Page:Englishwomaninan00elli.pdf/80

 apiece, and if no purchaser could be found even at that figure, the wretched creatures were left mutilated on the wayside, their eyes burnt out, their legs broken by hatchets!

Our first halt was at Manissa, once a flourishing town of about ninety thousand inhabitants, standing some sixty-five kilometres above sea-level. The Governor and all the "notables" were on the platform to welcome the travellers, and had arranged that the "train should wait," for us to be shown round.

Some kind of most primitive carriage had been produced from somewhere, and we were driven through more "ruins" to the "temporary" town hall for the inevitable coffee and cigarettes. In the best English, the governor told us of Greek atrocities and the victory of M. Kemal Pasha, introducing us also to his whole staff.

I asked whether it would be possible for me to obtain precise figures of the devastations, and he promised they should be prepared for my use at once. When I reminded him of the "waiting" train, he merely waived such difficulties aside as a "secondary consideration," begging me "not to mention it."

Naturally, I found one ruined town very like another. There was, in a sense, little to see beyond "parts of" the mosques, badly scorched or half-burnt minarets, and, at Manissa, no more than one thousand houses standing out of fourteen! Also, the statistics reveal a heartrending loss of life!

The women and children, I learnt, had been driven into the mosques, which were surrounded by machine-guns to ensure against any possibility of escape, and then set on fire. As the full realisation of such hideous barbarity took hold of my imagination, it was as if all my senses were paralysed. That cold perspiration which so often precedes a faint, seized my limbs. I was powerless either to speak or move. How would our twentieth-century appear to the old cave-dwellers it has pleased us to call savage? Mrs. de C was right, indeed, to say that the Turks