest rising one Friday morning in the mosque pulpit and declaring with melodious unction that the Russian was clamoring at the outer door of the Osmanli house, and that Islam was in danger.
The Russian—by Allah and by Allah, but they knew him of old!
He would ride over their fields, over the sown and the fallow. He would cut down the peach trees. He would pollute their mosques, their harems, and their wells. He would stable his horses in their cypress-shaded graveyards. He would enslave the women, kill the little children, and send the red flame licking over byre and barn thatch.
Therefore:
Jehad!—Holy War! Kill for the Faith and the blessed Messenger Mohammed!
Thus, uncomplaining, ox-eyed, they had pressed their wives and their children to hairy, massive chests, had adjusted the rawhide straps of their sandals, had trooped to district military headquarters, had been fitted into nondescript, chafing, buckram-stiffened uniforms, had been given excellent German rifles, wretched food, brackish water; and had trudged along the tilting roads of stony, bleak Anatolia.
Moslems, peasants, pawns—they had gone forth, leaving their all behind, stabbed on the horns of Fate; with no Red Cross, no doctors, no ambulances, to look after their wounded or to ease the last agonies of their dying; with sleek, furtive-eyed Levantine government clerks stealing the pittance which the war office allowed for the sustenance of the women and children and feeble old men who tilled the fields and garnered meagre crops with their puny arms while the strong, the lusty, the bearded, were away battling for the Faith; with none to praise their patriotism or sing epic pæans to the glory of their matter-of-fact courage; with neither flags waving nor brasses blaring; with no printed or spoken public opinion to tell them that they were doing right, that they were heroes; with nobody back home to send them encouragement or com forts or pitiful little luxuries.
They had gone forth, unimaginative, unenthusiastic, to kill—as a matter of duty, a sending of Kismet.
For Islam was in danger. The Russian was clamoring at the outer gate, beyond Erzeroum.
Turks, they. Cannon fodder. Bloody dung to mulch the fields of ambition.
Had come long months of fighting and marching and fighting again. Victories, soberly accepted. More marching, through a hot, sad land speckled with purple shadows.
And they had wondered a little, and one day Mehmet el-Touati, as spokesman of his company, had asked a question of his colonel, Moustaffa Sheffket Bey, who, in time of peace, was the civilian Pasha of his native district.
The colonel had smiled through white, even teeth.
"Yes, Mehmet el-Touati," he had replied. "We are going South."
"But Russia is in the North, Effendina, beyond the snow range."
"I know. But—have you ever hunted?"
"Often, Effendina."
"Good. You stalk deer against the wind, don't you, so that it may not scent you and bolt?"
"Yes, Effendina."
"It is the same with warfare, with hunting men. We are traveling South—for a while. We do not want the Russian to smell the Turkish scent."
"But—" Mehmet el-Touati had pointed at a corpse that lay curled up in the middle of the road, like a dog asleep in the sun. "These people are not—"
"No. They are not Russians. They are the Armenian jackals who accompany the Russian lion in search of carrion. They are the Russian's allies. They, too, are the enemies of the Faith. Kill them. Kill the jackals first. Presently, with the help of Allah, the All-Merciful, we shall nail the lion's pelt to the door of our house."
"Alhamdulillah!"
He, and the others, had accepted the explanation. They had marched—South. They had fallen on the Armenian villages with torch and rope and scimitar. They had killed.
It was an order.
Many of his regiment died. Others took their places, Turkish peasants like himself, middle aged, bearded, solemn—but from districts farther South and West.
They, too, had heard that Islam was in danger, that the Russian was at the door.
Came more fighting, through many, weary months. Then a defeat, a rout, a debacle; the ground littered with their dead and dying, amongst them the colonel of the Seventeenth, Moustaffa Sheffket Bey; and talk of treason in exalted places, of a renegade Saloniki Jew by the name of Enver Bey throttling the ancient Osmanli Empire and handing it over, tied hand and foot, to a Potsdam usurper.
Greeks and Syrians and Druses had spread the hushed, bitter tale through the ranks of the retreating army. But the grave Turkish peasant soldiers had slowly shaken their heads.
Leaky-tongued babble, that!
They had never heard of either Enver Bey or the Potsdam usurper. Their very names were unknown to them. They were fighting because Islam was in danger.
Had not the green-turbaned priests told them so?
They had been defeated. What of it? That, too, was Fate—Fate, which comes out of the dark, like a blind camel, with no warning, no jingling of bells.
At first they had won, and presently they would win again. They would conquer as of old. It was so written.
They would return to their quiet, sleepy villages and once more till the fields. Once more they would harrow on the strips of fallow, shouting to their clumsy, humped oxen. Once more they would hear the creaking song of the water wheels, the chant of the mullahs calling the Faithful to prayer, and the drowsy zumming of the honey bees. Once more, on Friday, the day of rest of all God's creatures, they would stroll out with their women and children into the sloping hills and smoke their pipes and eat their food and sip their coffee and licorice water beneath the twinkling of the golden crab apples that clustered high up in the hedges and the greenish elderberries on their thick, purple-blue stalks.
Meanwhile more fighting, marching, suffering.
Torch and rope and scimitar had done the work. The Armenians had died by the thousands.
The land was a reeking shambles.
And—what of the Russian?
With the Armenians strung up in front of their own houses, or buried in shallow graves, there was only the Russian left to fight.
And he did fight, with long-range guns and massed machine-gun fire and airplanes and blazing white shells that screamed death from afar.
Daily he took toll, gave toll.
"But," said Mehmet el-Touati, voicing the sluggish, gray doubts of the Seventeenth Infantry which, in its turn, voiced the doubts of the army—"why is the Russian here, in the South? How did he come down from behind the snow ramparts of the Caucasus and is facing us here, in the flat lands, the yellow lands, the fertile lands? Also, I fought the Russian, twenty, thirty years ago, when I was a youth, with no gray in my hair and never a crack in my heart. Then the Russian was heavy and bearded and dressed in green. Now he is tall and lithe and slim and ruddy of skin and—" he pointed at an English prisoner—"dressed in khaki brown. I cannot understand it. Is there then truth in the bazaar babble that treason has crept into the Osmanli house on silent, unclean feet?"
Thus he spoke to the new colonel of the Seventeenth, Yakub Lahada Bey.
The latter was a monocled, mustached dandy from Stamboul, who had learned how to ogle and speak German and misquote Nietzsche and drink beer in the Berlin academy of war. Too, he had learned, nor badly, certain rudiments of strategy and tactics. But he had paid a bitter price for his lessons. For he had forgotten the simple, native decencies of his native land, the one eternal wisdom of the Koran which says that all Moslems are brothers, equal.
He dropped his eyeglass, twirled his mustache, and turned on Mehmet et-Touati with a snarl.
"Shut up, son of a dog with a dog's heart," he cried. "Get back—or—"
He lifted his riding crop significantly, and Mehmet el-Touati salaamed and walked away. He shrugged his shoulders. A beating from a master and a step in the mud, he said to himself, were not things one should consider in times of stress. Nor did he mind the killing, the dying, the wounds, the bleeding toes, the wretched food.
But what of Islam? What of the Russian? What of—treason?
Still, the priests had told them that Islam was in danger, that they must fight. And they did. Though not as well as before.
For doubt had entered their hearts.
Came another defeat; another retreat; another disgrace hushed up, followed by hectic clamorings from Stamboul, the seat of the Caliph, the Commander of the Faithful, and thunderous, choleric, dragooning orders zumming South from Berlin along the telegraph wires.
Then, one day, a red-faced, blue-eyed, white-mustached, spectacled giant, eagle-topped silver helmet on bullet head, stout chest ablaze with medals and ribbons, rode into headquarters camp and addressed the soldiers, who were lined up for parade review, in halting Turkish with a strange, guttural accent.
Mehmet el-Touati did not understand the whole of the harangue. But he caught a word here and there: about Islam being in danger, and the Russian at the door; too, something about a great Emperor in the North, Wilhelm by name, who, like themselves, was a good Moslem and coming to their rescue.
Thus Mehmet el-Touati cheered until he was hoarse. So did the others. And hereafter foreigners—Prussians, they called themselves—took the places of the Osmanlis as officers and drill sergeants in many of the regiments, including the Seventeenth. They said that they were Moslems—which was odd, considering that their habits and customs were different from those of the Turks. But—said the priests—they belonged to a different sect, and what did that matter in the eyes of Allah, the All-Knowing?
On and away, then!
Kill, kill for the Faith!
For days at a time they were loaded on flat, stinking cattle cars pulled by wheezy, rickety, sooty engines, until they lost all ideas as to direction and time and distance. East they were shipped—and fought, losing half their effectives, quickly replaced by raw village levies, until the Seventeenth was like a kaleidoscope of all the many provinces of the Turkish Empire, with Mehmet el-Touati the last surviving soldier of the Anatolian mountain district in his company.
Again they were loaded on flat cars, then unloaded, rushed into battle, bled white. Back on the cars once more—South, East, North, West!
The Russian—Mehmet el-Touati wondered—was he 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.
The Prussian paled beneath his tan. …
A tight, tense moment of danger. A little moment, the result of a deed—brutal, though insignificant, except in the final analysis of national psychology—that might have spread into gigantic, fuliginous conflagration, that might have sent the whole German-Turkish card house into a pitful, smoldering heap of ruins!
But a Turkish staff officer, fat, pompous, good-natured, his eyes red and swollen with too much hasheesh smoking, played the part of the deus ex machina. He stepped quickly between the Prussian and the Turks and talked to them in a gentle, soothing singsong, winding up with the old slogan, the old fetish, the old lie:
"Patience, brother Moslems! Patience and a stout heart! For Islam is in danger! The Russian is at the door!"
Yet, deep in the heart of Mehmet el-Touati, deep in the hearts of the simple peasant soldiers, doubt grew, and a terrible feeling of insecurity.
It was not alone that the Russian seemed to have many allies—Armenians yesterday, to-day Arabs and Syrians, to-morrow Greeks and Druses and Persians. All that could be explained, was explained, by the green-turbaned priests who accompanied the army. But they had been told that the Emperor of the North who was coming to their rescue was a Moslem, like themselves. Why then did these Prussian officers—for the case of brevet-major Gottlieb Krüger was not an isolated one—kick and curse their brother Moslems, the Turks? Why did they spit on Islam, the ancient Faith, their own Faith?
Mehmet el-Touati shrugged his shoulders resignedly.
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 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.
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 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 Prussian brevet-major was sharing the contents of his brandy flask with the Turkish staff officer.
As he passed, a few words drifted through the tent flap, flew out on the pinions of Fate, buffeted against the stolid mind of Mehmet el-Touati with almost physical impact—caused him to tremble a little, then to drop to the ground, to creep close, to listen, tensely, with breath sucked in, lungs beating like trip hammers.
"Russia is smashed!" the Prussian was saying in his halting, guttural Turkish. "The Russians have signed a peace treaty with us, with Austria, with Bulgaria, with your country—Turkey. There'll be a little desultory border fighting—but all danger is past. The Russian is out of the running."
"You are sure of that?" asked the other.
"Absolutely. Remember the despatches I received this morning?"
"Yes."
"They were from headquarters. The peace treaty at Brest-Litovsk had been signed. Russia is out of the running—as harmless as a bear with his teeth and claws drawn. And now—"
"And now?" breathed the staff officer.
"And now?" came the silent echo in Mehmet el-Touati's heart, as he glued his ear against the tent.
"And now you Turks are going to see some real fighting. Of course I am only guessing. But I lay you long odds that your crack troops—like this regiment, the Seventeenth—are going to be sent to the Western front, brigaded with Prussians—and used against the French and British. Or perhaps they'll be sent to Albania to fight with the Austrians against the Italians, or to Macedonia to stiffen the Bulgarians a little."
"You mean to say the war is not over—with the Russian beaten?" asked the Turkish staff officer.
"Your war? Yes. It is over. But our war is not! And you are going to fight for us, my friend and you are going to toe the mark and fight well. For—" he laughed unpleasantly, "remember our Prussian slogan—Discipline! Discipline!"
Mehmet el-Touati crept away, into the shadow of a horse-chestnut tree, to think. But he did not have to think long.
Only one fact stood out: the Russian was beaten; Islam was safe—and the house of the Osmanli.
Nothing else mattered.
The West front? Albania? Macedonia?
The French and British and Italians?
No, no! He shook his head. He knew nothing about them. They were not in his life, his world. Russia was beaten. Islam was safe, and he had done his duty, and now he must go home and look after his fields and his wife and his children. They had been neglected so long.
He must go soon. To-day. This very night. For here he was in the foot hills of his own country, where he knew the roads.
But—how?
He remembered the Kurds who had tried to desert who had been caught, courtmartialed, shot, by orders of—
Yes! By orders of the Prussian, the foreigner!
The Turkish staff officer would not care. He would argue that one man more or less in the company was not worth the trouble of halting the column, of searching the surrounding valleys and mountains with a fine-tooth comb.
Thus—there was just one way—
And so, that night, with no hatred in his heart but with a Moslem's implacable logic guiding his hand, Mehmet el-Touati killed the Prussian officer and took the road toward his own country.