Ottoman Army - Soldiers
Of the men - the rank and file - of the Turkish army, it may truly be said that, considering all things, they were by far the most orderly and obedient troops in the world. Mutiny or revolt among them was almost unknown. Occasionally, as when the late Sultan was deposed, they assist or take part in a popular movement; but such an event is invariably caused by the orders from above. Never in any army, either of our own or any other time, were men more obedient than were the Turkish troops ; and never were seen soldiers who would endure more hardships than they do without grumbling.
The chief reason for this is that they are all of one creed - they are all Moslems, and consequently all fatalists. "What is written is written," and no effort of man can alter it, is an axiom of their faith. As an offensive, or an attacking corps, a Turkish regiment, brigade, or division, would by no means come np to what in the English, German, Austrian, French, or Italian armies would be deemed requisite. Enthusiasm is almost unknown among them, at least under their Turkish officers. The latter, like all Turks, are apathetic to a degree, even under the hottest fire.
But when hardships have to be borne - when there is hardly any food to be had in a campaign, when the fate of war seems to he against them, when long, dusty, hot marches have to be made - there was no soldier equal to the Turk. He may give in from sheer physical exhaustion; he may drop down from want of nourishment, or want of water; he may lie down and die by the wayside; but he never complains, never grumbles. "Quod scriptum scriptum" is his faith, and he gallantly showed it to be so by the unflinching manner in which he bore all the fatigues and troubles of life. He was, in a word, perhaps the best passive soldier in the world.
Not that he was by any means wanting in personal courage; but he was not well enough commanded, not bravely enough led; his officers were too poor in spirit - too cowed, too worried by the hopeless state of indebtedness which their long arrears of pay enforce upon them - for Turkish troops ever to rival his brothers-in-arms under the French, English, or German flags. And yet he was in some respects not unlike a Northern German. He was utterly careless as to where he went, or where he was ordered. He would submit to any amount of even personal punishment from an officer, without resenting it. And he put as much blind faith in everyone that the Padisha, or Sultan, had created an authority in the army, as the Prussian does in all who bore the envied "Von" before their names.
Here, however, the simile must end. The German soldier was certainly the reverse of clean in his person; but outwardly he is polished and brushed up to the most wonderful extent. Not so the Turk. He makes no pretence of cleanliness. Without, as within, his habits of dirt are indescribable. His barrack-room would send an English sanitary commissioner into fits. His officers and non-commissioned officers interfere very little, if at all, with him off parade. They looked upon him, as they did upon themselves, and not without reason, as a man who is wronged - as one with whom faith has not been kept, who is greatly in arrears of pay, and whose clothing is dealt out to him by fits and starts, not at certain given seasons.
The famous bulwark of the Ottoman Empire - Shumla - is, perhaps, the most historic of strategic points and of fortresses, and yet reresembled in nothing other fortified places. It was an admirable position for an entrenched. camp, but nothing more; and in the hands of no other people would it be heard of to-day, as it never was heard of before they possessed it. The Balkan, narrow in the west, but dividing in the east into many branches, attains on the coast of the Black Sea, between the important harbors of Burgas and Varna, a breadth of 54 miles. In this much intersected mountain region, in the triangle formed by Shumla, Varna and Burgas, the principal battles of 1828 and 1829 were fought. The Albanian cavalry with the Ottomans at Shumla refused to obey commands, demanded payment on the battlefield, and fled at the slightest provocation.
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