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So that afternoon I walked boldly into the French camp as if I had important business there, and found my way to the further hut. There lying on a straw mattress, incredibly lousy and sandwiched between a Turco from Morocco and a Senegalese negro soldier, I found a white man, who jumped up to see me and was extraordinarily glad to find that his message had borne fruit.
Intrenchments such as the world has never seen before covered the countryside for fifty miles. Teuton, Gaul and Anglo-Saxon, Turco and Hindu, literally "dug themselves in," and refused to budge an inch, though hell itself, in all its horror and its fury, was loosed against them.
In a distant corner a Turco, wearing his red fez upon his head, sat with his chin on his knees amid an improvised bivouac of bed-clothes and looked on uncomprehendingly. The rest smoked cigarettes and toyed with the voluptuous pages of La Vie Parisienne. The sous-officier, being an artiste in his way, had been giving me a histrionic exhibition of shell-fire.
We halted a little farther in the city. We were very hungry, but all the shops were closed. I got some milk, but some of my comrades, who wanted wine, made a raid into the cellar of an abandoned house, and were jumped upon by an immense negro dressed like a Turco, whom they took for the devil. Glad as we all were to be in Paris, the sight as we marched on was most melancholy.
"I saw hundreds of men lying on the beds in the wards with varieties of wounds, no two being identical. This Turco or African soldier suffered from a torn tongue, cut by a bullet, which traversed his cheek. Another had lost three fingers of his left hand. A bullet entered the temple of this infantryman and fell into his mouth, where by some curious reaction he swallowed it.
Such people are apt to be useful so long as their enthusiasm lasts, whatever the motives which prompt them. This even the Turks could see; and a firman had been procured without difficulty, enabling them to erect their houses and to lease and cultivate a certain portion of land, planting American seed-wheat and maize where before grew only gran turco, barley, sesamum and anise.
There are two kinds of Gran Turco, or maize; that sown in May is of rather better quality than the other, and produces on an average 10 lbs. more per sack in weight than that which is sown afterwards in June.
He clamped Turco between his knees and picked up his fore leg, while the old dog whined and licked his hands anxiously. There was a stain of blood from the shoulder down, and above it, cut neatly through the muscles, a gaping wound. "That was a thirty-thirty," said Creede grimly, and every man looked up.
And in ordinary circumstances, I should sympathise with such a complaint made by a European people. But the circumstances are not ordinary. Here, again, the quiet unique barbarism of Prussia goes deeper than what we call barbarities. About mere barbarities, it is true, the Turco and the Sikh would have a very good reply to the superior Teuton.
No doubt it was the love of the strangers for the yellow metal that inspired El Turco to these alluring stories, in the hope of getting rid of the unwelcome visitors. At any rate, this was the effect it had.
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