The cost is L740,000, to be repaid three years after the end of the war.  Similarly, by the spring of this year, Germany had arranged to start submarine training in Constantinople for the Turks, and a submarine school was open and at work in March.  A few months later it was established at the island of Prinkipo, where it is now hard at work under German instructors.  Other naval cadets were sent to Germany for their training, and Turkish officers were present at the battle of Jutland in June 1916, and of course were decorated by the Emperor in person for their coolness and courage.[1]

[Footnote 1:  In October 1917 a bill was passed for the entire remodelling of the Turkish fleet after the war, on the lines of the German fleet, ’which proved its perfect training in the battle of Skager Rak.’]

A complete revision of the Turkish system of exemptions from military service was necessary as soon as Germany began to want men badly.  The age for military service was first raised, and we find a Turkish order of October 1916, calling on all men of forty-three, forty-four, and forty-five years of age to pay their exemption tax if they did not wish to be called to the colours.  That secured their money, and, with truly Prussian irony, hardly had this been done when a fresh army order was issued calling out all men, whether they had paid their exemption tax or not.  Germany thus secured both their money and their lives.

Still more men were needed, and in November a fresh levy of boys was raised regardless of whether they had reached the military age or not.  This absorbed the senior class of the boy scouts, who hitherto had learned their drill in a ‘recreationary manner.’  Neither Jews nor Christians are exempt from service, and frequent press gangs go round Constantinople rounding up those who are in hiding.

Again the Prussian Moloch was hungry for more, and in December 1916 the Turkish Gazette announced that all males in Asia Minor between the ages of fourteen and sixty-five were to be enrolled for military service, and in January of this year, 1917, fresh recruiting was foreshadowed by the order that men of forty-six to fifty-two, who had paid their exemption money, should be medically examined to see if they were fit for active service.  This fresh recruiting was also put in force in the case of boys, and during the summer of 1917 all boys above the age of twelve, provided they were sound and well-built, were taken for the army.  Wider and wider the net was spread, and in the same month a fresh Turco-German convention was signed, whereby was enforced a reciprocal surrender in both countries of persons liable to military service, and of deserters, and simultaneously all Turks living in Switzerland, and who had paid exemption money, were recalled to their Germanised fatherland.  By now the first crops of the year were ripening in Smyrna, and in default of civilian labour (for every one was now a soldier) they were reaped by Turkish soldiers and the produce sent direct to Germany.