to the Christian nations that the Ottoman Empire was fighting (for example, during the Balkan Wars). By 1915, most Greek men of army age had been conscripted into labour battalions. They maintained tunnels, built roads, and worked on farms. They had little food and wore tattered clothes. A foreign consul said this of Greek labourers in Konya: Men in the labour battalions died quickly. For example, approximately 80% of the Greek labourers forced to work at İslâhiye, near Gaziantep, died. One English intelligence officer said that "the life of a Greek in a labour gang is generally about two months." Other foreigners reported that dead Greeks were thrown into mass graves, with as many as six bodies piled in a single grave. In 1921, Turkish authorities made false birth certificates declaring Greek orphans to be older than they actually were. In this way, teenage boys were also conscripted into labour battalions. Even Mark Lambert Bristol, who had a notably pro-Turkish bias, reported that the Greek men in labour battalions were "treated like animals." Two memoirs depict the experiences of Greeks in labour battalions. Elias Venezis, who survived the labour battalions, wrote about his experience in Number 31328: The Book of Slavery. American author Thea Halo, daughter of genocide survivor Sano Halo, wrote about her mother's experiences in the book Not Even My Name. Sano Halo, a Pontian Greek, recalled that her father and grandfather had been taken to the labour battalions when she was a young girl. Her father escaped and returned to the family, but her grandfather never came home. Depictions The Greek novelist Elias Venezis later described the situation in his work The Number 31328: The Book of Slavery (). According to his account, of the 3000 "conscripted" into Venezis' labour brigade, only 23 survived. Leyla Neyzi has published a study of the diary of Yaşar Paker, a member of the Jewish community of early 20th century Angora/Ankara who was drafted to the Labour Battalions twice, first during the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) and then again during World War II, a war in which Turkey did not take part. Neyzi's paper on the basis of Paker's diary published by Jewish Social Studies presents an overall picture for the conditions in these battalions, which were composed entirely of non-Muslims. References Further reading Zürcher, Erik-Jan: Ottoman labour battalions in World War I, in: Kieser, Hans-Lukas / Schaller, Dominik J. (eds.): Der