ods of supplying an army were causing their peasant population. The Government showed precisely the same shamelessness and lack of intelligence in the way that they requisitioned materials from merchants and shopmen. These proceedings amounted to little less than conscious highwaymanship. But practically none of these merchants were Moslems; most of them were Christians, though there were a few Jews; and the Turkish officials therefore not only provided the needs of their army and incidentally lined their own pockets, but they found a religious joy in pillaging the infidel establishments. They would enter a retail shop, take practically all the merchandise on the shelves, and give merely a piece of paper in acknowledgment. As the Government had never paid for the supplies which it had taken in the Italian and Balkan wars, the merchants hardly expected that they would ever receive anything for these latest requisitions. Afterward many who understood officialdom, and were politically influential, did recover to the extent of 70 per cent.—what became of the remaining 30 per cent, is not a secret to those who have had experience with Turkish bureaucrats.
Thus for most of the population requisitioning simply meant financial ruin. That the process was merely pillaging is shown by many of the materials which the army took, ostensibly for the use of the soldiers. Thus the officers seized all the mohair they could find; on occasion they even carried off women's silk stockings, corsets, and baby's slippers, and I heard of one case in which they reinforced the Turkish commissary with caviar and other delicacies. They demanded blankets from one merchant who was a dealer in women's under-
