PITIFUL WRECKAGE OF THE WAR.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VII, Issue 562, 26 April 1913, Page 3

PITIFUL WRECKAGE OF THE WAR.

VANISHED FAMILIES. It is a 6ad experience to go to one of the military hospitals in Constantinople and watch the soldiers who were brought in there three months ago shattered with shrapnel or Mannlicher -bullets from Lule Burgaa or Chata'.ga, leaving the place as cured (writes Mr C.Ward Price in the Daily Mail). ' They are drawn up in the entrance hall for a last inspection by the medical officer in charge of the hospital. Some have been fitted out with new peasant clothes, usually by a foreign charitable funri, others wear their rough haki uniform.

Here is a man whose left arm ends in a slump at the wrist He is crying quietly; tears have an odd look on that tough, wrinkled face with its shaggy fringe if beard. He came in with six wound? from shrapnel bullets and the doctors say that he has made a marvellous recovery. Clean living, sober, strong, with the peasant's lack of nerves, to suffer from the pain and shock, he has lived throught what would have killed a European soldier twice over. With l!; 9 smashed leg, from which he will hobble all the rest of hi J days, he crawled thirty mile 3 from where he was hit at Lule Burgas to the field hospital at Chorlu. But now, he is crying, because, a* he says, be would rathsr they had let him die. The doctor pats the grizzled fellow on the shoulder like a child, but the tears still stand in Mehmed's eyes. Where is he to go? he asks. How is he to live? He holds out hi? stump o£ an arm. He can never hold a "Bpade or guide a plough again. "You must go to your friends; they will look after you," says the doctor encouragingly. He has no friends and no family now, he answers. His little farm was by Kirk-Kilisse. He left it with his wife, his mother, and three children. Where are they now? They must have filled the bullock cart with what they could and fled, leaving the rest to the Bulgarians, like all the others. What has become of them since then he will never know. Did they die of want and exposure on the way? Did they meet a worse fate at the hands of Bulgarian peasants, rejoicing in opportunities oE revenge on defenceless Turks? Did the cholera take them in that foul, sour - smelling concentration camp among the graves and the cypresses outside the walls of Stamboul? Or have they passed over, like thousands more, into Asia Minor, to live on the charity of others almpst as poor as themselves among the snow? Mehmed will never know. His wife and children are lost in the wilderness, and he. a helpless cripple, is turned out into the jostling allrs of Stamboul to find a living ss best he may.