When this frontier province was occupied by the Turks (an event that occurred shortly before the revolution), it was strongly garrisoned from end to end. But the sufferings of the unhappy soldiers in the ensuing winter were terrible. No provision was made for their accommodation; no medical stores were provided; and hardly any food. It says much for the troops that they did not loot every village in the neighbourhood; but the fact is that "Nefer Mustafa" (the Turkish Tommy Atkins) is the most easily disciplined and normally one of the kindliest of men. He is not the most intelligent of soldiers, but he is the most obedient; and he will march and starve, fight or freeze, and die in scores of dysentery and cholera, not only without a mutiny, but even without a sense of grievance against anybody; though he can hardly be ignorant that the rascally minor officials are making their profit out of the stores which he does not get. In one particular case, two battalions, amounting to perhaps 1200 men in all (the contractors probably drew stores, &c., for the 2000 they should have been, but that is a detail), were marched from Van to Tergawar late one autumn. There they remained, billeted in the deserted villages, till the following spring; when such of them as could walk were brought back to Van once more. Four months' peace service in that district, without a shot being fired, had brought those 1200 men down to 400; of whom a bare half were able to march at all! It was simply the work of cold, hunger, fever, and neglect! Things did improve with the army under the new régime, or did for a while at any rate; but the pre-revolutionary state of things would have been regarded as exaggerated for a comic opera but for the tale of human suffering that it implied. The pay of the soldier was nominally one or two piastres a day; but when he got this magnificent sum, which was not often, it was paid him in _sanads_, Government assignats, not cash. The local treasury, moreover, would not cash them (in fact, they were usually payable in some other province than that where the poor recipient was quartered), and no shop would look at them as payment for goods. Certain merchants made a business of buying them, at 1/5th of the face value, and presenting them in the proper quarter, when they might perhaps get half the sum due. The Government would be debited with the full amount; and the officials got the balance. By a final touch, which surely nobody but Ottoman officials of the old régime could have conceived, the Government would not receive its own bank-notes from its own soldiers in payment of its own taxes! Those had to be paid in gold, the Government only accepting silver at a heavy premium.