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Updated: April 30, 2025
As for me my two hands shook. "And we have with us," said he, "a hostage who might prove useful a hostage who might prove amenable to reason. Bring out the prisoner!" said he. So I bade Tugendheim come forth. He was sitting on the straw where the guards had pushed him, still working sullenly to free his hands.
"I release you from your word to me!" said Tugendheim. "And I promised you to the Kurdish chief." "The Kurdish chief?" said Tugendheim. "What of him? What of it? Why, why, why he is a savage scarcely human not to be weighed in the scales against a civilized man! What does such a promise as that amount to?" And he stood tugging at his mustaches as if he would tear them out.
Tugendheim begged hard to be allowed to come with us, but Ranjoor Singh would not let him.
"Is down," he said, "both between here and Skutari, and between here and Inismid. God sent this storm to favor us, and we will praise God by making use of it." "Where is Tugendheim?" said I, but it was some minutes before he answered me, for, since the loaves were counted he went to see them distributed, and I followed him.
He had helped us more than a little by drilling the Syrians, and often his presence with us had saved our skins by convincing Turkish scouts of our bona fides. We thought of Gooja Singh, and had no wish that Tugendheim should meet a like fate. So, perhaps because we all begged for him, or perhaps because he so intended in the first place, Ranjoor Singh relented.
So we were invisible unless the camels should approach too close. The Turks and Tugendheim I saw placed in the midst of all the other unmounted men, and ordered them guarded like felons; and I bade those in charge of mules and horses stand by, ready to muzzle their beasts with coats or what-not, to prevent neighing and braying.
They saw the point of that. "But what if we are discovered too soon?" said they. "What if we are sunk before dawn by a British submarine!" said I. "We will swim when we find ourselves in water! For the present, bind and gag Tugendheim!" So they went and stalked Tugendheim, the German, who had been drinking from a little pocket flask.
The German officer agreed instantly, Tugendheim making faces thus and brushing his mustache more fiercely upward. So the very first morning after our arrival we were paraded early and sent out with a negro band, to tramp back and forth through the streets until nearly too weary to desire life.
He was stern when we begged for longer rests, merciless toward the ammunition bearers, silent at all times unless compelled to give orders or correct us. Most of the time he kept Tugendheim marching beside him, and Tugendheim, I think, began to regard him with quite peculiar respect; for he admired resolution.
But what Tugendheim had told were almost truths compared to this man's stories; in place of Tugendheim's studied vagueness there was detail in such profusion that I can not recall now the hundredth part of it. He told us the British fleet had long been rusting at the bottom of the sea, and that all the British generals and half the army were prisoners in Berlin.
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