THE NON-COMBATANTS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIX, Issue 4, 22 January 1913, Page 59

THE NON-COMBATANTS.

IN THE WAKE OF THE WAR. (By PERCEVAL GIBBON, in the ‘ Daily News.”) Normally, there are no poor in Bulgaria-. The people are not yet thick enough upon the ground to have -crowded out a class whose living is precarious, for whose labour there is no continuous market. A certain even level of prosperity is a character of the country. Therefore, if proof were needed that the war with Turkey is a national war rather than a political one, it would be found in the fact that now nearly everyone is poor and very many are in sight of plain want.

Those who now face a winter of poverty are of every class. Rather more than one in thirty of the total population are actually bearing arms, and over wide stretches of country, in many hundreds of villages, there remains now not a single able-bodied man, not a yoke of oxen or water-buffaloes, not a farmcart. The net which dredged them forth for service had a small mesh; it took also grain, forage, clothing; it left this country of a victorious people nearly as naked as if it had been plundered by a conquering invader. Even at the beginning of things, before war was actually declared, I heard at Sofia of societies of women and old men organised in the villages to carry on the work of tillage in the absence of the peasants. Not all of those societies, I think, were serious; some possibly had a church bazaar quality of playfulness and pose; but there were districts enough in which no such societies existed, in which the lonely women turned out as a matter of course to take up the labour for which men were lacking. With such cattle as were left, beasts which even the Requisition Commission had rejected as unfit to serve the army, women undertook the ploughing of the sodden lands.

When the Men Return. A farm, however. has a sort of momentum; it does not cease to furnish food the moment the farmer is withdrawn. The true hardship will come later, when the men return, handicapped for their work, by the loss of the oxen and horses expended on the road to Kirk Kilisse and I.ule Burgas, and the little gaily-painted carts that

poured in endless lines towards Adrianople, by the want of all that homely equipment of life which the war turned to strange uses and destroyed. In the towns hardship came more swiftly for those who were left behind. A typical example is that of a small official’s family. He was summoned to the colours midway between one monthly pay-day and the next, and with his departure his meagre income forthwith ceased. Such cases number themselves by thousands. Many, also, are the small shops, whose whole stock of goods—or that part of it which remained after the Requisition Commission had been satisfied—was sold out. Business in any case was dead, and, with the railways choked with troops and war material, there were no means of renewing the stock even if there had been customers for it. Meanwhile, despite the efforts of the authorities to fix prices, the cost of food inevitably rose. The whole aspect of life altered. Families accustomed to comfort suddenly knew want; in every class there were folk who went in fear of starvation; and though in some towns the municipality strove to establish a system of relief, the money for an adequate provision was lacking. In Sofia, for example, the grant made to families whose bread-winner was at the front was thirty centimes—a fraction over twopence—per day per person: but even in the capital this meagre grant could not be extended to all those who stood in need of it.

Grim Realities. Down at the frontier, upon the edge of the actual war, one saw misery in a plainer shape. Mustapha Pasha is one of the main gates between Turkey and Bulgaria, and through it drifted the mournful processions of hapless peasants who had seen the war flow across their villages and destroy them. The burning of villages has been a feature of this war; the Turks have left a trail of flaming thatch to mark the line of their retreat, and the Bulgarians themselves, despite their pretensions to forbearance, have not been guiltless. These peasants, lean, terrorised, sore-footed, were folk who had lost all they possessed. Even their ploughs had been smashed where they lay by the fieldedge; too often the ploughman lay dead likewise, and there were yet other wrongs of which his widow might have told if she would. They came afoot across the empty country, escorted by reservists, making day-long northward

marches and lying by night at the roadside. Among them were women who had limped for days carrying children in their arms, and men with wounds and injuries. They camo slowly up the narrow main street of that abominable town, edging their way past the unceasing convoys that poured through it, silent, scared and broken, to the yard of the old Konak where they would wait the Staff’s decision as to what was to become of them. When questioned, they seemed to answer with no sense of wrong, in no tone of protest or rebellion. They had suffered this and that; they were weary; their one hope was to get beyond the radius of the fighting and burning, into Bulgaria where there was peace.

The Country Has Spent Itself. Of such, many thousands have already taken refuge in Bulgaria—over 30,000, according to one statement which was made to me. A small proportion of the men have been given employment with the transport, but the rest are a mere burden on a community already taxed to the uttermost. It must be remembered that Bulgaria has no system of poor relief at the best of times; there are neither workhouses nor poor rates, these people have to be maintained out of meagre funds hastily appropriated for the purpose and badly needed elsewhere. They complicate the situation with which the authorities have to deal in the towns where they settle down, which hitherto have numbered no paupers among their inhabitants, and they have already proved that in their wretchedness they are the carriers of disease, of cholera and typhus and even of leprosy. Their death-rate is high; what is appalling is that even in their misery they have also a birth-rate. Even should peace ensue immediately, distress and hardship must continue throughout the winter in a very large number of -families. The return of the men to their homes will take time: it will require even more time before they can resume their interrupted occupations and become wage-earners again. Among them will be many permanently crippled by wounds and ot hers not yet recovered from wounds; and there is fear, too, that, with their return, the cholera winch is raging about Chatalja may make good its foothold in Bulgaria. The country has spent itself upon the war until its resources are all but. exhausted; there is little left to spend upon the labour of reeoverv.