CURRENT TOPICS.

Hastings Standard, Issue 411, 28 August 1897, Page 2

CURRENT TOPICS.

Undoubtedly the most able in a literary sense of all the correspondents who accompanied the Turkish army in Tliessaly was Mr G. W. Stevens. He is in a manner a friend of the Turks, but a very candid friend, and condemns and praises with rugged frankness and most even-handed impartiality. Because the Turks wore sloppy canvas slippers, tied on with string, it was predicted with the calmness of inevitable certainty, says Mr Stevens, that they were a disorderly rabble, who could never stand a day before the civilised, disciplined, well-equipped forces of Greece. Subsequently Edhem's army was acclaimed as an organisation that might have shamed Yon Moltke, merely because the Greeks in the meantime had run away from it. The writer's own deduction strikes the happy mean : " In truth, the Turkish army was neither the one nor the other. It was just good enough to do what it did. It could drive the Greeks before it, but it could not destroy them. It drove the Greeks because it was an army of good men ; it failed to destroy them because it was an army of bad officers."

The statements as to the stiffening of the army with German officers are dismissed by thiscontributor as nonsensical. Gruuibkow Pasha, a German colonel of artillery, is said to have been called inspector of artillery for the Turks, but held no executive command. He gave some advice at the beginning of the campaign which was not generally followed, then went back to Constantinople. " Excepting him,' declares Mr Stevens positively, " there was no single German officer other than the military attache, and two correspondents, with the Turkish army at any single moment of the campaign.' Had there been the incapacity of the Turks would have blasted the reputation of their instructors. The men had not been sufficiently Germanised to learn how to tire volleys, and rarely even formed a firing line. Their favorite formation seemed a mixture of a skirmishing line and columns of companies. The moral, however, is that a badly led army which will stand up to be shot at beats a badly led army which will not:— " The Turk is very much what he was before—a rude, strong, good-humored unrefined, half-barbarian man, who can endure, and fight, and obey orders. The Greek is what he was—a dishonest, intelligent, chicken - hearted talker, whom nothing apparently will deprive of Britain's sympathy as long as he quotes Byron, and lives in the land of Alcibiades."

A moke dismal supplementary record of the Grteko-Turkish war than that furnished by Mr Bennet Burleigh, a correspondent on the scene, cannot be imagined. Utter incapacity, to say nothing of halfsleepy, half-bewildered muddle-headedness seems to have been universal on the Greek side, if we except only General Smolenski, who, with his small force, beat the Turks handsomely at Velestino, and was then rendered furious by orders to fall back in consequence of the Crown Prince's abandonment of the really impregnable position of Pharsala. Of this Prince Mr Burleigh had nothing at all complimentary to say. He is a tall, fair, young man, of about 30, with mild blue eyes. The writer does not think that he once thoroughly inspected the frontier before the war began, or did anything else he should have done. He was warned that the Melouna Pass was strongly fortified by the Turks, and should be let severely alone, save that the exit should be blocked by field works, but he paid no attention. At Pharsala he let the' foreign legion, 2000 strong, hold Edhem Pasha's army of 60,000 at bay for several hours without sending a battalion to help them. Smolenski is said to have exclaimed, angrily, " The Prince s men are the same as mine; they can win battles against the Turks if someone will lead them." As for the tales of personal gallantry shown by the Prince and his brothers, that, observes Mr Burleigh, caustically, is " bombastic nonsense." The Greeks could have had 500 or 1000 foreign officers for the asking, and the war would then have gone very differently.