510 
WITH THE GREEKS. 
deal bigger. I do not believe that either as regards organization or 
its equipment the Turkish army was much better than the Greek. At 
Domokos the handling of the Turks was certainly no better than that 
of their antagonists. The Ottoman advance across the plains of Thes¬ 
saly was remarkable for nothing except its deliberation. The Osmanli 
soldiery are, no doubt, excellent; but, properly led and fed, the Greek 
will fight too and is more intelligent and more dashing than his here¬ 
ditary foe. The one notable feat of arms performed by Ottoman troops 
in the five weeks was the rapid advance o£ a large part of Edhem 
Pasha^s army to the Othrys mountains on the morrow of the severe 
day of Domokos. None of us spectators were prepared for this after 
previous performances and so we missed seeing some very interesting 
operations. When the Turks got to within sight of Lamia they had 
very nearly reached the end of their tether ; forcing Thermopylae and 
the neighbouring defiles would have proved quite a different task from 
anything which they attempted in the war except their disastrous 
frontal assault on the shelter trenches below Domokos. 
The very feeble results obtained from common shell, even when well 
directed, in this war (for I understood from correspondents who had 
been at Mati, Yelestino and other engagements that this was as notice¬ 
able on previous occasions as at Domokos) prove that we have been 
right in letting this form of projectile drop out of our field and horse 
artillery equipment. Actual warfare has, in fact, proved the correctness 
of deductions drawn from practice made in peace time. We hear a 
great deal about the moral effect of artillery fire, but one soon gets 
used to common shell which do no harm. We have always been in 
advance of foreign countries in our appreciation of the value of 
shrapnel. But, after the late campaign, it is not too much to hope that 
all armies which can afford the change will relegate the common 
shell of their mobile batteries to museums or else send them back to 
foundries to be converted into some more useful warlike store. Of 
course these remarks do not take high explosive shells into consideration. 
