DISCIPLINED ARABS

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 191, 10 February 1912, Page 9 (Supplement)

DISCIPLINED ARABS

A TRIBUTE TO TURKISH ALLIES. Mr. Alan Ostler pays a very warm tribute in the London Daily Express to the Arab allies of the Turkish forces in Tripoli, He admits that no one will readily believe that the Arab character can produce a soldier of the European type. The Arabs who are well known are the heroically Brave "Fuzzy-Wuzzy" and the reckless Dervish who charged again arid again in the face of the leaden hail that Kitchener showered upon him' at Omdurman, but these Mr. Ostler says, are not • the Arabs who are helping the Turks. They are men who have learnt the les-" son of modern scientific warfare. The correspondent was frankly astonished' when he came into touch with the Arabs in the Zouara district after a wearisome journey over the desolate strip of desert that forms the borderland between Tunis and Tripoli. On reaching a small fort he was questioned by a business-like ; officer who sent him an ot once to Musa Mehemet Bimbashi, the Arab commander in Zouara., Previous acquaintance with Arab methods had led the visitor ttf expect delay, but he was agreeably surprised. The Bimbashi telegraphed immediately to the Turkish commander news of the correspondent's arrival, arranged quarters lor. him, ordered coffee and cigarettes for his delectation before dinner, / and left the Englishman astonished at his prompt, methodical handling of an unexpected incident. Mr. Ostler says there are many more men like the Bimbashi in the neighborhood of Tripoli. They are desert Arabs who have been trained in the military college at Constantinople, and though many of them speak no European language their acquaintance with the methods of scientific warfare, the correspondent ventures to predict ,is a thing that some day will astonish the world. "Gravity, dignity and a kind of high-bred fearlessness," he writes, "seem to be the only Arab qualities they retain. This is a new type, full of possibilities, and> it is evolved from the East by the East. European teaching pure and simple, such as that which Egyptian soldiers have learned from us and Algerians from the French, can produce no more capable military man than this Musa Mehemet Bimbashi." Mr. Ostler wrote his eulogy ten weeks ago, and since then his Arab friends hard done something to justify him.