The Barre daily times. (Barre, Vt.) 1897-1959, 1918-10-31
Aleppo.

Gen. Allenby's capture of Aleppo turns
the spotlight on another Of those rose.
red cities half as old as time" which we
moderns persist in viewing through the
lenses of the imagination. The Turks
held the place as their chief base in Syria
and its fall is big with import for the
campaign of the allies in the East; al.
ready our military writers are setting
that event in the proper technical per
speetive. Before the war we were re.
minded that Aleppo had superseded An
tioch as the economic center Of northern
Syria and Palmyra as the great road sta
ton for eastern caravans. To-day the
city which travellers idealize il being la
belled prOsaically as ian extensive trad.
ing center, with population Of about
10000, one-sixth of them Christians"
What If Aleppo could speak for itself OF
the age-long squalor and suffering that
have mingled with its romance, Of the
human blood that has flowed through its
streets of the armies that have stormed
its high .perched citadel, Of the mighty
blows from world events that beating
down upon II since the Assyrian, Babylo.
Man and Egyptian days, have made IL
well-nigh an epitome Of world history z
Aleppo would be famous enough as an
earthquake city, for 1t has been several
times shaken and had TO be rebuilt for
the second time in 1880. Pogroms have
been among its experiences with Christ
mas for victimsi infested by the original
bolshevik, it has been misgoverned into
disorder and mob rule from the earliest
times. Plague-swept, it has also been
war-swept. From the seventh century
the chronicler has been kept busy record
| ing the successive turnovers through
which it changed hands until the day in
1917 when IL finally came under Ottoman
rule. The Turk, the Mameluke, the Sara
cen, the Mongol, the Greek and the Ro.
man have all had finger in the Aleppo
pie Prodigies were sometimes performed
In both attack and defense. When the
Saraeens swooped down on the city fight
ing availed not for it's capture, and the
beheading of 300 prisoners before the
castle wall merely stiffened the resist
anee. Finally, as Gibbon tells the story,
strategy succeeded where valor had met
its match: soldier Of gigantic size and
| intrepid resolution, after scaling the
ascent in the dead Of night, supported
seven of the stoutest Saracens, and thus
gained access for the besiegers. Aleppo
| fell to the Romans through discussions
among the garrison; it was secured for
Tamerlane not by his Zine Of Indian ee-
plants, whose turrets were filled with
archers and Greek fire" but ''by coward
ice and treachery." And it was Tanner
lane--a veritabe kaiser in his day--who
protested after the capture, with the
shrieks of his victims running through
| the streets. that he was mot a man Of
blood" that he had never been the ag-
gressor," and that his enemies chad al
ways been the authors Of their own ca
| lamity."
After Jerusalem and Damascus, Aleppo
has now been acquired permanently for
civilization, and there is little likelihood
that it will ever again go through the
ordeal Of q siege. In the future that is
now definitely on the way we shall have
no more Assyrians coming down like
the wolf on the fold" no more Chingis
Khans or Tamerlanes securing the world
| for prey and no more Pan Moslemisms or
! Pan Germanisms roaming armed through
the earth seeking whom they may de-
your. If the victory now in sight is to
mean anything for the Bible lands and
for the East, scourged for centuries by
militarism, it will lift these old-world
cities from the dead weight of hideous
historic memories into an era of peace
| full development. If 1t is to mean any.
thing for the race, it will insure a regime
in which an injury done to one commu.
nifty will be an offense to ALL and under
which the free civic life of the people
guaranteed everywhere may reach an
outflowing of which we can now form
only some faint conception, Boston Her
aid