Cholera Seizes 1,000 Daily.

New York Times 100 years ago today, November 18, 1912:
Thousands of Soldiers Lie Dead and Dying in the Fields.
    CONSTANTINOPLE, Saturday, Nov. 16, (by indirect route.)— There are now over a thousand cases of cholera daily in and around Constantinople, and the death rate has reached 50 per cent. The authorities are powerless to cope with the situation
    Three thousand cholera patients arrived by train at San Stefano on Thursday. They would have been brought here but for the protests of the railway company and the Austrian Ambassador, who asked that they be sent to the lazarettos at Becos and Ismidt.
    For twenty-four hours the patients remained in the train, on a siding at San Stefano, without water or food or any medical attention. Then they were shipped to the quarantine station. If they had been of the lower order of animals they could not have been more neglected.
    A foreign doctor, assisting in the military hospital, discovered by accident yesterday that five soldiers, dying of the cholera, had been put among the wounded. He ordered their removal. Bearers took up the dying men on their shoulders, but their condition was such that he ordered the bearers to drop them. This they literally did, and the unfortunates were left lying in the mud for an hour, groaning and in convulsions before they were removed on stretchers.

Anybody Can View the Lines.
    An extraordinary feature of the conditions behind the Turkish lines at Tchatalja is the indifference of the army to the presence of unauthorized visitors. Any foreigner, wearing a fez or a European hat, may hire a vehicle and drive to the Turkish intrenchments and inspect the troops. There appears to be no cordon to prevent fugitives from returning to Constantinople.
    Several foreign officers who visited the lines on Thursday and Friday report the situation hopeless. The trenches are only partly dug.
    A huge pile of barbed wire is stacked near the endangered northern wing, having never been put to use. The troops are for the most part unable to work because cholera-infected soldiers are keeping watch in the earthworks.
    Innumerable sick lie groaning in the fields to the rear, some of them in their last agonies. Countless cholera-infected fugitives are straggling back on the fan-shaped road converging on Hademkeui from the outer forts. Thousands of patients and hundreds of dead lie on the ground around Hademkeui.
    At Derkos Lake, the chief source of Constantinople's water supply, there was a guard of soldiers. But twelve of them died and fifteen others were stricken with cholera on Thursday night. There is great fear that the whole watershed will be contaminated, involving Constantinople in the gravest danger.
    Three physicians at Derkos have been unable to do more than bury the dead. Turkish officers regard serious resistance at Tchatalja as impossible, but think it is equally impossible for the Bulgarians to occupy the Turkish positions without endangering the whole Bulgarian Army through cholera.