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The Turkish military forces would be of great importance if they joined the coalition of Central European Powers or its opponents. The regular peace establishment of the Turkish army amounts to 275,000 men. In the year 1910 there were three divisions of it: 2. Within this limit, according to the Redif law, men are enlisted in turns for short trainings.
The castle, which occupies the centre, is on a slight eminence, and flanked with eight bastions; it contains no regular troops, but merely some redif, or militia. Besides one small well-built stone mosque, there is nothing else to remark in the place. Some of the bazaar shops seemed tolerably well furnished; but the place is, on the whole, miserable and filthy in the extreme.
Finally he took courage from despair, and adopted the more manly course. But first he disgraced his ministers. The War Minister and Abdul-Kerim were summarily deposed, the latter being sent off as prisoner to the island of Lemnos. All witnesses agree that the War Minister, Redif Pasha, was incapable and corrupt.
The Redif, the second line, had received hardly more training, thanks to the disorganization of Abdul Hamid's last years and of the first years of the new order, than the Mustafuz, the third and last line. Armament, auxiliary services, and the like had been disorganized preparatory to a scheme for thorough reorganization, which had been carried, as yet, but a very little way.
Author. "What is the reason of that?" Collector. "Because they are so near the Bosniac frontier, where there is a large Moslem population. The Moslems of Shabatz pay no taxes, either to the Servian government or the sultan, for they are accounted Redif, or Militia, for which they receive a ducat a year from the sultan, as a returning fee.
Before the revolution, Shabatz numbered 20,000 Osmanlis, the sites of whose kiosks and gardens are still pointed out on the Polje, or open space between the town and the fortress, at present the only Moslems are the garrison of Bosniak Redif or militia, occupying the dilapidated fortifications.
Officers in the Nizam and Redif troops, military employés, officials, and others, more than 30,000. The entire war strength of the Turkish army amounts to 700,000 men. We need only to take into consideration the troops from Europe, Anatolia, Armenia, and Syria. All these troops even are not available in a European theatre of war.
The enemy has now few more Nizam troops at his disposal and not many Redif or second class troops. Up to date his casualties are 55,000, and again, in giving this figure, the General Commanding has preferred to err on the side of low estimates.
The loss of some thousands of soldiers and much material was compensated by an invaluable lesson in the faultiness of the military system, and especially the Redif organization. The way was now clearer than before for re-making the army on the best European model, the German. The campaign had not been long, nor, as wars go, costly to wage.
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