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 drastic steps to prevent the facts from reaching the outer world.

For three days the oasis was given over to massacre in wholesale and detail. Some 4,000 men, women and children perished in the course of it—the vast bulk of whom were certainly innocent of any participation whatever in the Italian defeat. They were murdered in the streets, in their houses, farms, gardens and, according to a peculiarly horrible narrative by a British officer serving with the Turkish forces, in a mosque, where several hundred women and children had taken refuge. Thousands more were deported by sea. All the newspaper correspondents were in agreement as to the main facts. Englishmen and Americans united with Frenchmen, Austrians and Germans in indignantly censuring them. Several of them handed in their official papers to the Italian commander-in-chief by way of protest. The feelings of these eye-witnesses may be gathered by the following brief expressions culled from a copious literature:

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