But the Turk, who was not used to having women disobey his commands, again ordered angrily that the picture should be taken down.  But the American missionary-nurse said gently, but firmly:  “No, the picture must stay there to remind us of Jesus.  If you cannot endure to see the picture there, then if you wish you may leave the hospital, of course.”

And so she passed on.  The Turk lay in his bed and thought it over.  He wished to get well.  If the doctors in this hospital—­Dr. Dodd and Dr. Post—­did not attend him, and if the nurses did not give him his medicine, he would not.  He therefore decided to make no more fuss about the picture.  So he lay looking at it, and was rather surprised to find in a few days that he liked to see it there, and that he wanted to hear more and more about the great Prophet-Doctor, Jesus.

Then he had another tussle of wills with Miss Cushman, the white nurse from across the seas.  It came about in this way.  Women who are Mohammedans keep their faces veiled, but the Armenian Christian nurses had their faces uncovered.

“Surely they are shameless women,” he thought in his heart.  “And they are Armenians too—­Christian infidels!” So he began to treat them rudely.  But the white nurse would not stand that.

Miss Cushman went and stood by his bed and said:  “I want you to remember that these nurses of mine are here to help you to get well.  They are to you even as daughters tending their father; and you must behave to them as a good father to good daughters.”

So the Turk lay in bed and thought about that also.  It took him a long time to take it in, for he had always been taught to hate the Armenians and to think low thoughts about their womenfolk.  But in the end he learnt that lesson also.

At last the Turk got well, left his bed, and went away.  He was so thankful that he was better that he was ready to do just anything in the world that Miss Cushman wanted him to do.  The days passed on in the hospital, and always the white nurse from across the seas and the Armenian nurses tended the Turkish and other patients, and healed them through the heats of that summer.

War and Massacre

As summer came near to its end there broke on the world the dreadful day when all Europe went to war.  Miss Cushman’s colleagues, the American doctors at the hospital, left Konia for service in the war.  Soon Turkey entered the war.  The fury of the Turks against the Armenians burst out into a flame.  You might see in Konia two or three Turks sitting in the shadow of a little saddler’s shop by the street smoking their hubble-bubble water-pipes, and saying words like these: 

“The Armenians are plotting to help the enemies of Turkey.  We shall have to kill them all.”

“Yes, wipe them out—­the accursed infidels!”

The Turks hate the Armenians because their religion, Islam, teaches them to hate the “infidel” Christians; they are of a foreign race and foreign religion in countries ruled by Turks, though the Armenians were there first, and the Armenians are cleverer business men than the Turks, who hate to see their subjects richer than themselves, and hope by massacre to seize Armenian wealth.