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70 The Berlin to Bagdad Linethe gold I was carrying, I awaited theturning about and departure of my train,whose passengers on this return trip werelargely demobilized Turkish soldiers to bedistributed along the way between thispoint and Constantinople, nearly a thousandmiles away—and with no prospectof a Fifth Avenue reception when theyreached their several desolate destinations.I had an hour or two of leisure to celebratethe birthday of my country'sturned eastward, as the unblinking eyesof the Sphinx which had never beheld aWestern sky. Yet even there, one couldnot safely generalize. It was not far fromthere that I saw a woman caring fortwenty or thirty of her young sister Armeniansrescued from a worse slaverythan that from which Lincoln had emancipatedmillions. I found that she couldspeak English—of the American accent—and that she had been taught (and notThe projected line of the Bagdad Railroad from Constantinople to Bagdad, part of which isalready in operation."Abraham" at this farthermost post ofthe army of Allenby, the Deliverer ofPalestine, and in sight of Saruj whichBaldwin had captured and then taken tohimself an Armenian wife. Except forthe "confusion of tongues" which hadcome upon the race somewhere out betweenthose rivers, where the unfinishedTower of Babel must have stood crumblingfor centuries, I should undoubtedlyhave tried to assemble the natives andtell them about Lincoln, such was myhabit in the States. It was inconceivableto me at home in America that therewas any part of the world that had notheard of him. But there, I was ready tobelieve, they had not. Their faces wereonly our tongue but our ideals) by a youngAmerican woman whose father must haveheard the Lincoln-Douglas debate by theside of the old prairie college buildingswhere I was her classmate. So perhapssome of the miserably clad, emaciated,weary soldiers whom I saw scramblinginto the open trucks (where they were toride unprotected during the cold nights)had after all heard of another Abrahamthan theirs. Certainly there was a dimfame among the cities (based on the unselfishlives of American teachers, missionaries,doctors, and nurses) of a peoplewho had a disinterested interest in otherpeoples, strange as that might seem.Their Grand Mufti, who had studied in