WHAT WAR MEANS

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 270, 11 May 1912, Page 2 (Supplement)

WHAT WAR MEANS

STARVING WOMEN AND CHILDREN. Famine has followed on the heels of war in the north of the province of Tripoli. It is famine of the cruellest kind, for its victims are almost all women and children, the adult males of the population being one and all at war with Italy, They draw their rations and receive their ammunition, and even their horses must not go short. Food for the soldier and his mount has been doled out by the Turks from the beginning of the war. But Arab women are fighting for the grains that fall from th« horses' nosebags, and babies that should be plump and brown are bony and yellow, with skin the hue of dried parchment stretched over ricketty frameworks of bones. This must have been going on for weeks, for the starving people who have come within the last few days to Azizia are the mothers and wives of the men from that belt of oases that fringes the coast from Zouara eastward nearly to the town of Tripoli itself. News of the Italian massacres of October 7 last, and the casual shell-fire from prowling cruisers, which have made a target of every mud hut visible among the palms, drove these poor wretches from their homes early during the war. Those in the neighborhood of Zouara were gathered together by order of Musa Meliemet, the military commander of the district, and housed in the stone fortress in the oasis of Rigdalin, but it seems that hundreds from the scattered villages further east fled in disorganised crowds into the desert, and, subsisting on roots and rats and lizards, have made their pitiful way at iast to the new headquarters of the Turkish troops at Azizia. I do not know the details of their miseries in the desert (write Alan Ostler, special correspondent of the London Daily Express with the Turkish army). They did not dare to go back to their homes, because they know that women and children.are the special prey of the Christians. Some of them joined their men in the outpost eamps, and shared their dole of rice and barley. But even here they seem to have starved themselves lest the men and horses, who are defending their country, should go short. 1 have said that Arab women scramble for the barley grains that fall from the. horses' nosebags; well, that is not meant merely as a figure of speech. It is literally and terribly true. At Senati Beni Adhem, the cavalry outpost near here. I caught a woman doing this very thing during the night, and thought at first she was robbing the horses. She wasn't, poor thing! She was simply gleaning after them; and I found her quite by accident. It happens that my own horse is vicious and apt to attack any stranger who approaches him in his'pickets. During the evening I heard him snorting and' squealing with temper, and immediately afterwards heard a stifled scream. I ran out of the tent just in time to see a ragged figure picked itself up from under the animal's forefeet, and on laying hold of it, found it to be an Arab woman, miserably thin, and apparently in pain. Then I accused her of trying to steal barley from the horses' nosebags. She denied it, incoherently, and I meant at first to turn her over'to the sentry; but she contrived to make me understand that all she wanted was to pick up the scattered grains of barley that had fallen to the ground, and that while she was doing it the horse had attacked her and knocked her down. "What do you want the barley for—to sell it?" I asked her. "For my children to eat, Sidi," was the incredible reply. I did not believe her; and when she began to lament the little store of grain which the horse had made her spill I simply told her to go away, or T would fetch the sentry. Afterwards I was sorry. For on the very next day I saw a woman crouched on the ground near where some sacks of grain had been, and she was picking up grain by grain with her fingers, "To whom will you sell it?" I asked. "I shall eat it." she replied. "Surely, you cannot live on horses' food," I said. And she answered that she and her children had eaten nothing else for many a day. Gradually I found out that even those women who, with their children, have come to hang on the outskirts of the army, are in a state of half-starvation. They themselves sav, "We must eat little, lest our fighting men go short." As for those who wander tjo and fro in the desert, shelterless, nearly naked, and with bones starting through their skin, how they live on. day after day. only those who know the endurance of the Arab can understand.