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The Kia ora coo-ee : the magazine for the ANZACS in the Middle East, 1918

A Bare, Neglected Land

A Bare, Neglected Land.

Since then most of the Turkish ponies have been sold at auction in a keen local market; the guns have been collected by ordnance; the Turkish trains are running on the restored railways; life is almost normal over the wide captured territory and in the villages and towns. Drive over the 20,000 or 30,000 square miles of territory acquired in the campaign, and you cannot believe that here less than a month ago was a great modern enemy army 100,000 strong. Scarcely a trace of the fighting Turk remains, and what is still more extraordinary, there is very little to tell that for many hundreds of years the Ottoman Government held and ruled the land. The evidence of the long -Turkish oppression is negative. One of the richest lands in the world lies relatively undeveloped. A region which once carried many millions of rich settlers, and was beautiful with its wide orchards and groves and priceless forests of timber, and its wide domains of intensive cultivation, to-day lies treeless and neglected and poor.