The Birmingham age-herald., 1915-02-22
WAR ECHOES

Frederick Palmer in Golfers Weekly: The Belgian farmer cannot go to the next town without the permission of the l German sentries. He cannot even mail a 1 letter to his son who is In the trenches with the allies. The Germans have taken | his horse theirs the power to take any thing he has if they choose-the power of the bayonet.
 If he wants to send his produce to a foreign market. if he wants to buy food in foreign market, the British naval blockade closes the sea to him. He sits on d chair with steel spikes. hands tied and mouth gagged, while his mind seethes. solacing it's hate with hope through the long winter months
 If you lived in Kansas and could not get your wheat to Chicago or any gro- ceres or newspapers from the nearest town, or learn whether your son in Wy , oming was alive or dead or whether the man who owns your mortgage in New York has foreclosed or not-well, that s enough without the German sentry. Only instead of groceries from Chicago, the thing you need past that blockade is bread to keep you from starving.
 Many sob stories''s have come out of Belgium, but this is not one. I saw no one sobbing there; only grim stubborn ness, endurance, and suffering. Belgium has been the paradise of purple patch painters in rhetoric. But l could think of only simple words like food life, death, hate, love and sacrifice. Belgium is a house with sealed doors. where family of 100000 sits in idleness and silence around a cheerless hearth, thinking; thinking of nothing but war and feeling nothing but waH America opened a window and slipped a loaf of bread into the empty larder. Those Belgian soldiers whom I had seen in Dixmude, wounded, exhausted, mud-caked, shivering, were happy beside the people waiting at home. They were in the fight
 H. c. Dwight. in the March Scribner: There Is less of comedy than tragedy, though, in the present plight of the Turks. They have allowed themselves to be led into a dilemma of which either solution can hardly mean less than their ruin. Their own ignorance and folly are to
 
 capable of energy and of concerted ac- tfon that man of energy like Enver Pasha has been able to lead them where he chooses, that they were unable to dis own the high hand of their too power full protectors of Odessa. Yet even of Enver Pasha, as of his German mentors. one feels that there is something sincere and gallant in his folly. He has led his country into hopeless adventure not merely from personal ambition but from conviction. It is more than possible, too, that he will pay for his conviction with his life. He has so many enemies that any day he may be shot. And it is en- tirely conceivable that Constantinople may attempt to solve the ruinous dilem- ma by a revolution that would open the Dardanelles to the allied fleet.
 These possibilities, and others contingent upon them, lead to life in that kaleido- scopic town a quality of uncertainty. Life is peculiarly uncertain for those who hap pen to be Russian, Frenchmen or Eng lishmen, for the Turks and the Germans between them are doing all they can to eradicate the influence of their enemies. EINtH lOT us AHeTlCdIS l ldnCy, cOnul- tions might be made rather difficult if the Turks were to win their war. We have a great many schools and hospitals in Turkey, perhaps the largest and most completely equipped in the empire, and Turks and Germans alike are prone \ to see in them the arm of a deep-laid na- tional policy. They have already adopted toward these institutions an attitude which. if submitted to, would ultimately entail their suppression. Nevertheless in Constantinople, as elsewhere nowadays, it is a good thing to be an American. Even if revolution were to break out, or the war were otherwise to disorganize the country, it does not seem to me that any one who has friends there need be unduly alarmed about them. But if the war were to end in a disaster, l confess I would not care to be German in Turkey.