TRIPOLI WAR.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1569, 12 October 1912, Page 5

TRIPOLI WAR.

AN .ITALIAN ADVANCE. Br Toicfirash—Press Association—CoDrrizht Rome, October 10. The Italian troops in Tripoli have occupied, the Sidi Abdallah district. Armed with bombs the troops advanced in three columns over difficult country. They were stubbornly opposed, four being killr ed and fifty-nine wounded. The Turkish and Arab losses were; heavy, TURKISH VERSION. Constantinople, October 10. The Italians attacked a Turkc-Arab camp at Misrata (118 miles east by south of Tripoli) for nine hours, but were repulsed. Thirteen Italians were killed and thirty wounded. FROM OASIS TO DESERT. HAVOC OF THE WAR IN TRIPOLI.' A correspondent of an English paper wrote recently:—lf any explanation were needed for the determined opposition to Italian aggression in Tripoli by the Arabs, a recent letter to the "Secolo," of Milan, will help to afford it. Says the writer, Siguqr LucateUi:— l "I know not whether, as some hope,, the desert may be transformed into an oasis, but certain it is the oasis may be changed into a desert. One needs, only to wander about the oases of Tripoli and to see them yellow' and withered, slowly fading into sojitude and desolation, to understand how in the absence of man this once fertile soil is hastening to death.—oases which only last October were dense with luxuriant vegetation, and which seemed to exhale, in an exuberance of foliage and rich pofrumes, a riotous manifestation of life. The soil is nornially so thin and mobile that but for the unceasing vigilance of its cultivators the crops wither, the land takes on an ashen hue, and dies like a living soul. In theso vast abandoned oasis one feejs that something is perishing around one with alarming rapidity. Apart from the material destruction wrought by the necessities of war—tho innumerable date palms mown down by the cannon or cut down to give free play for the riflemen in the trenches—there is a veritable and literal agony of the land, whioh might indeed be yet arrested, but which in a brief lapse of time will perhaps prove incurable." '" '-;- : '■ In some of the gardens, whose former owners are either slain or fled, poor patches which the heels of horse and man have reduced to sandy solitudes, is now gathered an Arab colony, a refuge for all the human misery of the city and the oases—for the widowed and orphaned by the war, for deserted families that come, dying of hunger, to beg at the trenches. This miserable' population is increasing without any diminution of the profound wretchedness of its squalor. True, the Kalians have at least saved them from starvation, but the promiscuity of their camp has debased them; they pass hours wrapped in fierce, sullen distrust towards all, even to those wno feed them, towards the doctor who tends them, and to whom they confess their ailments only when they can be no longer concealed.