Cholera Horrors In Turkish Camp.

New York Times 100 years ago today, November 21, 1912:
Ground Covered with Dead and Dying Like a Fly Paper, Says Ashmead-Bartlett.
THE DEAD PILED IN HEAPS
Living Almost as Closely Packed — All the Tracks Leading to the Camp Dotted with Bodies.
By Marconi Transatlantic Wireless Telegraph to The New York Times.
    LONDON, Thursday, Nov. 21.— Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, in a dispatch to The Dally Telegraph from Constantinople describing the terrible ravages of Asiatic cholera among the Turks, says:
    "Every village through which I passed has its victims, every road over which the troops move to the front is marked by a trail of corpses or of men dying by the roadside. As there are no medical arrangements of any sort, it is impossible to succor and save any of these wretched victims of the war.
    "Those who fall are left to die where they drop. No pleading or prayers will move the living to raise a helping hand, even if they are in a position to do so.
    "In the village in which I had been stopping a great number of troops had been quartered, and cholera at once broke out. As soon as a man was seized by it he was thrown over the back of a horse, carried outside the outskirts of the houses, and laid on the first patch of open ground, there to die. When dead, his body was hastily covered with a thin layer of earth. These ghastly mounds litter the country.
    "But these horrid scenes in the villages in the rear of the army pale altogether into insignificance when compared with the horrors of Hademkeui, the headquarters of the army. It is the men who went through the awful hardships and sufferings of the retreat, who lived for ten days on green corn or scraps of offal picked up as they marched, that yield the greatest number of victims to the altar of Asiatic cholera.
    "I never, actually entered that village, because the sights I saw from the outside caused me to turn my horse's head in the opposite direction and filled me with a vague terror I had never known before.
    "Three days ago I rode over the hills, intending to visit Hademkeui. I mounted the last slope which hid the valley in Which it lies, and then I was brought to a standstill by the awful babel of sounds which arose beneath me.
    "I looked more closely, and found I was gazing into a valley of the Shadow of Death. There was the station of Hademkeui, and a train was in the station. It was delayed by wretched specimens of sick humanity seeking to escape from the dread spectre.
    "The train was leaving for Constantinople, and all who could crawl were endeavoring to secure a place on it, hoping thus to reach a haven of refuge. Some were wounded, some down with dysentery, others with enteric, others were feeling the first spasms of the scourge itself, others were merely sick at heart. Unable to stand longer the constant strain of waiting for their natural deaths, all were trying to escape.
    "In the centre of Hademkeui lay a large square, formed on one side by some barracks, on two others by lines of white Hospital tents, on the fourth by the high road. This square resembled a successful flypaper in midsummer — it was covered with corpses of dead and writhing bodies of living in all attitudes, some prone, some sitting, some kneeling, some constantly shifting, some with hands clasped as if supplication.
    "In some parts of the area dead were piled in heaps, in others those still living were almost as closely packed.
    ''This shocking lake of misery was being constantly fed by rivulets of stretcher-bearers bringing in fresh victims from the camps and forts, and by others who crawled in of their own accord, seeming to prefer to end their days in company with their fellow-men, or else expecting to find succor or release from their immediate torments.
    "All the tracks leading to this impromptu morgue were dotted with the bodies of those who had died on the road. From time to time empty bullock wagons would pass through and the bodies of those in whom life was extinct would be dumped into them, carted out of the village, and thrown into great pits, where sleep thousands of poor Asiatic peasants.
    "Hademkeui is the immediate prize for which the armies of two nations are now engaged in deadly struggle."