------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER IX MORE IMPRESSIONS—“SITTING AMIDST AN ARMY OF SUPPOSED SAVAGE FANATICS, DEBATING THE GREATNESS OF GOD” THE train is slowly crawling up the heights, the air grows colder and colder, we put on wrap after wrap, and, all of a sudden, not a fly to be seen! The scenery, meanwhile, seems more desolate at every mile we pass. The horribly systematic destruction has overlooked nothing, and every village is in ruins. The corn, so carefully hidden in pits, has been burned; the water, on which life itself depends, has been polluted; the peasants are vainly digging in search of the hard-earned paper money, savings which they had buried beneath the soil, only to turn up a few black cinders! Even the trees have been nearly all razed to the ground. There is nothing you can tell me about the “devastated areas” in France, for I have visited every inch of the ground; but there the people could move on to the next villages, and were not imprisoned among the ruins. I would not minimise German atrocities, but they did not fill the churches with women and children before firing them! The wholesale destruction of villages and of cattle is not “legitimate warfare,” but this butchering of women has put the Greek outside the pale of civilisation. “They have left us the sunset,” I could only murmur, “this marvellous panorama of which one never tires.” The desolation, indeed, lends it a double wonder. Why cannot men, too, die in glory? The railway line has been cut at Gunhani. Here, no doubt, the Governor has been instructed not only to welcome us with every comfort—tea, coffee, and statistics—but to find us beds which do not exist! We are travelling in the dark, since the sun has deserted us. Every now and again the officer flashes out his little electric lamp to see that all is well. The feelings of my fellow-passengers must be murderous, for have I not kept the train waiting all along the line, so that we are even later than normal Turkish management would have made us? But I can detect no black looks. In the pitchy darkness, as the train slows down for the last time, before its immediate “return” journey, ragged figures are seen crowding the station. Their turbans are brightly coloured, despite the dirt and rain to which they have been exposed; their clothes are mere “shreds and patches”; they have fashioned themselves picturesque slippers of straw. Like the grotesque figures of some stage chorus from no man’s land, they dart about us on every side, each man seizing upon some one article of luggage. If I express anxiety about my possessions, the cheik bids me “fear not. God is with us. All is well, and in a short while we shall remember this discomfort but as a page of history.” It was a lesson against worry I never forgot—the secret of Islam’s suffering in silence!