PRESSED INTO THE SERVICE
There was no question as to my eligibility for service. I was young and
strong and healthy--and even if I had not been, the physical examination
of Turkish recruits is a farce. The enlisting officers have a theory of
their own that no man is really unfit for the army--a theory which has
been fostered by the ingenious devices of the Arabs to avoid
conscription. To these wild people the protracted discipline of military
training is simply a purgatory, and for weeks before the recruiting
officers are due, they dose themselves with powerful herbs and physics
and fast, and nurse sores into being, until they are in a really
deplorable condition. Some of them go so far as to cut off a finger or
two. The officers, however, have learned to see beyond these little
tricks, and few Arabs succeed in wriggling through their drag-net. I
have watched dozens of Arabs being brought in to the recruiting office
on camels or horses, so weak were they, and welcomed into the service
with a severe beating--the sick and the shammers sharing the same fate.
Thus it often happens that some of the new recruits die after their
first day of garrison life.
Together with twenty of my comrades, I presented myself at the
recruiting station at Acco (the St. Jean d'Acre of history). We had been
given to understand that, once our names were registered, we should be
allowed to return home to provide ourselves with money, suitable
clothing, and food, as well as to bid our families good-bye. To our
astonishment, however, we were marched off to the Hân, or caravanserai,
and locked into the great courtyard with hundreds of dirty Arabs. Hour
after hour passed; darkness came, and finally we had to stretch
ourselves on the ground and make the best of a bad situation. It was a
night of horrors. Few of us had closed an eye when, at dawn, an officer
appeared and ordered us out of the Hân. From our total number about
three hundred (including four young men from our village and myself)
were picked out and told to make ready to start at once for Saffêd, a
town in the hills of northern Galilee near the Sea of Tiberias, where
our garrison was to be located. No attention was paid to our requests
that we be allowed to return to our homes for a final visit. That same
morning we were on our way to Saffêd--a motley, disgruntled crew.
[ILLUSTRATION: SAFFÊD]
It was a four days' march--four days of heat and dust and physical
suffering. The September sun smote us mercilessly as we straggled along
the miserable native trail, full of gullies and loose stones. It would
not have been so bad if we had been adequately shod or clothed; but soon
we found ourselves envying the ragged Arabs as they trudged along
barefoot, paying no heed to the jagged flints. (Shoes, to the Arab, are
articles for ceremonious indoor use; when any serious walking is to be
done, he takes them off, slings them over his shoulder, and trusts to
the horny soles of his feet.)
To add to our troubles, the Turkish officers, with characteristic
fatalism, had made no commissary provision for us whatever. Any food we
ate had to be purchased by the roadside from our own funds, which were
scant enough to start with. The Arabs were in a terrible plight. Most of
them were penniless, and, as the pangs of hunger set in, they began
pillaging right and left from the little farms by the wayside. From
modest beginnings--poultry and vegetables--they progressed to larger
game, unhindered by the officers. Houses were entered, women insulted;
time and again I saw a stray horse, grazing by the roadside, seized by a
crowd of grinning Arabs, who piled on the poor beast's back until he was
almost crushed to earth, and rode off triumphantly, while their comrades
held back the weeping owner. The result of this sort of
"requisitioning," was that our band of recruits was followed by an
increasing throng of farmers--imploring, threatening, trying by hook or
by crook to win back the stolen goods. Little satisfaction did they get,
although some of them went with us as far as Saffêd.
Our garrison town is not an inviting place, nor has it an inviting
reputation. Lord Kitchener himself had good reason to remember it. As a
young lieutenant of twenty-three, in the Royal Engineering Corps, he was
nearly killed there by a band of fanatical Arabs while surveying for the
Palestine Exploration Fund. Kitchener had a narrow escape of it (one of
his fellow officers was shot dead close by him), but he went calmly
ahead and completed his maps, splendid large-scale affairs which have
never since been equaled--and which are now in use by the Turkish and
German armies! However, though Saffêd combines most of the unpleasant
characteristics of Palestine native towns, we welcomed the sight of it,
for we were used up by the march. An old deserted mosque was given us
for barracks; there, on the bare stone floor, in close-packed
promiscuity, too tired to react to filth and vermin, we spent our first
night as soldiers of the Sultan, while the milky moonlight streamed in
through every chink and aperture, and bats flitted round the vaulting
above the snoring carcasses of the recruits.
Next morning we were routed out at five. The black depths of the well in
the center of the mosque courtyard provided doubtful water for washing,
bathing, and drinking; then came breakfast,--our first government
meal,--consisting, simply enough, of boiled rice, which was ladled out
into tin wash-basins holding rations for ten men. In true Eastern
fashion we squatted down round the basin and dug into the rice with our
fingers. At first I was rather upset by this sort of table manners, and
for some time I ate with my eyes fixed on my own portion, to avoid
seeing the Arabs, who fill the palms of their hands with rice, pat it
into a ball and cram it into their mouths just so, the bolus making a
great lump in their lean throats as it reluctantly descends.
In the course of that same morning we were allotted our uniforms. The
Turkish uniform, under indirect German influence, has been greatly
modified during the past five years. It is of khaki--a greener khaki
than that of the British army, and of conventional European cut. Spiral
puttees and good boots are provided; the only peculiar feature is the
headgear--a curious, uncouth-looking combination of the turban and the
German helmet, devised by Enver Pasha to combine religion and
practicality, and called in his honor _enverieh_. (With commendable
thrift, Enver patented his invention, and it is rumored that he has
drawn a comfortable fortune from its sale.) An excellent uniform it is,
on the whole; but, to our disgust, we found that in the great olive-drab
pile to which we were led, there was not a single new one. All were old,
discarded, and dirty, and the mere thought of putting on the clothes of
some unknown Arab legionary, who, perhaps, had died of cholera at Mecca
or Yemen, made me shudder. After some indecision, my friends and I
finally went up to one of the officers and offered to _buy_ new uniforms
with the money we expected daily from our families. The officer,
scenting the chance for a little private profit, gave his consent.
The days and weeks following were busy ones. From morning till night, it
was drill, drill, and again drill. We were divided into groups of fifty,
each of which was put in charge of a young non-commissioned officer from
the Military School of Constantinople or Damascus, or of some Arab who
had seen several years' service. These instructors had a hard time of
it; the German military system, which had only recently been introduced,
was too much for them. They kept mixing up the old and the new methods
of training, with the result that it was often hopeless to try and make
out their orders. Whole weeks were spent in grinding into the Arabs the
names of the different parts of the rifle; weeks more went to teaching
them to clean it--although it must be said that, once they had mastered
these technicalities, they were excellent shots. Their efficiency would
have been considerably greater if there had been more target-shooting.
From the very first, however, we felt that there was a scarcity of
ammunition. This shortage the drill-masters, in a spirit of
compensation, attempted to make up by abundant severity. The whip of
soft, flexible, stinging leather, which seldom leaves the Turkish
officer's hand, was never idle. This was not surprising, for the Arab is
a cunning fellow, whose only respect is for brute force. He exercises it
himself on every possible victim, and expects the same treatment from
his superiors.
So far as my comrades and I were concerned, I must admit that we were
generally treated kindly. We knew most of the drill-exercises from the
gymnastic training we had practiced since childhood, and the officers
realized that we were educated and came from respectable families. The
same was also true with regard to the native Christians, most of whom
can read and write and are of a better class than the Mohammedans of the
country. When Turkey threw in her lot with the Germanic powers, the
attitude toward the Jews and Christians changed radically; but of this I
shall speak later.
It was a hard life we led while in training at Saffêd; evening would
find us dead tired, and little disposed for anything but rest. As the
tremendous light-play of the Eastern sunsets faded away, we would gather
in little groups in the courtyard of our mosque--its minaret towering
black against a turquoise sky--and talk fitfully of the little
happenings of the day, while the Arabs murmured gutturally around us.
Occasionally, one of them would burst into a quavering, hot-blooded
tribal love-song. It happened that I was fairly well known among these
natives through my horse Kochba--of pure Maneghi-Sbeli blood--which I
had purchased from some Anazzi Bedouins who were encamped not far from
Aleppo: a swift and intelligent animal he was, winner of many races, and
in a land where a horse is considerably more valuable than a wife, his
ownership cast quite a glamour over me.
[ILLUSTRATION: THE AUTHOR ON HIS HORSE KOCHBA]
In the evenings, then, the Arabs would come up to chat. As they speak
seldom of their children, of their women-folk never, the conversation
was limited to generalities about the crops and the weather, or to the
recitation of never-ending tales of Abou-Zeid, the famous hero of the
Beni-Hilal, or of Antar the glorious. Politics, of which they have
amazing ideas, also came in for discussion. Napoleon Bonaparte and Queen
Victoria are still living figures to them; but (significantly enough)
they considered the Kaiser king of all the kings of this world, with the
exception of the Sultan, whom they admitted to equality.
Seldom did an evening pass without a dance. As darkness fell, the Arabs
would gather in a great circle around one of their comrades, who
squatted on the ground with a bamboo flute; to a weird minor music they
would begin swaying and moving about while some self-chosen poet among
them would sing impromptu verses to the flute _obbligato_. As a rule the
themes were homely.
"To-morrow we shall eat rice and meat," the singer would wail.
"_Yaha lili-amali"_ (my endeavor be granted), came the full-throated
response of all the others. The chorus was tremendously effective.
Sometimes the singer would indulge in pointed personalities, with
answering roars of laughter.
These dances lasted for hours, and as they progressed the men gradually
worked themselves up into a frenzy. I never failed to wonder at these
people, who, without the aid of alcohol, could reproduce the various
stages of intoxication. As I lay by and watched the moon riding serenely
above these frantic men and their twisting black shadows, I reflected
that they were just in the condition when one word from a holy man would
suffice to send them off to wholesale murder and rapine.
It was my good fortune soon to be released from the noise and dirt of
the mosque. I had had experience with corruptible Turkish officers; and
one day, when barrack conditions became unendurable, I went to the
officer commanding our division--an old Arab from Latakieh who had been
called from retirement at the time of the mobilization. He lived in a
little tent near the mosque, where I found him squatting on the floor,
nodding drowsily over his comfortable paunch. As he was an officer of
the old régime, I entered boldly, squatted beside him and told him my
troubles. The answer came with an enormous shrug of the shoulders.
"You are serving the Sultan. Hardship should be sweet!"
"I should be more fit to serve him if I got more sleep and rest."
He waved a fat hand about the tent.
"Look at me! Here I am, an officer of rank and"--shooting a knowing
look at me--"I have not even a nice blanket."
"A crime! A crime!" I interrupted. "To think of it, when I, a humble
soldier, have dozens of them at home! I should be honored if you would
allow me--" My voice trailed off suggestively.
"How could you get one?" he asked.
"Oh, I have friends here in Saffêd but I _must_ be able to sleep in a
nice place."
"Of course; certainly. What would you suggest?"
"That hotel kept by the Jewish widow might do," I replied.
More amenities were exchanged, the upshot of which was that my four
friends and I were given permission to sleep at the inn--a humble place,
but infinitely better than the mosque. It was all perfectly simple.
[ILLUSTRATION: SOLDIERS' TENTS IN SAMARIA]