Turkish soldier

“ The docility of the Turkish soldier is admirable; and his desire of improvement so unwearying that it is a common occurrence for him to spend his hours of relaxation in perfecting himself, as far as his own knowledge enables him to do so, in the management of his firelock; while the care and time which he bestows upon the arm itself, is visible at once from the lustre of its bright barrel, and the cleanliness of its whole appearance. ”

“ In Turkey, the burden of obligatory service is placed exclusively on the Mussulman population, the Christians up till now having enjoyed complete exemption, in return for which they have paid a small poll-tax. The Turkish soldier is among the toughest as well as the bravest in the world, and he will undergo great hardships uncomplainingly; but there are limits even to his endurance. It would be difficult to exaggerate the pitiable condition of these fine troops, as I have often seen them in provincial garrisons and posts in the days of the old régime. ”

“ Any one who has observed his career closely knows that his actions are diametrically opposed to the principles of the Mussulman law and creed.” Moreover, the Turkish soldier, like the soldiers in other armies and the majority of116 healthy young men, can be appealed to through his stomach, and he naturally acquired an affection for and confidence in these majors, captains, and lieutenants of the new school who sympathised with him, pitied his wretched condition, and with their own money, or the Committee funds, supplemented his miserable rations and supplied him with comforts. ”

“ One continually hears similar comments, and there can be no doubt of the Turkish soldier's bravery, and his unusual ability to endure hardship. No one who has wrangled with a minor Turkish official, and experienced the impassive resistance he is able to interpose to anything he doesn't want to do, will underestimate what this quality might become, translated into the rugged physique and impassivity of the common soldier. ”

“ That the Turks can effectually interfere is quite impossible. Any one who knows how high-strung the Mussulman sentiment now is, how insubordinate the generally obedient ill-treated Turkish soldier has now become, can easily foresee what would be the natural result of a Turkish general leading his men to fight against their co-religionists, in order to force them to deliver their country to the giaour. ”

“ German generals, under General Liman von Sanders, were practically in control of the Turkish army. The commander-in-chief was Enver Bey, who had been educated in Germany and was more German than the Germans. A new system of organization for the Turkish army had been established by the Germans, which had substituted the mechanical German system for the rough and inefficient Turkish methods. Universal conscription provided men, and the Turkish soldier has always been known as a good soldier. ”

“ But the most confiding endurance on the part of the Turkish soldier, even when the military cause has long been lost, will not hinder this same soldier, when he is once more back in his own home as a peasant, from realising that European influence and European civilisation are a very competent protection against the miserably retrogressive Turkish rule, and that he has drawn more material profit from that single example of European activity, the Baghdad Railway, than from all Turkish official reforms put together, and so would willingly see Europe exercising a powerful control in his country. ”

“ During the second period, from the Turkish re-conquest of the Morea down to the close of the War of Independence, Turkey was declining, slowly but surely, in all save the one art which she has never lost even in her political dotage, the art of fighting. For, like the Roman and the Briton, the Turk has ever been a good soldier, but, unlike those two great unintellectual peoples, many of whose qualities he shares, he has never been a good administrator; even when his arrangements have been excellent in theory, as they often are, they have frequently proved to be miserable in practice. ”

“ The Turkish Army is not so much a profession or an institution necessitated by the fears and aims of the Government as the quite normal state of the Turkish nation.... Every Turk is a born soldier, and adopts other pursuits chiefly because times are bad. When there is a question of fighting, if only in a riot, the stolid peasant wakes up and shows surprising power of finding organisation and expedients, and alas! ”

“ An attempt is making in certain quarters to persuade the civilized world that Turkey has still some military power. Of this almost imperial city the citadel is but a mass of ruins. Count Guyon, a confederate general with Kossuth, and now a Turkish Pasha and drill-officer, assured us it would be repaired and strengthened; but the city-walls offer no defence against a modern army; and the Turkish soldier, notwithstanding his courage and endurance, cannot be bastinadoed into military science; neither have educated Christian officers, like Guyon, any real influence. ”

“ The reason the Turkish population does not increase is this: The army has to be made up of Mohammedans, partly because the Sultan does not put arms into the hands of the Christians, for obvious reasons, since they have no motive to uphold and every motive to fight him, and partly because to be a soldier in Turkey is a holy service, the privilege of Mohammedans alone. As there is a large standing army, nearly all the Mohammedan youths have to become soldiers. ”

“ The Turks crushed them—the Armenian leaders failed their followers—and massacred men, women and children in hundreds of thousands. They massacred them not because they were Christians but because they were Armenians and wanted to be independent. Such wholesale barbarity was made possible for Enver and his friends by the nature of the Turkish private soldier, who has been described as the best natural soldier in the world. This means that he is brave, enduring and so obedient that he allows himself to have no feelings except those that he is ordered to have. ”

“ They are patient, quiet men, these suffering Turkish soldiers, some still wondering why they were torn from their Anatolian homes and sent to fight with unaccustomed arms men whom they did not know of, for a cause they did not understand, and under conditions such as invite disaster. Untrained they went to war, unfed they fought as long as men could hold out, longer probably than would any European troops, starving, sick, in rags, forsaken by their officers, they staggered back into the City, where those responsible for their sufferings still live in lies. ”

“ The infantry are supposed to be all armed with Martini-Peabody rifles, but in Mesopotamia older patterns are still in use. The life of a Turkish soldier is not enviable; and none of them would be volunteers for government service. The Turkish217 navy is represented in the Persian Gulf and on the rivers by one or two third-rate cruisers and a small river gunboat.
The result of the calling of Turkey into the Wahabi quarrel between the two sons of Feysul, was the occupation of Katif and Hassa by the Ottoman government. ”

“ In this siege and in that of Silistria and the defence of Eupatoria, the Turkish soldiers gave ample proof that when well led they had lost none of their pristine valour in defence of earthworks. The allied Powers, however, seem to have been quite ignorant or unmindful of the military value of the Turkish soldiers and made little or no practical use of them. An army of fifty thousand Turks led by English or French officers would have been of the utmost value in the earlier part of the war. It was only towards the close of it that twenty thousand Turks were enrolled under British officers. ”

“ Z-r-r-p! went thousands of rifles and dozens of machine-guns. Gad! How these Turks withered and fell. It was brutal, yet it was inspiring. Shrieks, curses, and groans were mixed with pitiful cries for "Allah!" "Allah!"
Bravely these Turkish soldiers died, and bravely the more fortunate came on. They tore through the barbed wire with a fiendish frenzy and leaped down on to parts of their enemy's lines. With that mad ferocity which only a Moslem fanatic can display, they plugged their bayonets into the first opposing man. Cold steel is hard to face. Few armies can face it. ”

“ The Turkish soldiers, on the other hand, are unused to motion—are mostly without experience, and lack confidence both in themselves and in their new system, which they but imperfectly understand. They have no particular attachment to their officers; while the Egyptians, though at first disliking military service, are said in a short time to become so fond of it, as to have and to desire no other home than their tent; they feel also, universally, a strong attachment both to Ibrahim Pasha and to Mahomet Ali. ”

“ Could it be that the Turks treated their prisoners well instead of badly? Even on the British side of the lines we heard stories of how Turkish soldiers had killed British wounded, how Turkish officers had threatened newly taken prisoners with death if they did not give up all they possessed, and how everybody's money and most people's boots were stolen immediately they were captured ”

“ The contrast with the conduct of the Turkish soldiers in the past is so radical that the system is all the more effective in accomplishing its purpose; for, in Turkish times, the man most feared by the community was the policeman, for he was always a robber and often a fiend. ”

“ High explosives cleared the way for their advance, and cheering and yelling they went over the parapet. The Turks in the front-line trenches, completely demoralized, fled to the rear. A few, too weak or too sorely wounded to run, surrendered.
The Turk's dislike for German officers.
Prisoners taken in this engagement told us that the Turkish rank and file heartily hated their German officers. One prisoner said that he had been an officer, but since the outbreak of this war had been replaced by a German. At present the Turks are officered entirely by Germans. ”

“ But he has been a fighter because he has always lived under a military despotism which demanded his services, and it is much to be doubted whether his qualities in this regard will for the future be exercised as they have been in the past. For the Turkish armies, in so far as they have consisted of Turks, have been chiefly, if not wholly, recruited from the peasantry of Anatolia, who, when not summoned to their country's colours, or ordered to maltreat and massacre, are quiet, rather indolent folk, content to plough their lands and reap an exiguous but sufficient harvest. ”

“ That there was a large amount of corruption in the officialdom of Turkey at that time was no doubt true; but the real samples of national character, the men in the rank and file of the army, I found to be simple-minded, courteous, honourable, and honest in time of peace, while braver men on the battle-field than those who fought under Osman Pasha at Plevna are not to be found in Europe. The magnificent physique and robust constitution of the ordinary Turkish private soldiers I believe to be due mainly to two causes. ”

“ Another plea for the admission of Christian subjects of Turkey into the army is that, as they are free from conscription, their men stay at home, work without hindrance, and look after the prosperity and welfare of their families uninterruptedly, and their number is on the increase as a consequence. It is quite true that compulsory military service is telling upon the Turkish nation alarmingly. A man is liable to fight from his twentieth year to his fortieth whenever he may be called upon to do so, and he is, of course, always liable to be killed. ”

“ The European war makes the Turks think that this is their golden opportunity for turkifying the empire from the one end to the other. All non-Moslems, mere boys and young men of 25 to 30 years of age and grown men up to 45, are being arrested by the police and secret service force, and dragged to the barracks, like convicts, and if they fail to pay the fifty or eighty pounds Turkish ($230 or $350) for exemption from military service, they are forced to work as "assistant-soldiers." ”

“ They go back to the trench, not afraid, but in a kind of maze, and as they take stock and count their strength there comes the roar of the Turkish war cry, the drum-like proclamation of the faith, and the Turks come at them with the bayonet. Then that lonely remnant of a platoon stands to it with rapid fire, and the machine gun rattles like a motor bicycle, and some ribald or silly song goes up, and the Turks fail to get home, but die or waver and retreat and are themselves charged as they turn. ”

“ It has absorbed nothing but a dim idea of a military organization which when applied to a civilized, cultured nation makes for military perfection, when attempted on nomads leads to such debacles as the plains of Thessaly, the mountainous districts of Macedonia, and the stricken fields of Thrace have recently witnessed.{148}
British naval officers have for years been acting as instructors to the Turkish Navy, which from a collection of obsolete iron tanks has to outward appearance assumed the semblance of a war fleet ”

“ From the courtyard of the Sublime Porte, where Turkey’s devious policy has been fashioned for so long, from the square in front of the War Office, which suddenly awakened, hurried untrained troops under untrained leaders, without a definite plan, to death by shot and shell, by starvation and disease; you could hear the sound of guns carried on the westerly wind from the lines of Chatalja, the last defences of the capital, where the remnants of the Sultan’s army are standing at bay against the organized forces of young Western nations. ”