Achmed Abdullah

“ They had bought him drinks, in their negligent, damnably kind manner—just as this man across from him had given him a cigarette, as the plump stock-brokers in the Silver Glen had given him tips.
He felt his muscles tauten. His heart was congested with hate and rage; doubly so, as, a few days after he had joined his old regiment, Pierre l'Rongeur and Anatol' Chapin had been blown to bits by a German high-explosive shell.
He wanted to kill, kill.
But he, too, was in no hurry. He, too, must watch and observe: not psychological reactions, as the German was doing, but prosy, physical details. ”

“ Major Graf Wolf von Baschwitz, chief of the Royal Prussian Ethnological Survey Department for Army Field Service, as it was called lengthily, euphoniously, and mendaciously.
For the lieutenant was the blond beast par excellence, with his smooth, honey-colored hair, his broad-templed, flat-backed head, firm, cherry lips, and unflinching blue eyes; a typical German aristocrat, a machine, hard, crunching, erect; stupid in so far as he could not conceive a thought, could only develop it, though thoroughly, after somebody else had given him the germ, the initiative. ”

“ That a man might lose his head, his temper, see red on the spur of the moment—yes! That was in the cards. But he had never even dreamed of the possibility of a man like Bibi, who had deserted with only one idea in mind: to kill. To kill deliberately, cold-bloodedly, scientifically.
Perhaps, at the very last, he did understand, since in every great climax of life there is always one impression more poignantly bitter than the rest; and it is generally the pin-point of a fraction when fear first springs. ”