The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle. — 1878-02-02 (Stourbridge, West Midlands, England)

THE FEARFUL DISTRESS IN TURKEY.  A letter in the Mats (Paris paper), contains the followjug appalling details : -  _ "It is impossible not to feel awe-stricken at this immense exodus. It is Biblical in its proportions, and suggests the flight from Egypt, and the migrations that followed the fall of Nineveh and Babylon. The population, maddened by the fear of the Bulgarians, rush in crowds to the railway; men, women, and children accumulate in such dense masses that the drivers have to stop their train, and then the Panic-strichen mass take the train by storm. They swarm up the sides of the vans and carriages; they clamber on to the roofs and cluster there when the inside is filled. There the cold seizes them, and the weakest drop down from exhaustion, or, dying in the midst of their fellow fugitives, are flung on to the line. ID one train, the arrival of which I witnessed, not fewer than ten women and children had died from the effects of the cold ; I saw their corpses removed from the midst of their companions, who were all in a dreadful condition. Most of the men and even some of the women had a gun slung across their shoulders, but they were half naked and in such a state of exhaustion that force was required to march them to the khans and mosques where they find a temporary refuge."  The Standard of Monday publishes the following, from their Special Correspondent at Constantinople, under date Monday, Jan. 28 :  " I have just seen Colonel Blunt, who has been engaged at,Tchorlou since the 12th instant in relieving the refugees. lie assures me that since the 12th inst. one thousand and ninety-thred railway waggons, carrying at least fifty-five thousand refugees, have passed through rchorlou. This is wholly irrespective of vast numbers of refugees who have travelled by the common road on foot, or on arabas. Ile says that the misery of the refugees baffles every attempt to relieve it. The waggons are so crowded that little children are frequently trampled to death in them and found dead on the arrival of the train at the station. The roofs of the closed carriages are covered with refugees, and little children roll off them into the snow. rlanks are stretched across the buffers, and refugees sit thereon, in great peril of being thrown off. The iron orates for luggage which swingbeneath the carriages are filled with prostrate refugees, who become so cramped with cold that they cannot be moved at the stations, and have to be fed through the bars of the crate. In one crate Colonel Blunt saw fifteen persons, one of whom had died on the road, but the rest were so cramped and jammed together that the dead body could not be separated from themselves by the living. When a train stops the refugees dare not leave the waggons for any purpose, for fear of losing their places, and the fearful condition of the carriages and yassengers after a journey of three or four days ie indescribable.  "Many women have been so maddened by misery that they have killed their children ; some have been seen to place their children on the rails in front of the advancing train. At the bridge of Mourratlekesel Kupru many women were seen to throw their children from the train into the river. At Tchorlou station a woman was seen to kneel down by the side of the train and stab her two children to the heart. The railway guard who saw them being murdered, and in vain shouted to her to stop, reports that when he cante to her she declared that she )ad killed her children so that they might never know such misery as she was enduring. All the horrors that we read of in accounts of famous ancient sieges and wars are being repeated now.