THE utter wretchedness and weakness of Turkey is thus pictured by a world traveled journalist, William T. Ellis, in the New York Independent of December 19, last:
Courtesy “Scientific American”
“Turkey, because she has never been able to depend upon the loyalty of her subjects, has borne all her Asiatic conscripts to her troubled European dominions, and the European soldiers to the deadly Yemen, from which few return. In Ma’an, Arabia, which is as far down on the Mecca railway as a Christian may go, my guard was a Turkish soldier from Diarbekir, in Mesopotamia, where his family lived, unable to subsist on the pittance of his pay, even when he got it. To this exiled soldier on the desert, the poverty-stricken but quaint old city of Diarbekir, on the head waters of the Tigris, was paradise. His ecstatic descriptions of it had the same homesick note as the psalms of the Hebrew exiles in Babylon. Multiply this man by almost the total number of the Turkish army, and something of the personal deprivation and loneliness involved in militarism is seen.”
