Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 December 1893 — THE FATALISTIC TURK. [ARTICLE]

THE FATALISTIC TURK.

How He Braves Death at the Holy city of Hls Faith. The accounts given by the pilgrims of the way in whieh cholera attacked them are terrible in their grim fatalism, says the London Spectator. June 24, two days before the Courban Bairam, upward of 100,000 Mussulmans, Arabs, Turks, and Indians had gathered on the sacred mount to hear the solemn address which is delivered to those who wish to become hadji. Many of these people were in the most wretched condition, and some had not even a loaf of bread. It was here that the disease appears to have struck them, like the blast of a poisoned wind. When, next day the onward movement to the holy city began it was found that the ground was strewn like a battle field with the dead and dying, and so terribly virulent was the type of Infection thus engendered" that it was, says the account, impossible for any living creature to approach the place. The authorities seem, however, to have realized that something must be done, and that the bodies could not be left to rot Accordingly, a Turkish regiment was sent to perform the work of burial and to remove any of the pilgrims who still lived. Never did troops In the heat of battle receive a command more fraught with peril. The risk, as it proved, was literally greater than that of facing machine guns, and the moral effect was far more terrible. There are ten men who will face death by bullets to one who will face death by cholera. Yet these Turkish soldiers, with the fatalistic courage of their race, obeyed as they obeyed at Plevna.

The battalion, when it reached the mount, was 700 strong. After the work had been done 200 men only remained to go back to the coast Five hundred of the soldiers had died of cholera. That is, nearly three-quar-ters of the regiment perished in the work of burial, No doubt English troops would have been upheld by many considerations—by religious feeling and by the instinct of mercy, and they would, moreover, have been well fed. The Turkish troops probably felt the sense of pity very little, and their officers were almost certainly men with anything but a high sense of conduct. They acted merely from the most naked sense of the duty of not flinching at a command. It was an order given from afar and from above, and that and fate are to them all one.