BACK FROM THE WAR

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 59, 27 July 1912, Page 1 (Supplement)

BACK FROM THE WAR

IAII'HKSiShiNS OF CIVILISATION, ADVANTAGES OF ('IV I LIGATION. (lly Alan OsUov. Express special correspondent witli the Turkish forces in Tripoli).

I hnve just re! timed Lo the civilised world ■■■Hoy mor • than a year's life among Lii.' desert people in Northern Africa. For weeks I had been looking forward with an impatience quite beyond words to the joy of walking through busy thoroughfares and looking at shop windows, reading newspapers, and, more than all, talking in my own tongue to people whose thoughts and manners are not those of the desert—to nice, kindly, cleanly civilised men and women.

And now that I am b?i?k again ,1 find, that I don't like civilisation at all. At least, I find in civilised life a great many faults and drawbacks which I hardly seemed to notice before, and many of the joys which I had anticipated most keenly are often not joyful in the very least.

There is rapid travel, for instance. Again and again, riding with the slow caravans hour after hour, I have envied the happy passengers in a railway train, who could cover in twelve hours a journey that a horse cannot accomplish in as many weary, dusty days. When I landed at Glasgow the other day—l came home in a tramp steamer from the Mediterranean—l remember those envious moments in the desert. I boarded the night train for Euston, congratulating myself on the speed and comfort with which I was to travel, and gleefully refleeting that there would be no horse to groom and feed at the journey's end, no tiresome search for fresh water, no interminable wait while an unsavory meal was being prepared, no tent to pitch—none of the thousand and one little worries of desert travel. TRAIN TERROR.

Within ten minutes I was feeling most lamentably ill, watching the lights whirl past the window with sickening speed, and feeling literally stunned by the roar of the express train. The passing of another train, with the blinding stream of light and furious rattle of carriages,, gave me a pang of genuine terror. And yet, not many days ago, I was riding slowly through the zone of a furious bombardment of an Arab coast village by three Italian cruisers, and—with all modesty, be it said—l felt no alarm at all.

Truthfully speaking, there is nothing very terrifying about a. bombardment—especially an Italian bombardment. If you have never seen one, no doubt you form a mental impression of a world turned topsy-turvey, re-echoing with shrieks , and thunderous detonations, made hideous by charred and blackened ruins and the mutilated fragments of the dead. Fugitives fly screaming from beneath a pall of sulphurous smoke, and shrapnel and fragments of shell fill the air.

This is all very well for the realism of the adventure story and the cinematograph show, but, generally speaking, lamentably overdone as regards the realism of reality. In fact, if you are the object of a bombardment, you will see very little, unless the object of the attack happens to be a town of large and fairly solid structure. An Arab village of twostoreyed mud-brick huts interspersed with palm trees could be knocked to atoms without providing anything much more spectacular than an occasional cloud of dust or shower of splintered palm wood. FIREWORKS COMPARISON. ' Such a village is Zouara, the most westerly of the larger coast villages save Tripoli; and save for the final destruction of houses which seemed to be already half in ruins, the periodical bombardments to which it has been subjected by the Italian warships have had about as much effect as so many pyrotechnic displays. Therefore, approaching Zouara a few days ago on my way from the Turkish camp, I honestly did not feel any particular uneasiness on learning that the town was being bombarded again. I had stayed there during two bombardments, suffering no other inconvenience than that of having to turn out of my house lest a chance shell should strike it and bring it down on my head; and after this experience of harmless pleasantry which the Italians are pleased to call an attack, neither I nor the drivers of the camel caravan with which I travelled felt any alarm at the thought of having to pass close to the village. But civilisation is not only terrifying. To one long unaccustomed to it, it is in a great many respects highly disagreeable.

I have shivered by a brushwood fire — the desert can be bitterly cold —and thought of the joys of sitting by a fire in a cosy room in England. But now, the fire gives me a headache, and the walls of the cosy room seem to touch me on all sides. There is hardly room to move about. I wonder, by-the-bye, how many people realise that their houses are really collections of tiny islands formed on chairs, linked up by narrow pathways, between tables, bookshelves, fireplaces, coal scattles, flower stands, and I don't know how many ridiculous obstacles. Coming from a land in whose houses tables and chairs consist of the handiest clean space on the floor, this peculiarity of European life strikes me forcibly.

TOO MUCH TALK. I thought that I should greatly enjoy conversation with my own kind. I don't. Most of them talk too much. One isn't allowed to sit silently contemplative in the society of civilised people, and, consequently, instead of peacefully pursuing one's own train of thought, or enjoying that delicious state of mental inertia so dear to Orientals, one has to cudgel one's brains for topics for a conversation which in five minutes will be forgotten.

Women—well-born and otherwise wellbehaved women —talk freely and openly with men in the very streets, bearing themselves as though they were man's equals, and never so much as putting the corner of a handkerchief in theft mouths to veil their faces.

And, finally—it is a disagreeable admission, I know —the majority of my fellow-countrymen seem singularly and fantastically ugly beings. An Arab or a negro has a dark complexion which somehow seems to conceal faultiness of feature. He walks well, carries his head with an air. and though his mantle be in rags, his bearing is dignified. Tit the streets of Glasgow on Saturday 1 fell in with a crowd of many hundreds who had spent the afternoon watching twenty-two men kick a leather ball about; and. looking upon the crowd of pale and pimply faces, narrow shoulders and Hat chests, noting how their owners slouched and shuffled through the dirty si reel, displayed black and broken teeth as they laughed and chatted. I forgot thai, these were the youth of a highly prosperous and civilised nation, and' could only think of mv desert folk with keen regret.