Armenian Genocide Contemporary Articles

[Aratta-Kingdom]

DAILY NEWSPAPER REPORTING OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE:

COULD THEY ALL BE WRONG?

 

Armenian News Network / Groong

April 23, 2008

 

By Katia M. Peltekian

 

 

In a world where there were no radios, televisions or the internet,

the only source of information for events occurring around the world

was the newspaper. At the time, the news did not travel fast, but it

did eventually reach the four corners of the world.

 

Throughout the world, papers filled their pages with news from the

Ottoman Empire. Towards the end of the 19th century, when European

countries as well as the United States were on friendly terms with

Turkey, thousands of reports about the on-going massacres and

mistreatment of the Armenians were printed on the pages of such well-

known newspapers in the English language as The Times (of London),

The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The

Toronto Star, The Montreal Gazette, etc. These newspapers included

reports by correspondents, travelers, and consuls or ambassadors of

different countries based in the different regions of the Ottoman

Empire. But the more detailed reports came from the missionaries who

witnessed the plight of the Armenians and tried to help the orphans

and the survivors as best they could.

 

It is to be noted that the Western press covered the Hamidian

massacres much more extensively than the massacres of World War One

period since many of the western countries broke diplomatic relations

with Turkey when the Great War broke out. Not only diplomats left the

Empire but for safety reasons their citizens left also. On the other

hand, as a neutral country, the USA kept its ambassador, consuls and

missionaries in Turkey for the first three years of the War. As the

number and frequency of the reports in the British press dropped, for

example, those in the American press were on the rise until America

joined the War on the side of the Allies in April 1917.

 

 

THE SOURCES

 

A careful examination of various newspapers in the English language

will show that the sources for information originated from what could

be labeled as the best kind of evidence: eyewitnesses as well as

victims themselves. Most of the news originated from the war zone and

its vicinity where refugees were welcomed; the reports included the

eyewitness accounts of missionaries, consuls, survivors and refugees.

Other sources emerged from world capitals such as London, Paris,

Berlin, Washington and, more importantly, from Constantinople where

correspondents and diplomatic missions of neutral or allied countries

resided.

 

Thus most of the information about the ongoing massacres in the

different regions of the Ottoman Empire came from diplomatic

missions, religious missions, physicians, teachers and travelers.

These sources were often referred to as sources of `unquestioned

veracity, integrity and authority'; in many instances, the reports

came from an eyewitness whose `reliability cannot be questioned', or

from `well-known Americans who are cognizant of the actual situation

in Turkey' who `produce absolutely trustworthy evidence and

authenticated data.'

 

The United States maintained a neutral position during the first

three years of the Great War. It had an ambassador residing in

Constantinople, and consuls and vice-consuls well-spread around the

Ottoman Empire. In addition, the American missionaries were placed

throughout the area where they could observe events or record

eyewitness testimonies directly from survivors and victims. Since the

missionaries were in daily contact with the people, they were able to

provide credible testimony on the treatment of the Armenians during

the deportations and about the mass murders.

 

The British and the Commonwealth countries, on the other hand,

depended on the British ex-residents of Turkey who left their homes

as the war broke out. Also correspondents traveling with the Russian

army on the Caucasus front reported the scenes of atrocities as the

Russians liberated the Armenian cities of Erzurum, Bitlis and Trebizond.

 

In many instances the British, Canadian and the American newspapers

relied also on reports written by the foreign press or were released

by foreign missionaries and diplomats. For example, the Italian

consul of Trebizond Signor Giacomo Gorrini stated in a special cable

dispatch to a Canadian newspaper in August 1915 the following:

 

The decree, which was published on June 24, ordered the massacre of

Armenians, and forms the blackest page in Ottoman history ... The

result of the proclamation was carnage on a big and bloody scale ... I

saw thousands of innocent women and children placed on boats which

were capsized in the Black Sea. Thousands of young Armenian women

were forcibly converted to Mohammedism ... I shall never forget the

scenes of horror I witnessed from June 21 to July 23, when I left.'

 

Another source of information came from the Germans themselves,

Turkey's allies during the Great War. In October 1915, The Los

Angeles Times published a translated version of what a German

official had declared in German newspapers:

 

If Turkey considers necessary that the Armenian uprising and other

intrigues be suppressed with all means ... that does not constitute

massacres nor atrocities, but simply a measure of a justified and

necessary character ... `

 

Occasionally, there also appeared the Turkish `version' of the events

that occurred in the Eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, denying

all the reports that diplomats and missionaries wrote. However, there

was a Turkish statesman who denounced the atrocities committed by the

Turkish authorities. According to a statement Cherif ***** sent to

The New York Times in October 1915

 

... the Young Turks, or the Committee of Union and Progress, ... for

years plotted the extermination of the Armenian people.

 

The answer of the Turkish Consul General in New York Djelal Bey to

the same newspaper came as such:

 

... There may have been cases where inoffensive people shared the

fate of the offender ... Unfortunately, in times of war, such

discrimination is utterly impossible... However much to be deplored may

be these harrowing events in the last analysis, we can but say that

the Armenians have only themselves to blame.

 

In 1916, The Times of London (Great Britain) printed an interview

with Talaat Bey, the Turkish Minister of Interior. The source was a

newspaper from Germany - an ally of Turkey. Talaat was quoted

confessing the following:

 

The removal of the Armenians from the eastern Vilayets of Turkey

became in consequence a military, national and historical necessity ...

The removal of the western group to Deyr-Zor was unfortunately

entrusted to an incapable official and serious `excesses' followed ...

We have been blamed for not making a distinction between the innocent

and the guilty. It was impossible; the innocent of today might become

the guilty of tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

 

THE WORD `GENOCIDE'

 

The word Genocide was not coined until the 1940s; however, other

terms and phrases were used to describe the way the Armenians were

treated in Ottoman Turkey not only by the Turkish and Kurdish

population but by the Turkish authorities also.

 

Some of these terms in the American and British press correspond

partly or wholly to the definition of Genocide: `organized and

systematic massacre,' `a systematic authorized and desperate effort

on the part of the rulers of Turkey to wipe out the Armenians,' and

`a war of extermination on Armenians,' `annihilation of the whole

people,' or `the gradual destruction of the Armenians.'

 

Although successive Turkish governments have denied that the Ottoman

government had any intention to wipe out the Armenians, the reports

coming out of Turkey confirmed that the `police massacre Armenians on

orders of authorities,' that the Armenians were `exiled under

conditions that mean slow extermination,' that the Armenians were

`being exterminated as a result of an absolutely premeditated policy

elaborately pursued by the gang now in control of Turkey,' or that

`the massacres are the result of a deliberate plan of the Turkish

Government to get rid of the Armenian question.'

 

Many similar descriptions do in fact confirm that the Turkish

authorities planned and executed the extermination of the Armenian

population.

 

 

PERIOD BEFORE THE GREAT WAR

 

One reason Turkey and Turkish historians now give for the wholesale

massacre of Armenians is that there was a war and just as Turks were

killed, so were the Armenians. Of course, they also claim that many

Armenians were punished because they were traitors and joined the

Russian army fighting against Turkey. However, there is no

explanation for the massacres that occurred prior to the Great War.

During the Sultan Hamid era, hundreds of thousands of Armenians were

killed in cold blood in such cities as Zeitoun, Sassoun, Ourfa,

Erzurum and Van in the 1890s.

 

At the time, the newspapers of the western world, which were on good

terms with Turkey, printed thousands of reports describing the

deplorable situation of the Armenians under Turkish rule. A small

sampling of the headlines from the 19th century papers outlines the

condition of the Armenians under Turkish rule:

 

. Fresh Turkish Outrages: 700 Christians reported to have been

massacred at Erzeroum. (The New York Times - Sept. 27, 1876)

. The Erzeroum Massacre: Armenians slaughtered and the British

Consulate stoned. (The New York Times - July 26, 1890)

. Dungeons for Christians: Nearly 2,000 Armenians immured in Turkish

prisons. (The Washington Post - April 10, 1893)

. The Armenians: Innocent Christians executed by the Ottoman

Authorities. (The Los Angeles Times - Aug. 4, 1893)

. Armenians murdered in Turkey: Hundreds of bodies thrown into the

harbor of Constantinople. (Chicago Daily Tribune - Oct. 20, 1893)

. Massacre of Armenians: Horrible tales of butchery perpetrated by

Turks - Thousands were killed. (The Halifax Herald - Nov. 20, 1894)

. Massacre of the Armenians: Turkish troops made a solitude and called

it peace in Sassoun. (The New York Times - Nov 27, 1894)

. Disturbed Armenia: Massacres Confirmed. (The Times - Dec. 4, 1894)

He Tells of the Sacking of Hadjin: Another story of the Armenian

massacre from an eye-witness. (Chicago Daily Tribune - Dec. 8, 1894)

. Horrible Massacres: Treacherous Turkish troops murder 360 Armenians

of all ages and both sexes. (The Halifax Herald - Feb 28, 1895)

. Eight Thousand Butchered: The horrors of the Armenian massacres only

just beginning to be realized by the World. (The New York Times -

March 25, 1895)

. Turkish Atrocities: Pitiful stories of pillage, burning, torture and

murder. (The Halifax Herald - June 13, 1895)

. The Trebizond Massacre. (The Sunday Times - Oct. 27, 1895)

. The Massacres in Erzurum. (The Times - Nov. 16, 1895)

. Plunder and Outrage: Armenian villages for a distance of 200 miles

are looted and burned and their inhabitants killed or put to flight.

(The Los Angeles Times - Jan. 1, 1896)

. 100,000 Massacred in Armenia and 250,000 Christians rendered

homeless. (The Halifax Herald - Jan. 3, 1896)

. Two Thousand Dead: The awful sweep of the ravenous Turk. (The Los

Angeles Times - Feb. 12, 1896)

. At Mercy of the Turks: Graphic picture of the suffering of the

Armenians - Massacres the result of definite plan devised by the

. Sultan and his advisers to annihilate the `Hated Christians' (Chicago

Daily Tribune - Feb. 22, 1896)

. Armenians Killed at Oorfa: 8,000 victims said to have been murdered.

(The New York Times - May 19, 1896)

. The Armenian Outrages: How the Christians were murdered by the cruel

Turks - Stories of horror which are unequaled - Mothers killed in the

presence of their husbands and children. (The New York Times - June

1, 1896)

. Fresh Disturbances in Van: Renewal of the Armenian massacres - 400

people killed. (The Washington Post - June 25, 1896)

. Deportation of the Armenians - (The New York Times - Sept. 7, 1896)

. Armenians Slain by the Hundreds: British Ambassador Currie makes a

protest. (The Halifax Herald - March 27, 1897)

. The Tokat Massacre. (The Times - May 6, 1897)

Wholesale Massacre: Secret Extermination. (The Halifax Herald - July

13, 1897).

 

 

And the massacres did not stop there. At different intervals of time,

massacres of the Armenian population also took place during the first

years of the 20th century.

 

The following selective excerpts from different newspapers illustrate

the situation of the Armenians between 1900 and 1914. The Armenians

were exposed to not only massacres but also dislocation. They were

disarmed, dispersed, pillaged, outraged and murdered in cold blood

during peaceful times. The worst was in 1909 when the Turks and Kurds

descended on the Armenians of the Vilayet of Adana and wiped out an

estimated number of 30,000 in the towns and villages of the district.

At the time, there was no Great War. The Armenians were not simply

casualties of war. Their extermination was a premeditated plan set by

the Turkish authorities.

 

 

Chicago Daily Tribune - Oct. 21, 1900.

According to a dispatch to a French newspaper, `frightful massacres

of Armenians have just occurred in the district of Diarbekir.' The

report asserts that for five days, the Turkish population of the city

killed and outraged the Armenians as the Turkish troops watched. In

addition, eight villages were entirely destroyed and burned and the

residents were left homeless.

 

The New York Times - Aug. 30, 1901.

A reference is made to an article in the London-based newspaper The

Daily Mail and written by Ali Nouri Bey, ex-Turkish Consul at

Rotterdam with the heading that confirms the Porte intends to

exterminate the Armenian race by a regular system. According to Ali

Nouri Bey, the massacres that had recently restarted are `part of a

regular system of extermination. The number of Armenians killed will

depend upon the outcry raised in Europe and the pressure brought to

bear upon the Sultan. The same horrible process will be repeated year

by year until all are killed.'

 

On September 20, 1901, the same paper reports briefly about The

Armenian Troubles: It is believed that the Turks mean to exterminate

the Mountaineers in Sassoun Vilayet.

 

The Washington Post - May 14, 1904.

Titled Sassoun Armenians practically exterminated by the Turks, an

official dispatch received from Constantinople by the French Foreign

Office confirms `the reports that Turkish troops have burned villages

throughout the Sassoun district of Armenia, killing the

inhabitants.' Together with the British and Russian Ambassadors, the

French Ambassador M. Constans sent consuls to the Erzeroum area to

try and stop further massacres from occurring. `However, the official

advices indicate that the work of exterminating the Armenians

occupying the mountainous district of Sassoun is practically

accomplished.'

 

Chicago Daily Tribune - May 29, 1904.

The headline reads Turks said to have destroyed forty-three villages

and massacred the inhabitants. The news from Paris reports: `Deputy

De Pressense (Socialist) has received a telegram from Baku saying the

Turkish forces operating against the Armenians consisted of 12,000

regulars and 10,000 Kurds, ... and that forty-three villages were

burned and their inhabitants killed. The male Armenians are said to

have made a desperate resistance on the summit of Mount Antok.'

 

The Washington Post - July 13, 1906.

The massacres have reached the city of Van. `Alarming news has been

received [in Tiflis] of horrible ravages by Turkish troops across the

border, in Turkish Armenia. Soldiers who were collecting taxes are

said to have indulged in frightful outrages. The population of the

city of Van is represented to have been nearly destroyed by the

Turkish troops, who pulled down houses, assaulted the women, and

acted generally like wild beasts ...'

 

The New York Times - Oct. 18, 1908.

This brief news comes from Berlin confirming that the Turkish troops

committed many atrocities. According to a dispatch published by the

German newspaper Berliner Tageblatt, `Armenians in Viran-Shehr have

been massacred by Turkish troops. The women and children have been

subjected to fearful treatment. The troops were sent to Viran-Shehr

to overawe the mutinous townspeople, two-thirds of whom are

Armenians, and they at once began to murder and plunder. They are

said to have completely overrun the city.'

 

The New York Times - April 25, 1909.

The large title affirms 30,000 Killed in Massacres: Conservative

Estimate of Victims of Turkish Fanaticism in Adana Vilayet. The news

from Beirut describes the following: `At the town of Adana more than

100 girls are missing. It is known that twenty-one native pastors

have been killed. Fears are entertained that other American

missionaries than those whose deaths have been reported, have been

murdered. There are 15,000 refugees in Adana and Tarsus and 5,000 at

Mersina.' The article also reports the following about different

districts.

 

`In Hadjin, an American lady missionary Miss Lambert has been killed

in the streets two days after she sent an appeal to Constantinople.'

 

`Dortyol is holding out.'

 

`Antioch is quiet, there being no Armenians left in that town.'

 

`The Armenian village of Kessab has been burned and many persons

killed there. The women and children of Kessab are fugitives in the

surrounding mountains, exposed to hunger and mob violence.'

 

The New York Times - April 28, 1909.

The Rev. Herbert Adams Gibbons of Hartford, Connecticut, a missionary

of the American Board of Foreign Missions stationed in Adana and

Tarsus writes a long report in which he describes the massacres as he

witnessed them.

 

`The entire Vilayet of Adana has been visited during the last five

days with a terrible massacre of Armenians, the worst ever known in

the history of the district.'

 

The report continues: `Adana was a hell. The bazaars were looted and

set on fire. There was continuous and unceasing shooting and killing

in every part of the town, and fires raged in many quarters. Moslems

from the neighborhood began pouring into the city and notwithstanding

our protests, the Vali distributed arms to these men, alleging that

they were Turkish reserves.'

 

`Adana is in a pitiable condition. The town has been pillaged and

destroyed, and there are thousands of homeless people here without

means of livelihood ... The corpses lie scattered through the streets.

Friday, when I went out, I had to pick my way between the dead to

avoid stepping on them. Saturday morning I counted a dozen cartloads

of Armenian bodies in one-half an hour being carried to the river and

thrown into the water...'

 

`The condition of the refugees is most pitiable and heartrending. Not

only are there orphans and widows beyond number, but a great many,

even the babies, are suffering from severe wounds.'

 

The report by Rev. Gibbons also gives details on how the problems

started between the Turks and the Armenians and how the British

Consul and his wife personally helped the wounded and the refugees.

 

Christian Science Monitor - Aug 21, 1913.

Turks Resume Persecution of the Armenians is the headline in this

journal which publishes information that was placed in its

possession. It prints the following by the journal's informant who

`is the most unimpeachable source.' The article says:

 

`News also comes, our informant continues, from Diarbekir to the

effect that Turks and Kurds are openly arming on a great scale with

the connivance of the authorities; whereas the Christians have even

their pocket revolvers taken away whenever the police can find them ...'

 

`In spite of categorical assurances given by the Porte to the

Patriarchate that no Moslem emigrants from Macedonia and Thrace would

be sent to Armenia, the first contingent of Turks has already reached

Diarbekir. It is stated authoritatively that about 1000 of such

families are to be quartered in the district of Tidje, Diarbekir,

where the Armenian element predominates ...'

 

`The public debt department of the district has computed the loss

suffered by the Armenians of Tchengiler (in Vilayet of Brusa) at

#6000. This means that about 4000 Armenian peasants have been reduced

to the brink of starvation for a whole year. This fact, out of many,

is sufficient to demonstrate the policy adopted by the Turks to bring

about the economic ruin of the Armenian element.'

 

 

THE WORLD WAR ONE PERIOD

 

And the Great War broke out in mid-1914. The Young Turks continued

their policy of exterminating the Armenians and other minorities

under the guise of war casualties.

 

When the war broke out and Turkey joined Germany and Austria,

diplomats, correspondents and residents of those countries at war

with Turkey left the Ottoman Empire. Although prior to the Great War

the British sources, for example, had provided extensive reports

about the conditions under which the Armenians lived, once the war

broke out, the American diplomats and missionaries became the

eyewitnesses to the wholesale massacres that took place in Armenian

towns and villages.

 

The following handful of excerpts from the thousands of news reports

printed in the British, American and Canadian press describe the

horrible massacres and deportations which the Turkish authorities

undertook.

 

The Times - Jan. 13, 1915.

The news received in Tiflis describes the frightful conditions in

Azerbaijan as Turkey invades the region. The entire Armenian

population in Tabriz is escaping towards the Caucasus as `the

massacre of Armenians in the region of Bashkala, between Van and

Urumia Lakes, continues.'

 

The Times - Feb. 23, 1915.

The details of the horrors perpetrated by the Turks during the

occupation of Ardanuch are now available. According to a Tiflis

correspondent, the Turks first `confined themselves to pillage, and

slew only 15 civilians, but after December 30, when the news of our

[Russian] occupation of Ardahan was received, the local Mussulmans

threw off the mask, and the same evening organized a systematic

massacre.. One hundred and fifty Armenians were led out into the

street and shot, or had their throats cut ...'

 

The Washington Post - Feb. 28, 1915.

The details of further massacres are revealed: `Two hundred and fifty

men were massacred at Tambot and their women carried into slavery.

The Turks did not even permit internment of the bodies, but left them

to be devoured by dogs.'

 

The New York Times - March 20, 1915

According to a report received by the Red Cross Fund in London, the

`whole plain of Alashgerd is virtually covered with the bodies of

men, women, and children.' The organizers of the Red Cross Fund say

there are 120,000 destitute Armenians now in the Caucasus.

 

The Washington Post - April 25, 1915.

From Tabriz comes the following news: `Hundreds of Armenians in the

Vilayet of Van have been massacred by Turkish troops, according to

refugees who arrived here today. All the towns near Lake Van have

been sacked, the Turkish police killing all the Christians who

escaped the first attack on the troops...'

 

Toronto Daily Star - April 26, 1915.

In a Canadian Press dispatch from Tiflis, terrible tales of Armenian

slaughter have been reported. According to the Associated Press, 800

villagers of Urfa and 720 in Salmas were massacred. The report

continues: `Three weeks had failed to obliterate the signs of the

slaughter. Pools of blood still marked the execution places in

Haltevan. The caps of 36 victims lay where a mud wall had been

toppled over them...'

 

The Washington Post - April 26, 1915

According to American missions in Persia, many refugees were arriving

at Julfa in deplorable conditions: `Maddened women threw their

children into the Araxes River or into pools in order to end their

sufferings from cold and hunger. The mud and the cold and the

shelterless nights, during which the garments of the refugees were

frozen knee high, continued for three weeks, until the people were

slowly dispersed by rail.'

 

The New York Times - April 29, 1915

In a letter sent to the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, Dr.

W.S. Vanneman, head of the Mission Hospital at Tabriz and the

chairman of the relief committee appointed by the American Consul,

writes the following: `About ten days ago the Kurds in Salmas, with

the permission of the Turkish troops, gathered all the Nestorian and

Armenian men remaining there, it is reported about 800. Four hundred

were sent to Khosrova and 400 to Haft Dewan under the pretense of

giving them bread. They were held a few days and then all of them

were tortured and massacred. Many of the women and children were

taken away and maltreated...'

 

The Washington Post - May 16, 1915.

The headline reads Kill 10,000 Christians: Turkish Regulars, with

Artillery, Bombard Armenians. Van is again attacked. According to

American missionary Robert M. Larabee and other aid agents, `this

Armenian city in Asiatic Turkey was bombarded by 900 Turkish regular

troops who had with them three pieces of artillery. Armenians

numbering 860 assembled in the village of Saragunis to oppose the

murderous bands of Kurds threatening that place, but the Kurds were

aided by Turkish regulars, and after a long struggle the detachment

of Armenians were all wiped out with the exception of eight men, who

ultimately found shelter in the monastery of St. Tatius...'

 

The Times - May 24, 1915.

This London based newspaper has received the following from the Press

Bureau. `His Majesty's Government, in common with the Governments of

France and Russia, make the following public declaration: For about

the last month the Kurds and the Turkish population of Armenia have

been engaged in massacring Armenians, with the connivance and often

the help of the Ottoman authorities. Such massacres took place about

the middle of April at Erzerum, Dertchan, Egin, Bitlis, Sassoun,

Moush, Zeitun, and in all Cilicia. The inhabitants of about 100

villagers near Van were all assassinated, and in the town itself the

Armenian quarter is besieged by Kurds. At the same time the Ottoman

Government at Constantinople is raging against the inoffensive

Armenian population. In the face of these fresh crimes, committed by

Turkey, the Allied Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte

that they will hold all the members of the Ottoman Government, as

well as such of their agents as are implicated, personally

responsible for such massacres.'

 

The Montreal Daily Star - July 23, 1915.

Francis Lavelle Murray of the International News reports from

Petrograd: `After looting and burning homes of Christians in Bitlis,

and torturing or killing many of the residents of that city, the

Turks gathered 9,000 men, women and children from the nearby villages

and drove them more than thirty miles to the banks of the Tigris,

where all were shot. Their bodies were then thrown into the river...'

 

The Los Angeles Times - July 25, 1915.

A report by an Associated Press foreign correspondent is titled Wells

Filled With The Dead - Every Woman and Child in Heresan is Killed.

The correspondent had been riding with general Antranik and the

Russian army. At Heresan, he found `60 Armenian men, all that are

known to remain alive and free in a population of 500... Half a dozen

wells were crammed with the bodies of those who had not been carried

away...'

 

The Montreal Daily Star - Aug. 3, 1915.

The United Press correspondent Henry Wood writes: `Atrocities that

rival the outrages of Abdul Hamid are being inflicted on the

2,000,000 Armenians in Turkey by the Young Turks Government. Official

circles in Turkey are using every possible means to prevent the news

from reaching the outside world ...'

 

`Thousands of Armenians have been deported from their homes in Asia

Minor, their property confiscated and their families broken up. Young

Armenians have been hurriedly drafted into the army and rushed to

Gallipoli Penninsula to meet a quick end in the trenches of the

Dardanelles. Wives, mothers and young children have been left

helpless in the streets or transported to strange cities and

abandoned to the mercies of the Mussulman population...'

 

`The order for the present cruelties was issued early in may and

executed with all the extreme genius of the Turkish police system. At

Broussa, in Asiatic Turkey, the city which it is expected the Turks

will select for their capital if Constantinople falls, I investigated

personally the manner in which the decree was carried out. From

eyewitnesses from other towns of the interior, I found that the

procedure in nearly every instance was the same...'

 

`... the Constantinople police arrested the alleged leaders of an

Armenian society who were charged with plotting the establishment of

an independent Armenia. Nineteen of these men were convicted by a

court-martial and hanged in front of the Ministry of War...'

 

`Twenty thousand Turks from Thrace were taken to Zeitoun and

established in houses that for generations belonged to the Armenians,

while the former owners were scattered to the extreme ends of the

Empire. One portion being sent to the sandy deserts of the head of

the Persian Gulf and the other to malarial marshes in the interior.

Eyewitnesses from the interior, coming to Constantinople describe the

processions of these ragged, miserable Armenians as they poured off

to Zeitoun, herded by soldiers in groups ranging from fifty to

several hundred. Old men who could not maintain the pace were beaten

by the soldiers until they died in their tracks. Children dropped out

of the wayside to perish. Mothers unable any longer to nourish their

babies, dropped them in wells as they passed, preferring to end their

sufferings...'

 

The Turkish government accused the Armenians of rebellion. It charged

the Armenians of extending important aid to the Russian army as it

entered Van. And at the same time, the authorities expressed `regret

that it was found necessary to punish large numbers of Armenians, but

declare[d] they found it impossible to search among two million men

small group of offenders.'

 

The Washington Post - Aug. 4, 1915.

9,000 Women and Children Slain by Turks on Banks of the Tigris reads

the headline. It reports how the `Turks, after massacring all the

males of the population in the region of Bitlis,... assembled 9,000

women and children and drove them to the banks of the Tigris where

they shot them and threw the bodies into the river.'

 

The New York Times - Aug. 18, 1915.

In London, British parliamentarian Aneurin Williams presents a report

which confirms the news that the Armenians of Cilicia have been

deported into the Syrian Desert. He continues: `We learn, besides,

that the roads and the Euphrates are strewn with corpses of exiles,

and those who survive are doomed to certain death, since they will

find neither house, work, nor food in the desert. It is a plan to

exterminate the whole Armenian people...'

 

The report continues describing the arrests and execution of men

accused of `meeting secretly' in such places as Caesarea and Sivas.

It adds, `Hundreds of women and young girls and even children groan

in prisons. Churches and convents have been pillaged, defiled, and

destroyed. The villages around Van and Bitlis have been pillaged and

the inhabitants put to the sword. At the beginning of this month all

the inhabitants of Karahissar were pitilessly massacred, with the

exception of a few children.'

 

The Washington Post - Sept. 3, 1915.

Edgar A. Mowrer reports from Rome that the Armenian population of

Istanbul has been reduced from 60,000 to 30,000 under cover of

deportation. However, `the Turks indulged in murder, rapine and

atrocities of all descriptions.'

 

The Montreal Daily Star - Sept. 16, 1915.

In a special cable from Constantinople by the United Press, `The

Turks have resumed the methodical extermination of Armenians in all

the provinces of the Empire. Frightful scenes are being enacted

according to reports brought here. Women are being outraged or sold

into slavery, males are being massacred, and whole communities driven

off into the desert countries...'

 

The cable also quotes from Le Tanine, the official organ of the Young

Turk Party. The editorial reads: `Turkey will not be safe until the

Armenians either are exterminated or forced to accept the Mohammedan

religion.'

 

The Times - Sept. 22, 1915.

5,000 Armenians rescued by French Cruisers. The following official

communication is issued by the French Ministry of Marine: `Pursued by

the Turks, about 5,000 Armenians, nearly 3,000 of whom were women and

children or old people, took refuge towards the end of July in the

massif of Djebel Moussa, to the north of the Bay of Antioch. There

they had succeeded in keeping off their aggressors until the

beginning of September, but then their provisions and munitions began

to fail and they seemed certain to fall into the hands of the Turks,

when they succeeded in signaling to a French cruiser the dangerous

position in which they were. The cruisers of the French squadron

immediately went to their assistance and succeeded in assuring the

escape of the 5,000 Armenians, who were conveyed by our warships to

port Said, where they were heartily welcomed. They have been

accommodated in a temporary camp.'

 

Chicago Daily Tribune - Sept. 24, 1915.

The paper quotes from British refugees who arrived at Alexandria and

brought terrible tales of sufferings. These refugees witnessed the

massacres of August 19 in Urfa. `The Turks systematically murdered

the men and turned the women and children out into the desert where

thousands perished of starvation ...'

 

The New York Times - Sept. 24, 1915.

Charles R. Crane, the Director of Roberts College, and James Burton,

foreign Secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign

Missions, visited the State Department and conferred with the

officials regarding the slaughter of Armenians by the Turks and

Kurds. The article continues: `The records of the State Department

are replete with detailed reports from American Consular officers in

Asia Minor, which give harrowing tales of the treatment of the

Armenian Christians by the Turks and the Kurds. These reports have

not been made public. They indicate that the Turk has undertaken a

war of extermination on Armenians, especially those of the Gregorian

Church, to which about 90 per cent of the Armenians belong. The

Turkish Government originally ordered the deportation of all

Armenians, but, some time ago, after representations had been made by

Ambassador Morgenthau, the Ottoman Government gave assurances that

the order would be modified so as not to embrace Catholic and

Protestant Armenians....'

 

The Times - Sept. 30, 1915

The headline reads Wholesale Murder in Armenia: Exterminating a Race.

Reports confirming the current atrocities perpetrated against the

Armenians are confirmed. According to the correspondent in Cairo, the

attack on the Armenians began after Enver ***** returned from the

Caucasus front and was infuriated that the Armenians had assisted the

Russians. Thus, Talaat Bey took the opportunity to retaliate on the

unarmed Armenians of Asia Minor and ordered their expulsion. The

reporter continues:

 

`One instance, in which leading Armenians were concerned, shows the

fate awaiting even those who obey the order. Vartkes Effendi and

Zohrab Effendi, two prominent members of Parliament, Aghnuni, one of

the chief Dashnakists, Haladjian Effendi and Pastermadjian Effendi,

ex-minister of Public Works and Agriculture, were put in carriages at

Urfa for conveyance to Diarbekir, and then were murdered en route,

the escort reporting that the murders were the work of brigands...'

 

`... The present atrocities are not confined to a definite area. From

Samsun and Trebizond, from Ordu and Aintab, from Marash and Erzerum

come the same tales of atrocities - of men shot down in cold blood,

crucified, mutilated, or dragged off for labour battalions, of

children carried off and forcibly converted to Islam, of women

violated and enslaved in the interior, shot down, or sent off with

their children to the desert west of Mosul ... or to Deir esZor ... to

die miserably. Many of these unfortunates did not reach their

destination, because the escort so overdrove the victims that many

fell out, and, as flogging and kicking were unavailing, they were

left to perish by the roadside, their corpses distinctly defining the

route followed. Many were tied back to back in pairs and thrown into

rivers alive ...'

 

The Washington Post - Oct. 4, 1915.

An American committee makes public the report it has prepared after

careful and extensive investigation of the evidence on the atrocities

inflicted on the Armenians. The committee was made up of Charles R.

Crane, Samuel T. Dutton, Cleveland H. Dodge, Arthur C. James, Stephen

S. Wise, Frank Mason North, John R. Mott, Stanley White, James L.

Barton, William Sloane, William I Haven, George A. Plimpton, Carl

Davis Robinson, Frederick lynch, Norman Hapgood, Edward Lincold

Smith, Bishop David H. Greer, William W. Rockwell, Oscar S. Straus

and others.

 

According to this report, `more than 800,000 Armenians have been

driven from their towns and cities into deserts where life is

unsupportable, and where it is known thousands would die...'

 

`In many cases the men [of military age] were bound tightly together

with ropes or chains. Women with little children in their arms, or in

the last days of pregnancy, were driven along under the whip like

cattle. Some women so completely worn out and hopeless that they left

their infants beside the road ...'

 

The report continued describing how the Armenian prisoners were

treated where the men received 200, 300, or even 800 bastinadoes

(beating with a stick). The prisoners `all had their feet in such a

state that they had to be amputated. A young man was beaten to death

within the space of five minutes. Apart from the bastinadoing other

methods were employed, too, such as putting hot irons on the chest ...'

 

`The worst and most unimaginable horrors were reserved for us at the

banks of the Euphrates and in the Erzingian plain. The mutilated

bodies of women, girls and little children made everyone shudder. The

bandsmen were doing all sorts of awful deeds to the women and girls

that were with us, whose cries went up to heaven. At the Euphrates,

the bandsmen and gendarmes threw into the river all the remaining

children under 15 years old ...'

 

`On the way we constantly met murdered men and youth, all covered

with blood. There were also women and girls killed near their

husbands or sons. On the heights of the mountains and in the depths

of the valleys numbers of old men and babies were lying on the ground

dead. The poor people found themselves in the necessity of eating

grass ...'

 

Toronto Daily Star - Oct. 9, 1915.

Dr. A.H. Abbott of the University of Toronto has received a letter

from a Canadian missionary Rev. E.O. Eshoo in which the latter

describes the atrocities he has witnessed. The letter says that

`Twelve thousand people in the city of Urumia alone were massacred

outright, have since died of ill-treatment or starvation, or being

taken as harem slaves.' Mr. Eshoo's two sons are safe. But his mother

died of shock. `After hiding as a refugee for a week in the hay under

a barn with her daughter, she was set upon, robbed and beaten by

Kurds while on the road to Russian territory, and died a few days

later.' Eshoo's aunt was killed in bed, her head and breast being

crushed with stones. His uncle and nephew were both killed and one of

them was literally skinned alive ...

 

Eshoo further describes that `the Turks and Kurds were not mere

outlaws and raiders. They were part of the Turkish army, the first

lot being a detachment of 5,000 men under regular Turkish officers.'

He tells of one case of how a child was roasted alive in front of his

parents who were given the choice of either converting to Islam or

eating the flesh of their child.

 

Chicago Daily Tribune - Oct. 13, 1915.

The news has reached the US State Department from Ambassador

Morgenthau that the massacre of Armenians in Asiatic Turkey were

renewed with vigor. Apparently the American government had warned

Turkey that further atrocities against the Armenians would `alienate

the sympathy of the American people.' But no warnings were given by

the US government that diplomatic ties would be severed if these

atrocities continued.

 

The paper continues: `Earlier representations were met with two

concessions promising that those Armenians who wished to leave the

country would be permitted to do so unharmed and further that

Protestant Armenians would be spared. Information recently reaching

this country, however, indicates that these conditions have not been

strictly adhered to. From one quarter it was asserted that `they were

rescinded the next day.''

 

The Times - Oct. 26, 1915.

Addressing a large meeting in Manchester, Lord James Bryce made the

following statements:

 

`A large number of the young women were driven from their houses,

somehow even stripped of their own clothes, taken into the street,

and paraded before the Turkish officials, civil and military, who

picked out those they wished to send to their harems, while others

were publicly sold to anyone who would buy them - sold into a life of

prostitution.'

 

`The children shared a similar fate. The elder ones were mostly

killed. The younger ones were put into the market, and were sold at

prices which ran from 8s to 14 shillings, and sold only to Moslems on

the condition that they were brought up as Mohamedans. The whole

thing ... had come from the Government, so that there should be nothing

but Moslems in the Turkish Empire ...'

 

Chicago Daily Tribune - Nov. 4, 1915.

An American resident of Chicago, Mrs. Samuel Byloz recently arrived

back home from Marsovan, Turkey, where she was visiting when the war

broke out. She relates the following: `When the war began more than a

year ago the Turkish military authorities confiscated all brass and

copper owned by Armenians, even tearing the hardware from the

churches. This was followed by systematic pillage until the Armenians

were destitute. Last August murder and rapine began. I was at

Marsovan, a city of 12,000 located 75 miles west of the Black Sea

port of Samsoun, and the seat of the largest Armenian college, early

last August. I had been trying vigorously to secure a safe conduct

from the country but had been unsuccessful. On Aug. 5 a general

massacre of all Armenians in the city was declared by the priests

[i.e. sheikhs] in the mosques, and the next day the soldiers began

their work. I gained the protection of American Consul Petro of

Samsoun, who chanced to be in Marsovan. For three days the soldiers

stabbed and burned. The babies were thrown into the baths, and some

of the streets were littered with dead bodies. Young girls were

assaulted and older women killed. Then orders came to deport those

still living. Deport! the word is a farce. With practically nothing

to eat or wear, my countrymen were taken far into the AntiTaurus

Mountains and abandoned.' She then recounts how she secured a passage

to Bulgaria with the help of the American consul.

 

The Sunday Times - Nov. 14, 1915.

The paper gives excerpts of a book written by Arnold J. Toynbee. The

book in its entirety was going to be released the following day on

Nov. 15. Dealing with the outrages against the women, Toynbee states:

`Abundant news has come from Constantinople itself of their being

sold for a few shillings in the open markets of the capital; and one

piece of evidence in Lord Bryce's possession comes from a girl no

more than ten years old, who was carried with this object from a town

of North-Eastern Anatolia to the shores of the Bosphorus. These were

Christian women, as civilised and refined as the women of Western

Europe, and they were enslaved into degradation ...'

 

The report continues with the following description recounted by a

lady: `The worst and most unimaginable horrors were reserved for us

at the banks of the (Western) Euphrates (Kara Su) and the Erzinjan

Plain. The mutilated bodies of women, girls, and little children made

everybody shudder. The brigands were doing all sorts of awful deeds

to the women and girls that were with us, whose cries went up to

heaven. At the Euphrates the brigands and gendarmes threw into the

river all the remaining children under fifteen years old. Those who

could swim were shot down as they struggled in the water ...'

 

The New York Times - Nov. 27, 1915.

From London comes a report by Viscount Bryce, who made public the

details of further Armenian massacres. He describes the Armenians'

Heroic Stand in Mountains.

 

`The surviving warriors found themselves surrounded at close quarters

by 30,000 Turks and Kurds. Then followed one of those desperate,

heroic struggles for life which have always been the pride of the

mountaineers. Men, women, and children fought with knives, scythes,

and stones, and anything else they could handle. They rolled blocks

of stone down the steep slopes, killing many of their enemies. In the

frightful hand-to-hand combats women were seen thrusting their knives

into the throats of the Turks. When every warrior had fallen, several

of the younger women who were in danger of falling into the hands of

the Turks threw themselves from the rocks, some of them with infants

in their arms ...'

 

Another excerpt from Bryce's report describes the burning of women

and children: `The ghastly scenes which followed may seem incredible,

yet these reports have been confirmed beyond all doubt. The shortest

means employed for disposing of the women and children in the various

camps was by burning. Fire was set to the large wooden sheds in

Alijan, Mograkom, Khasjogh, and other Armenian villages, and these

absolutely helpless women and children were roasted to death ... The

odor of burning flesh [according to witnesses] permeated the air for

many days ...'

 

Christian Science Monitor - Dec. 17, 1915.

The paper reports that the Turkish government will not permit any

investigation of the condition of those Armenians who escaped the

massacres. The paper asserts that this is the most significant news

coming out of the Turkish capital and it comes from an

`unquestionable' source: Henry Mongenthau, the Ambassador of the

United Stated in Constantinople, who has sent the report to the State

Department asking for funds to help the remnants of the Armenian people.

 

The paper gives details of the report by Mr. Morgenthau and the

circumstances that had permitted this letter from reaching

Washington. The paper then continues: `It seems unquestionable that

everything which the United States can do to assist the people of

Armenia has been already done. For the moment what assistance is

possible seems to be reduced to financial aid. We are afraid that if

anything further were attempted, at this particular juncture, only a

remnant of the Armenian remnant would be left to cumber the earth.

The fate of these people is unthinkably terrible. They are penned in

the midst of an armed camp of religious fanatics, whose highest

conception of right is to offer them the Koran or the sword ... What

hope there would be for the Armenians inside the Ottoman gates, as it

were, with an allied army outside those gates, may easily be

imagined. Possibly the only remaining thing that could be done for

their protection would be to make it perfectly clear to the Sublime

Porte that its individual members would be held, in such

circumstances, absolutely responsible for whatever occurred.'

 

The Washington Post - Dec. 21, 1915.

The paper quotes from a statement by Count Ernest Von Reventlow, a

German naval expert, who was an advocate of the Turkish atrocities

perpetrated against the Armenians. He states: `It is high time

Germans comprehended the real meaning of Armenian atrocity affairs.

They should finally understand that it is not our affair to feel or

even express sympathy with Armenian revolutionaries and usurers, who

form a great and malignant danger for our brave, tried and true

Turkish allies and who are the tool of our mortal enemies - Great

Britain and Russia. If the Turks did not defend themselves

energetically and thoroughly against the Armenian danger whenever it

arises, they would be doing their allies as well as themselves a bad

service. Therefore we Germans must consider the handling of the

Armenian question as an internal affair of the Turks.'

 

The Times - Jan. 4, 1916.

A young missionary of the American Board of Foreign Missions (Boston)

writes from Egypt, where she recently arrived from Beirut. Other than

describing outrages committed against Armenian refugees from Kharput,

the young lady accounts the following: `In Marash an orphanage had to

be given up to the Turks, who turned it over to men. Its occupants

were girls and young women made orphans by the massacres of 1909 and

preceding years. Many of them were cultured young women. The

condition of those not yet dead is worse than death itself. In a

German orphanage in Marash there were more than 1,000 girls. The

order for expatriation came, and, in order that she might shield a

few of the older girls, the headmistress kept them under her

protection. Soon there came a telegram from the German Consul at

Aleppo, saying, `You have hidden some girls. You have no business to

do such a thing. Give them up.' The girls had to be given up, and

were taken away to suffer the inevitable at the hands of their

Turkish masters. This so angered the headmistress that she went to

Constantinople to protest to the German Ambassador.' Although she

tried hard to meet with the Ambassador, she failed and was told

`curtly' that it was none of her business.

 

The Washington Post - Feb. 6, 1916.

More details of the atrocities perpetrated against the Armenians is

reported by a young American woman who, after arriving in Cairo, gave

an account of what she witnessed and went through herself. Although

the official report submitted to the Board of Missions included all

the names of people and places, she had asked that these names not be

made public. The Post prints excerpts of her report: `At Aleppo she

(the missionary) saw the remnants of 5,000 exiles who had started

from ---. When they started they were of all ages and both sexes.

They went toward Aleppo down the Euphrates. When they came to

crossings of the rivers that flow into the Euphrates all the able-

bodied men were drowned and their bodies left in the water. Farther

on all the survivors, now only old men, women and children, were

entirely stripped of their clothing ... Of the 5,000 that started only

213 were left ...'

 

The Halifax Herald - March 15, 1916.

The terrifying tale of the Armenian massacres by a German mission is

reported by this Canadian newspaper. The mission's report states:

`Turkish soldiers who witnessed scenes of indescribable horror and

fanatical savagery told our investigators they saw hundreds of

terrified Armenian women slain outright as they pleaded for mercy on

their knees.'

 

`To save their babies from excruciating tortures, many of the women,

driven to desperation, flung their infants to drown in the rivers

Tigris and Euphrates, as the ravening hordes of religious intoxicated

Turks bore down on their homesteads, killing as they came.

Investigators asked the soldiers, `You mean to tell us you pitilessly

shot down women and children?' The soldiers replied, `We had no

choice; we only obeyed orders ...' '

 

The Washington Post - May 7, 1916.

Richard Hill, a local representative of the American Committee for

Armenian and Syrian relief, reports that 15,000 Armenians were killed

by Turks at Mamakhatun prior to the evacuation of Erzurum. According

to Hill, `the whole of the province has been cleared of Armenians

with the exception of those few who hid in the city. At the same time

15,000 were sent away from villages nearby. These were taken as far

as Mamakhatun, where they were killed. Other groups have been sent

off at different times, many of them, too, no doubt, sharing the same

fate as those from Erzurum, although some hope is entertained that

many of them may still be found alive in the region of Aleppo.'

 

The Sunday Times - May 14, 1916.

The news this time comes from Trebizond where the children were the

target for the atrocities. In Trebizond and its environs, the

Armenians were all massacred or drowned by the Turks. The report

continues saying: `It is unanimously declared that the atrocities

committed on the Armenians at Trebizond surpassed all the Turkish

cruelties towards the Armenians in other places. The expulsion of the

Armenians in Trebizond began in July 1915, and to begin with several

hundreds of young and influential Armenians were arrested on charges

of treason and of aiding the Russians. They were embarked on boats,

and drowned in the sea.'

 

`Other persons who were arrested were dispatched, men and women

separately, to the village of Djivizlik, near Trebizond, where the

women were violated and then killed, and the children bayoneted. The

Turks also amused themselves with firing practice, taking the heads

of the little children as targets. The survivors were sent to Erzurum.'

 

The Washington Post - Aug. 6, 1916.

A report comes from Paris in a special cable to the paper. It gives

estimates that the Armenian population prior to 1915 was two and a

half million, and then calculates that only some half a million were

left. The report puts the blame on the Young Turk government. `The

whole of the responsibility for the massacres rests with the Young

Turk government and it is these young Turks who, under the eye of

their accomplices, the German authorities in Constantinople,

conceived and ordered the massacres and it is they who urged the

savage Kurds to carry out the murders also, wherever possible, the

Mussulmans, by means of arousing their fanaticism.'

 

The Halifax Herald - Aug. 9, 1916.

The details of the desperate condition of deported Armenians in the

deserts of Northern Arabia and the lower Euphrates are made public by

the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief. According to

eyewitnesses, the Armenians were seen `eating grass, herbs and

locusts, and in desperation dead animals and human bodies are

reported to have been eaten.'

 

The New York Times - Aug. 21, 1916.

After returning from a three-month relief work in the devastated

villages in the Ottoman Empire, Rev. Harold Buxton, Secretary of the

Armenian Refugee Fund, gives details that confirm the previous

reports about the atrocities committed against the Armenians,

especially those reports which Viscount Bryce had presented to the

British House of Lords.

 

Rev. Buxton states: `I don't think there has been any exaggeration as

to the losses as published in England. The Armenian race numbered

over 4,000,000 of whom 2,000,000 were Turkish Armenians and of these

perhaps 1,000,000 have been deported and 500,000 massacred. Only

200,000 escaped into the mountains, and so across to Russian soil.

There are some hundreds of thousands in concentration camps between

Aleppo and Mosul and in the neighboring regions of Mesopotamia, where

Turkey continues to be supreme over their fate.'

 

The Times - Aug. 24, 1916.

According to Turkish and German sources, some 12,000 Armenian

workers, including women and children, were collected in the vicinity

of the Bozanti Tunnel through the Taurus Mountains to work under

German supervision. Later the more intellectual and active among them

were massacred with `utmost brutality.' The women were separated from

the men and `suddenly ordered to move on in their emigration. This is

the euphemistic term now employed by Turkish newspapers in referring

to the gradual destruction of the Armenians. The Governor of Adana,

brother-in-law of Enver *****, is entrusted with this task.'

 

The Washington Post - Oct. 15, 1916.

Letters have reached the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian

Relief describing the `heart-rending' picture of the remnants of the

Armenians and other Christians who were driven from their homes to

die of disease, hunger, and torture.

 

The first message comes from Der Zor, September 3, and reads in part:

`Tell our missionaries that their college children, young men and

girls are dying of hunger. To look at them breaks one's heart. But I

am not thinking of myself, but of the crowds of children outside that

are crying for bread, of the many pure young girls who, driven by

hunger and loneliness at home, seek refuge at the hearths of Arabian

men, to whom they are sold for bread; the women, mothers, who are

wandering about in despair to find bread for the little ones; the

young people, who, weakened by hunger, appear like old people,

prematurely aged.'

 

The letter continues: `We must daily buy back at least three or four

young girls, else they will be completely lost.'

 

`The people kill and eat the street dogs ... I saw a woman, who from

the street ate the clotted blood of an animal ... `

 

The Times - Nov. 24, 1916.

According to Reuter news agency in Baku, the Turks have massacred

some 5,000 to 6,000 Armenians in Sivas in Anatolia.

 

The Times - Jan. 1, 1917

The paper prints a report about how the Armenians were exterminated

described by Moslem eyewitnesses who had former official standing.

One of these eyewitnesses relates the following: `I saw in the

suburbs of Mush large numbers of dead bodies of Armenian men, women

and children lying in the fields. Some had been shot, some stabbed,

and nearly all horribly mutilated. The women were mostly naked. In

the same month I saw about 500 women, girls, and children, guarded by

gendarmes in a camp outside Bitlis. The gendarme said that these

people were being deported, but that the orders were to let the

`shotas,' or bands of Kurds, Turkish gendarmes, and criminals, deal

with them on the way. The bands had been organized by the Government

for the purpose of massacring the Armenians. At Bitlis I saw a number

of Armenian bodies floating in the water. Some had been washed up on

the banks. The smell was terrible and the water undrinkable ...'

 

The second Moslem eyewitness stated the following: `In April 1915, an

order came from Constantinople to Erzurum, where I was quartered that

the Armenians inhabiting frontier towns and villages should be

deported into the interior. I saw large convoys of Armenians go

through Erzurum. In May I was transferred to Trebizond. In July an

order came that all the Armenians of that vilayet should also be

deported to the interior. As I was a member of the Court-martial, I

knew that deportation meant massacre. Besides the deportation order,

an Imperial Iradeh commanded that all deserters, when caught, should

be shot without trial. A secret order, however, said `Armenians'

instead of `deserters.' A `fetva' from the Sheikh-ul-Islam

accompanied the Iradeh, saying that the Armenians had shed Moslem

blood, and it was lawful to kill them. I heard that all Armenian men

were being massacred on their way into the interior. They were lined

up on the edge of ditches, prepared beforehand, shot, and thrown into

the ditches. The women and children were attacked by organized bands,

called `Shotas,' plundered, outraged, and murdered. The children, of

whom the government had taken charge, were also massacred ...'

 

The Halifax Herald - Feb. 22, 1917.

According to the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief,

one third of the Armenian race has been massacred by the Turks and

one half of the survivors are left homeless and dying in exile. The

message from famous English writer John Massfield says in part: `Far

away as she is from the main conflict, Armenia has suffered more in

this war than any devastated land in Europe. She is like a victim met

by troops on the march and beaten and stabbed and left to die. There

is nothing in her misery to make a headline or a battle cry. It is

just dumb suffering, lying by the road.'

 

Note:

The United States of America formally declared war on Germany and its

allies on April 6, 1917.

 

The Washington Post - May 28, 1917

Henry Morgenthau, the former American Ambassador to Turkey, speaks at

a Presbyterian church in New York describing the barbarities which

the Turks practiced on their Christian subjects taking advantage of

the war.

 

Mr. Morgenthau stated: `While the attention of the world was absorbed

in other things, the Turks felt that the time had come to strike.

Political considerations prevented Germany and Austria from

interfering with the outrages committed. Turks justify their conduct

and the wholesale deportations on the ground of fear that the

Armenians might revolt. As a matter of fact, they did not revolt in a

single instance.'

 

The report continues: `Mr. Morgenthau, who is giving a large amount

of his time to the Armenian-Syrian Relief Committee, described the

attempt of the Turks to annihilate the Armenian race. He mentioned

the methods of extermination employed as follows: Requisitions,

without payment, resulting in economic ruin; confiscation, forced

exorbitant contributions and taxes; searches in Armenian houses for

arms, but in reality, for purposes of pillage; beating to death;

torture beyond imagination and too obscene to be related; forced

conversions to Mohamedanism; massacres and deportations.'

 

The Halifax Herald - Oct. 2, 1917.

Rev. George E. White, president of Anatolia college recently returned

to Canada. He described the following: `The slaughter with axes of

all the Armenian faculty members of Anatolia College, Marsovan ...

together with twelve hundred others, by Turkish peasants, whose pay

for the work was the privilege of stripping the clothing of their

victims' bodies ... The massacres were committed at night by order of

the Turkish government, the Armenians being sent out in lots of one

hundred and two hundred to their doom, and their bodies rolled into

prepared burial trenches.'

 

Christian Science Monitor - Nov. 5, 1917

The report's headline states Turks Massacre Great Numbers of

Armenians: Out of the 300,000 who left City of Sivas, only 5000

arrived at Destination.

 

`From Trebizond to Kermanshah, in Turkey, practically all the

Armenians and Assyrians have been either deported or massacred, the

deported population being sent to Mesopotamia, the destination the

Turks had chosen, according to a statement made by E.W. MacCallum,

chairman of the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief's

Caucasus Branch, whose headquarters were in Tiflis.'

 

MacCallum is quoted saying: `Out of the 300,000 Armenians who started

from the city of Sivas, moved by Turkish force, only 5000 arrived at

their destination. The other 295,000 were either massacred or, in the

cases of women and girls, taken by the Turks and Kurds for their

harems or some other hiding places.'

 

He continued: `The Armenians of Trebizond were taken in boats, on the

pretense of conveying them to another port on the Black Sea, where

they were all thrown overboard, the boats coming back empty in a few

hours from a trip which takes days to make. Children were put in

sacks and then the sacks were sewn up and thrown into the sea. This

is not a story concocted for a purpose. We have the testimony of the

American and Italian consuls of Trebizond to confirm it ...'

 

The New York Times - March 4, 1918.

A special cable to the paper reads: `The Copenhagen correspondent of

the Exchange Telegraph Company says that information has been

received there that Turkish soldiers have committed new massacres in

the district of Armenia which has been deserted by the Russians.'

 

The Times - March 8, 1918

Reports have reached London that all Armenian males were put to the

sword. `At Samsun, on the Black Sea, every Armenian male - man, boy,

or baby - has been put to the sword, while similar atrocities are

being perpetrated in towns and village.'

 

The Times - May 25, 1918.

Armenians saved by Arabs, reads the title. As the Arabs of the Hedjaz

joined the British forces, many Armenians who were deported by the

Turks were rescued. On the receipt of this news, Boghos Nubar *****

sent the following telegram to Emir Feisal, the Commander of the

Northern Meccan Army and a son of the King of Hedjaz:

 

`To the noble-born Emir Feisal. - We have just learned of the rescue

of our unfortunate fellow-countrymen through the efforts of your

gallant troops in Southern Syria. May God bless and prosper the

progress of your arms. The chivalrous act of the noble Moslems who

fight under your banners adds fresh luster to the annals of the Arab

race. Every Armenian throughout the world is today an ally of the

Arab movement: the praises of your clemency and the justice of your

cause shall be known wherever we can make our voices heard.'

 

To this telegram, the King of the Hedjaz sent the following reply:

 

`Your kind message to Feisal, of which I have heard, is a proof of

good will and affection. We pray God to make us worthy of your kind

thoughts. Feisal in assisting the oppressed has only performed one of

the first duties of our religion and of Arabs' faith. I say with

confidence and pride that the Armenian race and other races in

similar plight are regarded by us as partners in our fortunes in weal

and woe. We ask God before everything to give us strength to enable

us to do them helpful service by which to prove to the world the true

feelings of Islam, whose watchword is freedom. May God preserve you

in health and bring desires to a successful attainment by His help

and favour.'

 

 

THE POST-WAR PERIOD

 

The Great War ended with the signing of the armistice on November 11,

1918. Yet the massacres of the Armenians and other Christian

minorities in Turkey continued. Reports coming out of Constantinople

confirmed that Mustapha Kemal and his nationalists continued what

their predecessors had started. They were determined to end the

`minority question' by wiping out the minority.

 

The New York Times - Nov. 25, 1918.

According to a dispatch by the Associated Press, Enver *****'s

brother Nouffi ***** resumes the massacres. `Attacks on the Armenians

have been resumed in the district of Erzbeidjan [Azerbaijan], on the

border of the Caucasus, by Turkish troops under the leadership of

Nouffi *****, brother of Enver *****, former Minister of War. Nouffi

***** declares that he is outside the authority of the present

Constantinople Government, and that he has been delegated by the

Moslems of the district to suppress the revolt of the Armenians.'

 

Christian Science Monitor - Dec. 28, 1918.

Reports reaching Washington, DC, claim that the Turkish Government

has decided to court-martial all those who were responsible for the

Armenian massacres. However, most of them have fled the country with

Enver and Jemal *****s.

 

Toronto Daily Star - Jan. 29, 1919.

Turks again slay 20,000 Armenians, this time in Baku and the

surrounding regions. `Large bodies of Turkish troops are reported to

have joined Tartar bands and are attacking Armenian villages. It is

feared that still another chapter of atrocities will be added to the

Turkish record before the allies are able to relieve the beleaguered

Armenian towns.'

 

Toronto Daily Star - Feb. 11, 1919.

Canadian missionary Rev. L.W. Pierce and his wife reach Toronto from

Turkey and tell of horrible tales that they have witnessed and

experienced. `For 150 miles we traveled through a lane of dead

Armenians. Men, women and children lay by the roadside decapitated,

and otherwise mutilated. Some were sitting up as in life, but when we

drew near, we found they had sat down on the roadside and died from

the ravages of typhus ...'

 

`One man had his brains knocked out before us as we went, a babe in

arms was dragged from its mother's breast and thrown into a boiling

caldron. Other children were caught by the heels and swung around ...

and thrown far into the river ...'

 

The Halifax Herald - April 18, 1919.

The headline says Starving Women and Children Are Turned Loose By the

Turks: Thousands are wandering about the country utterly destitute,

some crazed from hunger and exposure. According to dispatches from

Constantinople, these women and children were being released from

Turkish harems in Asia Minor. One of the dispatches says: `Under

normal conditions this would be glad news indeed, but with members of

their families killed or deported in most instances and the remaining

people reduced to the severest poverty, it will be impossible for the

Armenians themselves to find shelter, clothing and food for hundreds

of thousands of children and tens of thousands of women thus thrust

upon them suddenly.'

 

The New York Times - April 19, 1919.

The murder of the Armenians is continuing. John H. Finley,

Commissioner for the Red Cross for Palestine, who has just returned

from a trip to the Near East states the following: `Throughout Asia

Minor, beyond the points to which the British and French troops have

advanced, the Armenians are still being persecuted by the Turks. The

fact that the armistice has been signed makes no difference. In one

way or another, by individuals and by groups, Armenians are being

killed. I know of one case where 100 Armenians were slaughtered, and

another where forty were shot down - all of this since the armistice

was signed.

 

The Washington Post - July 30, 1919.

In Berlin, the German paper Tageblatt prints extracts from a book

based upon diplomatic documents which the Foreign Ministry had

commissioned John Lepsius to write. `The writer shows that the

Turkish Committee of Union and Progress deliberately decided to

realize national ideas by assimilating or destroying the Armenians,

who in Turkey number about 1,850,000. He described the arrest and

massacre of 600 Armenian leaders in April 1915, and how the previous

so-called `Armenian rising' was provoked as a pretext for Young

Turks' schemes.'

 

The Halifax Herald - Sept. 18, 1919.

`The Turks have resumed their attacks upon the Armenians, and the

very existence of the nation is in danger.'

 

Christian Science Monitor - Feb 16, 1920.

Reports confirming the fresh massacre of Armenians reach London. Rev.

Charles Boxton, the representative of the Lord Mayor's Armenian

refugee fund, writes from Constantinople `confirming the massacre of

1500 Armenians at the end of January, near Marash, in Cilicia, by

Nationalist bands.

 

Chicago Daily Tribune - Feb 17, 1920.

A brief report reads the following: `Seven thousand Armenians have

been massacred in Cilicia in a new attack by Mustapha Kemal's Turkish

and Kurdish troops, which is still in progress.'

 

Toronto Daily Star - April 21, 1920.

The headline says Turks Still Slaying Helpless Armenians. Edgar A.

Mowrer, a correspondent, writes the following: `The Turkish

Nationalists in Cilicia are continuing to massacre Armenians ...'

 

The New York Times - June 12, 1920

The headline is explains the grave situation: Armenia Faces Butchers

Anarmed: Only aid from Allies or America can save her, says Sir

Philip Gibbs. The Subtitle continues: Turks Vow Extermination - `The

West may make Armenia free,' they say; `We will make it a desert.'

 

Christian Science Monitor - Oct 25, 1921

The Constantinople correspondent of the paper writes: `Mustapha Kemal

*****, remaining faithful to favorite Turkish methods, is now

systematically carrying on the destructive processes of deportation,

looting and massacre. Numerous reports reaching the Armenian and

Greek Patriarchates in Constantinople reveal the tremendous

destructive work done by the Kemalists. To escape future

responsibilities, Mustapha Kemal has organized various lawless bands

to strike the Christians ...'

 

 

The papers continued reporting about new massacres perpetrated

against the Armenians, Greeks and other Christian minorities. In

fact, the next large-scale massacre was in Smyrna in September of

1922 when the Turks under Mustapha Kemal massacred the Armenian and

Greek population of that city, and destroyed it completely, leaving

60,000 homeless. Although it had been almost 4 years since the end of

the War, Turks continued implementing their plans to exterminate the

Christian population under the watchful eyes of the western world.

 

The Halifax Herald - Sept. 16, 1922.

Smyrna is burning. Sixty thousand Armenians and Greeks are left

homeless. Apparently, `the Kemalists deliberately set the city on

fire in order to evacuate the entire Christian population, thereby

relieving the Turks altogether of the problem of minorities in

Anatolia ...'

 

The Los Angeles Times - Sept. 16, 1922

The horrors in Smyrna describe the `savagery of the Turks.' Both the

Greek and Armenian citizens in that district are being massacred as a

great number of them `were shot in masses on Turkish galleys.' The

Associated Press cable also mentions that the Greek metropolitan was

executed and the Armenian archbishop killed. `The details of the

savages of the Turks passes all imagination. An American woman is

said to have seen the bodies of women who had been killed by sword

thrusts through their bodies.'

 

The Halifax Herald - Sept. 18, 1922.

Smyrna: Vast Sepulchre of Human Ashes reads the headline. `Only the

shattered walls of 25,000 homes and the charred bodies of countless

victims remain to tell the story of death and destruction unexampled

in modern history ... Every building in the Armenian quarter has been

burned, with the dead lying about ... `

 

 

Following these atrocities, in December of 1922, the League of

Nations tried to find a solution for the minorities living in Turkey.

There was a plan drawn by the victorious powers for an independent

Armenia. However, during the Lausanne meeting, Ismet *****, head of

the Turkish delegation, adamantly refused to even discuss the

`Armenian question,' claiming that any discussion of the minorities

in Turkey would mean interference in Turkey's internal affairs by the

League of Nations. He even declared that `the Armenians brought the

massacres on themselves.'

 

Lord Curzon, the head of the British delegation at Lausanne, demanded

that Ismet ***** explain what he meant by his accusations against the

League of Nations. But what is more interesting in Lord Curzon's

speech, reported by the majority of the press, is his defense of the

Armenian people. He found it difficult to understand Ismet *****'s

statements that Turkey had given fair treatment to the minorities

`with the fact that of the three million Armenians formerly resident

in Anatolia, only 130,000 remained.'

 

He then raised the following questions: `Did they kill themselves or

did they voluntarily leave Anatolia? Why were the French troops

leaving Anatolia followed by 80,000 Armenians, who deserted

everything they had? Why are there hundreds of thousands of these

miserable Armenians scattered over the neighboring countries? Why do

they stay there if all they have to do is to return to Turkey and be

embraced by the Turkish government? Why is the Armenian question one

of the greatest scandals of the world?'

 

Lord Curzon continued: `It is easy for the Turks to offer to live

peacefully with a minority that has been reduced to a miserable

handful, but the eyes of the world are upon the Armenians and Turkey

and the world will not be content that the remnant of these wretched

people be left without protection other than what Turkey may be

pleased to accord.'

 

Unfortunately for the persecuted people, these same powers -

especially Great Britain and the United States of America - easily

forgot those wretched Armenians. Their governments now dishonor their

own past statesmen, diplomats and even citizens, whose only aim was

to help humanity, by refusing to recognize the Armenian Genocide, and

letting Turkey get away with the most atrocious crime of humanity,

the `greatest scandal.' It is this impunity that has encouraged other

nations to commit similar crimes against humanity. And the ones to be

blamed more are those who claim to be defenders of humanity yet

conveniently forget who the perpetrators of those crimes are. After

all, those who deny a crime - a crime amply recorded in their own

governmental archives - can only be called accomplices in the crime.

 

Although successive Turkish governments and Turkish historians have

denied and continue to deny that there ever was genocide, or that the

authorities had planned the extermination of the Armenians, the above

sample of extracts from thousands of accounts reported by

eyewitnesses, diplomats and missionaries confirm the opposite. The

Turkish governments before, during and after World War One were

responsible for the ongoing massacres perpetrated against the

Armenians and the other Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire.

 

And although successive Turkish governments have claimed that the

Armenians were only casualties of the War, just as the Turks were,

the above reports only confirm the opposite: that even in peaceful

times, the Armenian population was massacred in cold blood with the

intention of wiping them out completely.

 

Could all those who had reported the cruelties be wrong? Were all the

American missionaries who witnessed, investigated and reported the

massacres wrong? Was the American Ambassador to Turkey, Mr. Henry

Morgenthau, together with his consuls stationed in the different

parts of Turkey, lying or making up stories? Were the British,

French, Italian, German, Russian and other diplomats all wrong? Or

were all the correspondents who reported from the scenes of the

crimes all imagining the bloodshed? Of course, we shouldn't forget

the hundreds of international scholars who have since proven that

what happened to the Armenians at the hands of the Turks is Genocide.

 

Could all of them be wrong and Turkey, the perpetrator of the

Genocide, be right?

 

[Ashot]

LORD BRYCE’S REPORT ON TURKISH ATROCITIES IN ARMENIA

 

NOVEMBER, 1916

 

Most appalling of all the documents of the world war is the record of Turkey’s wholesale massacres of the Christian men. women, and children of Armenia, as revealed in a detailed report prepared by Lord Bryce, the former British Ambassador to the United States, which fills a volume of 600 pages. Lord Bryce’s material, much of which was finished by American and other neutral workers in Armenian, is edited by Arnold J. Toynbee, late Fellow of Ballion College, Oxford. The volume contains 150 documents, all the authentic evidence obtainable up to July, 1916, as to the massacres and deportations of Armenians and other Christian dwelling in Asia Minor and the northwestern corner of Persia invaded by Turkish troops. All the evidence goes to show the deliberate purpose of the Turkish authorities to exterminate the Armenian Nation, the most colossal crime, says Lord Bryce, in the history of the world. CURRENT HISTORY MAGAZINE herewith presents the more striking portions of the report.

 

Lord Bryce prefaces his volume with the following analysis of the evidence:

 

THIS complication has been mass in the spirit proper to a historical inquiry; that is to say, nothing has been omitted which could throw light on the facts, whatever the political bearing of the accounts might be. In such an inquiry no racial or religious sympathies, no prejudices, not even the natural horror raised by crimes, ought to distract the mind of the inquirer from the duty of trying to ascertain the real facts.

 

* * *

 

Let us, however, look at the evidence itself.

 

* Nearly all of it comes from eyewitnesses, some of whom wrote it down themselves, while others have it to persons who wrote it out at the time from their statements, given to them aurally. Nearly all of it, moreover, was written immediately after the events described, when the witnesses’ recollection was still fresh and clear.

* The main facts rest upon the evidence coming from different and independent sources. When the same fact is stated by witnesses who had no communication with one another, and in many cases did not even speak the same language, the presumption in favor of its truth becomes strong.

* Facts of the same or of a very similar nature occurring in different and independent witnesses. as there is every reason to believe -- and indeed it is hardly denied -- that the massacres and deportations were carried out under general orders proceeding from *Constantinople, the fact that persons who knew only what was happening in one locality record circumstances there broadly resembling those which occurred in another locality goes to show the general correctness of both sets of accounts.* * *

* The volume of this concurrent evidence from different quarters is so large as to establish the main facts beyond all questions. Errors of details in some instances may be allowed for. Exaggeration may, in the case of native witnesses, who were more likely to be exited, be also, now and then, allowed for. But the general character of the events stands out, resting on foundations too broad to be shaken, and even details comparatively unimportant in themselves are often remarkably corroborated from different quarters.

* In particular it is to be need that many of the most shocking and horrible accounts are those for which there is the most abundant testimony from the most trustworthy neutral witnesses. None of the worst cruelties rest on native evidence alone. If all that class of evidence were entirely struck out the general effect would be much the same, though some of the minor details would be wanting. One may, indeed, say that an examination of the neutral evidence tends to confirm the native evidence as a whole by showing that there is in it less of exaggeration than might have been expected. * * *

* The vast scale of these massacres and the pitiless cruelty with which the deportations were carried out may seen to some readers to throw doubt on the authenticity of the narratives. Can human beings (it may be asked) have perpetrated such crimes on innocent women and children? But a recollection of previous massacres will show that such crimes are part of the long-settled and the often-repeated policy of the Turkish rulers.

 

Historic Precedents

 

In Chios, nearly a century ago, the Turks slaughtered almost the whole Greek population of the island. In European Turkey in 1876 many thousands of Bulgarians were killed on the suspicion of an intended rising, and the outrages committed on women were, on a smaller scale, as bad as those here recorded. In 1895 and 1896 more than a hundred thousand Armenian Christians were put to death by Abdul Hamid, many thousands of whom died as martyrs to their Christian faith, by abjuring which they could have saved their lives.

 

All these massacres are registered not only in the ordinary press records of current history but in the reports of British diplomatic and consular officials written at the time. They are as certain as anything else that has happened in our day. There is, therefore, no antecedent improbability to be overcome before the accounts here given can be accepted. All that happened in 1915 is in the regular Turkish policy. The only differences are in the scale of the present crimes, and in the fact that the lingering sufferings of deportations, in which the deaths were as numerous as in the massacres, and fell with special severity upon the women, have in this latest instance been added.

 

The evidence is cumulative. Each part of it supports the rest because each part in independent of the others. The main facts are the same, and reveal the same plans and intentions at work. Even the varieties are instructive because they show those diversities of temper and feeling which appear in human nature everywhere.

 

The Turkish officials are usually heartless and callous. But here and there we see one of a finer nature, who refuses to carry out the orders given him and is sometimes dismissed for his refusal. The Moslem rabble is usually pitiless. It pillages the houses and robs the persons of the hapless exiles. But now and then there appear pious and compassionate Moslems who try to save the lives or alleviate the miseries of their Christian neighbors. We have a vivid picture of human life, where wickedness in high places deliberately lets loose the passions of racial or religious hatred, as well as the commoner passion of rapacity, yet cannot extinguish those better feelings which show as points of light in the gloom.

 

It is, however, for the reader to form his own judgment on these documents as he peruses them. They do not, and by the nature of the case can not, constitute what is called judicial evidence, such as a court of justice obtains when it puts witnesses on oath and subjects them to cross-examination. But by far the larger part (almost all, indeed, of what is here published) does constitute historical evidence of the best kind, inasmuch as the statements come from those who saw the events they describe and recorded them in writing immediately afterward. They corroborate one another, the narratives given by different observers showing a substantial agreement, which becomes conclusive when we find the salient facts repeated with no more variations in detail than the various opportunities of the independent observers made natural.

 

Turks Confess Main Facts

 

The gravest facts are those for which the evidence is most complete, and it tallies fatally with that which twenty years ago established the guilt of Abdul Hamid for the deeds that have made his name infamous. In this case there are, moreover, what was wanting then -- admissions which add weight to the testimony here presented -- I mean the admissions of the Turkish Government and of their German apologists. The attempts made to find excuses for wholesale slaughter and for the removal of a whole people from their homes leave no room doubt as to the slaughter and the removal. The main facts are established by the confession of the criminals themselves. What the evidence here presented does is to show in detail how these things were effected, what cruelties accompanied them, and how inexcusable they were. The disproval of the palliations which the Turks have put forward is as complete as the proof of the atrocities themselves.

 

This preface is intended to deal only with the credibility of the evidence here presented, so I will refrain from comment on the facts. A single observation, at rather a single question, may, however, be permitted from one who has closely followed the history of the Turkish East for more than forty years. European travelers have often commended the honesty and the kindliness to the Turkish peasantry, and our soldiers have said that they are fair fighters. Against them I have nothing to say, and will even ass that I have known individual Turkish officials who impressed me as men of honesty and good will. But the record of the rulers of Turkey for the last two or three centuries, from the sultan on his throne down to the district Mutessarif, is, taken as a whole, an almost unbroken record of corruption, of injustice, of an oppression which often rises into hideous cruelty.

 

The Yong Turks, when they deposed Abdul Hamid, came forward as the apostles of freedom, promising equal rights and equal treatment to all Ottoman subjects. The facts here recorded show how that promise was kept. Can we still continue to hope that the evils of such a Government are curable? Or does the evidence contained in this volume furnish the most terrible and convicting proof that it can no longer be permitted to rule over subjects of a different faith?

 

Turkish Reign of Terror

 

Before presenting documents of specific outrage Lord Bryce and Mr. Toynbee print a series of letters covering in a general way the whole catalogue of horrors visited upon the Armenians by their Turkish masters. One of these, written from Constantinople in July, 1915, contains the following sentences:

 

From May 1 onward the population of the City of Erzerum, and shortly afterward the population of the whole province, was collected at Samsoun and embarked on shipboard. The population of Kaisaria, Diarbekir, Ourfa, Trebizond, Sivas, Harpout, and the district of Van have been deported to the deserts of Mesopotamia, from the southern outskirts of Aleppo as far as Mosul and Baghdad.

 

“Armenia without the Armenians “-- that is the Ottoman Government’s project. The Moslems are already being allowed to take possession of the lands and houses abandoned by the Armenians.

 

* * *

 

The exiles will have to traverse on foot a distance that involves one or two months’ marching, and sometimes even more, before they reach the particular corner of the desert assigned to them for their habitation, and destined to become their tomb. We hear, in fact, that the course of their route and the stream of the Euphrates are littered with the corpses of exiles, while those who survive are doomed to certain death, since they will find in the desert neither house, nor work, nor food.

 

It is simply a scheme for exterminating the Armenian Nation wholesale without any fuss. It is just another form of massacre, and a more horrible form.

 

A letter from the same source, dated Constantinople, Aug. 15,1915, states:

 

It is now established that there is not an Armenian left in the provinces of Erzerum, Trebizond, Sivas, Harbout, Bitlis, and Diarbekir. About a million of the Armenian inhabitants of these provinces have been deported from their homes and sent southward into exile.

 

These deportations have been carried out very systematically by the local authorities since the beginning of April last. First of all, in every village and every town the population was disarmed by the gendarmerie and by criminals released for this purpose from prison. On the pretext of disarming the Armenians these criminals committed assassinations and inflicted hideous tortures. Next, they imprisoned the Armenians en masse on the pretext that they had a political organization, and had in their possession arms, kind of social standing was pretext enough. After that they began the deportation. And first, on the pretext of sending them into exile, they drove from their homes those who had not been imprisoned, or those who had been set at liberty through lack of any charge against them, then they massacres them. Not one of these escaped slaughter.

 

Before they stared they were examined officially by the authorities, and any money or valuables in their possession were confiscated. They were usually shackled -- either separately or in gangs of five to ten. The remainder -- old men, women, and children -- were treated as waifs in the province of Harpout and placed at the disposal of the Moslem population. The highest official, as well as the most simple peasant, choose out the woman or girl who caught his fancy, and took her to wife, converting her by force to Islam. As for the children, the Moslems took as many of them as they wanted, and then the remnant of the Armenians were marched away, famished and destitute of provisions, to fall victims to hunger, unless that were anticipated by the savagery of the brigand bands.

 

In the province of Diarbekir there was an outright massacre, especially at Mardin, and the population was subjected to all the aforementioned atrocities.

 

In the provinces of Erzerum, Bitlis, Sivas, and Diarbekir the local authorities gave certain facilities to the Armenians condemned to deportation -- five to ten days’ grace, authorization to effect a partial sale of their goods , and permission to hire a cart in the case of some families. But after the first few days of their journey the carters abandoned them on the road and returned home. These convoys were waylaid the day after the start, sometimes several days after, by bands of brigands or by Moslem peasants of brigands fraternized with the gendarmes and slaughtered the few grown men or youths who were included in the convoys. They carried off the women, girls, and children, leaving only the old women, who were driven along by the gendarmes under blows of the lash, and died of hunger by the roadside. An eyewitness reports to us that the women deported from the province of Erzerum were abandoned some days ago on the plain of Harpout, where they have all died of hunger, (fifty or sixty a day.)

 

The only step taken by the authorities was to send people to bury them, in order to safeguard the health of the Moslem population.

 

Thousands of Corpses

 

The same barbarities have been committed everywhere, and by this time travelers find nothing but thousands of Armenian corpses all along the roads in these provinces. A Moslem traveler, on his was from Malatia to Sivas, a nine hours’ journey, passed nothing but corpses of men and women. All the male Armenians of Malatia had been taken there and massacred; the women and children have all been converted to Islam. No Armenian can travel in these parts, for every Moslem, and especially the brigands and gendarmes, considers it his duty now to kill them at sight.

 

Recently MM. Zohrab and Vartkes, the Armenian members of the Ottoman Parliament who had been sent off to Diarbekir to be tried by the Council of War, were killed before they got there, near Aleppo. In these provinces one can only travel incognito under a Moslem name. * * *

 

The Armenian soldiers, too, have suffered the same fate. They were also all disarmed and put to constructing roads. We have certain knowledge that the Armenian soldiers of the province of Erzerum, who were at work on the road from Erzerum to Erzingan, have all been massacred. The Armenian soldiers of the province of Diarbekir have all been massacred of the Diarbekir-Ourfa road, and the Diarbekir-Harpoutroad. From Harpout alone 1,800 young Armenians were enrolled and sent off to work at Diarbekir; all were massacred in the neighborhood of Arghana. We have no news from the other districts, but they have assuredly suffered the same fate there also.

 

In certain towns the Armenians who had been consigned to oblivion in the prisons have been hanged in batches. During the last month alone several dozen Armenians have been hanged in Kaisaria. In many places the Armenian population, to save their lives, have tried to become Mohammedans, but this time such overtures have not been readily accepted, as they were at the time of the other great massacres. At Sivas the would-be converts to Islam were offered the following terms: They must of age to the Government, which would undertake to place them in orphanages, and they must consent for their own part to leave their homes and settle wherever the Government directed.

 

At Harpout they would not accept the conversion conditional in each case upon the presence of a Moslem willing to take the convert in marriage. Many Armenian women preferred to throw themselves into the Euphrates with their infants, or committed suicide in their homes. The Euphrates and Tigris have become the sepulcher of thousands of Armenians.

 

All Armenians converted in the Black Sea towns -- Trebizond, Samsoun, Kerasond, &c. -- have been sent to the interior, and settled in towns inhabited exclusively by Moslems. The town of Shabin-Karahissar resisted disarmament and deportation and was thereupon bombarded. The whole population of the town and the surrounding country, with the Bishop at their head, was pitilessly massacred.

 

In short, from Samsoun on the one hand to Sughart and Diarbekir on the other, there is now not a single Armenian left. The majority have been massacred, part have been carried off, and a very small part have been converted to Islam.

 

History has never recorded, never hinted at, such a hecatomb. We are driven to believe that under the reign of Sultan Abdul-Hamid we were exceedingly fortunate.

 

Several important documents in the indictment are written by German eyewitnesses, who call upon the German Government to stop the Murderous deeds of their ally. One such document, addressed to the German Foreign office by four teachers at Aleppo, is printed separately at the close of this article as CURRENT HISTORY MAGAZINE had previously obtained it through other channels.

 

Another narrative given by Lord Bryce was printed in the Sonnenaufgang and the Alleghenies Missions-Zeitschift in October and November, 1915, respectively. After its appearance in the latter periodical the German censor forbade its reproduction and confiscated all copies on which he could get his hands, but a few were smuggled out of Germany. The article is in part as follows:

 

Between May 10 and May 30, 1,200 of the most prominent Armenians and other Christians, without distinction of confession, were arrested in the Vilayets of Diarbekir and Mamouret-ul-Aziz.

 

It is said that they were to be taken to Mosul, but nothing more has been heard of them.

 

On May 30, 674 of them were embarked on thirteen Tigris barges, under the pretext that they were to be taken to Mosul. The Vali’s aid de camp, assisted by fifty gendarmes, was in charge of the convoy. Half the gendarmes started off on the barges, while the other-half rode along the bank. A short time after the start the prisoners were stripped of all their money (about $6,000 Turkish) and then of their clothes; after that they were thrown into the river. The gendarmes on the bank were ordered to let none of them escape. The clothes of these victims were sold in the market of Diarbekir.

 

About the same time 700 young Armenian men were conscribed and were then set to build the Kara-Baghtche-Habashi road. There is no news of these 700 men, either.

 

It is said that in Diarbekir five or six priests were stripped naked one day, smeared with tar, and dragged through the streets.

 

In the Vilayet of Aleppo they have evicted the inhabitants of Hadjin, Sheer, Albustan, Goksoun, Geben, Shivilgi, Furnus, and the surrounding villages, Fundadjak, Hassan-Beyli, Harni, Lappashli, Dort Yol, and others.

 

They have marched them off in convoys into the desert on the pretext of setting them there. In the village of Tel-Armen (along the line of the neighboring villages about 5,000 people were massacred, leaving only a few women and children. The people were thrown alive down wells or into the fire. They pretend that the Armenians are to be employed in colonizing land situated at a distance of from twenty-four to thirty kilometers from the Baghdad Railway. But as it is only the women and children who are sent into exile, since all the men, with exception of the very old, are at the war, this means nothing less than the wholesale murder of the families, since they have neither the labor nor the capital from clearing the country. * * *

 

For a whole month corpses were observed floating down the River Euphrates nearly every day, often in batches of from two to six corpses bound together. The Turkish military authority in control of the Euphrates, the Kaimakam of Djerablous, refuses to allow the burial of these corpses, on the ground that he finds it impossible to establish whether they belong to Moslems or to Christians. He adds that no one has given him any orders on the subject. The corpses stranded on the bank are devoured by dogs and vultures. To this facts there are many German eyewitnesses. An employer of the Baghdad Railway has brought the information that the prisons at Biredjik are filled regularly every day and emptied every night -- into the Euphrates. Between Diarbekir and Ourfa a German cavalry Captain saw innumerable corpses lying unburied all along the road.

 

The following telegram was sent to Aleppo from Arabkir: “We have accepted the true religion. Now we are all right.” The inhabitants of a village near Anderoum went over to Islam and had to hold to it. At Hadjin six families wanted to become Mohammedans. They received the verdict: “Nothing under 100 families will be accepted.”

 

Aleppo and Ourfa are the assemblage places for the convoys of exiles. There were about 5,000 of them in Aleppo during June and July, while during the whole period from April to July many more than 50,000 must have passed through the city. the girls were abducted almost without exception by the soldiers and their Arab hangers-on. One father, on the verge of despair, besought me to take with me at least his 15-year-old daughter, as he could no longer protect her from the persecutions inflicted upon her. The children left behind by the Armenians on their journey are past counting.

 

Women whose pairs came upon them on the way had to continue their journey without respite. A woman bore twins in the neighborhood of Aintab; next morning she had to go on again. She very soon had to leave the children under a bush, and a little while after she collapsed herself. Another, whose pains came upon her during the march, was compelled to go on at once and fell down dead almost immediately.

 

Massacres in Mush District

 

The following harrowing narrative of happenings at Mush [also spelled Moush] was told by a German eyewitness, and was turned over to Lord Bryce by the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief:

 

The Winter was most severe in Mush; the gendarmes were sent to levy high taxes, and as the Armenians had already given everything to the Turks, and were therefore, powerless to pay these enormous taxes, they were beaten to death. The Armenians never defended themselves except when they saw the gendarmes ill-treat their wives and children, and the result in such cases was that the whole village was burned down, merely because a few Armenians had tried to protect their families.

 

Thus the Winter passed, with things happening every day more terrible that one can possibly describe. We then heard that massacres had started in Bitlis. In Mush everything was being prepared for one, when the Russians arrived at Aqlice, which is about fourteen to sixteen hours’ journey from Mush. This occupied the attention of the Turks, so that the massacre was put off for the tome being. Hardly had the Russians left Lice, however, when all of the districts inhabited by Armenians were pillaged and destroyed.

 

This was in the month of May. At the beginning of June, we heard that the whole Armenian population of Bitlis had been got rid of. It was at this time that we received news that the American missionary, Dr. Knapp, had been wounded in an American house and that the Turkish Government had sent him to Diarbekir. The very first night at Diarbekir he died, and the Government explained his death as a result of having overeaten, which of course nobody believed.

 

When there was no one left in Bitlis to massacre their attention was diverted to Mush. Cruelties had already been committed, but so far not too publicly; now, however, they started to shoot people down without any cause and beat them to death simply for the pleasure of doing so. In Mush itself, which is a big town, there are 300 villages, each containing about -500 houses. In all these not a single male Armenian is now to be seen, and hardly a woman either, except for a few here and there.

 

In the first week of July 20,000 soldiers arrived from Constantinople by way of Harpout with munitions and eleven guns, and laid siege to Mush. As a matter of fact, the town gad already been beleaguered since the middle of June. At this stage, the Mutessarif gave orders that we should leave the town and go to Harpout. We pleaded with him to let us stay, for we had in our charge all the orphans and patients; but he was angry and threatened to remove us by force if we did not do as instructed. As we both fell sick, however, we were allowed to remain at Mush. I received permission, in the event of our leaving Mush, to take the Armenians of our orphanage with us; but when we asked for assurances of their safety, his only reply was: “You can take them with you, but being Armenians their heads may and will be cut off on the way.”

 

On July 10 Mush was bombarded for several hours on the pretext that some Armenians had tried to escape. I went to see the Mutessarif and asked him to protect our buildings; his reply was: “Serves you right for staying instead of leaving as instructed. The guns are here to make an end of Mush. Take refuge with the Turks.” This, of course, was impossible, as we could not leave our charges. Next day a new order was promulgated for the expulsion of the Armenians, and three days’ grace was given them to make ready. They were told to register themselves at the Government Building before they left. Their families could remain, but their property and their money were to be confiscated. The Armenians were unable to go, for they had no money to defray the journey, and they preferred to die in their houses rather than be separated from their families and endure a lingering death of the road.

 

As started above, three days’ grace was given to the Armenians, but two hours had scarcely elapsed when the soldiers began breaking into the houses, arresting the inmates and throwing them into prison. The guns to fire and thus the people were effectually prevented from registering themselves at the Government Building. We all had to take refuge in the cellar for fear of our orphanage catching fire. It was heart-rending to hear the cries of the people and children who were being burned to death in their hearing them, and when people who were out in the street during the bombardment fell dead the soldiers merely laughed at them.

 

The survivors were sent of Ourfa, (there were none left but sick women and children;) I went to the Mutessarif and begged him to have mercy on the children at least, but in vain. He replied that the Armenian children must perish with their nation. All our people were taken from our hospital and orphanage; they left us three female servants. Under these atrocious circumstances, Mush was burned to the ground. Every officer boated of the number he had personally massacred as his share in riding Turkey of the Armenian race.

 

Harpout a Cemetery

 

We left for Harpot. Harpout has become the cemetery of the Armenians; from all directions they have been brought to Harpout to be buried. There they lie, and the dogs and the vultures lick their bodies. Now and then some man throws some earth over the bodies. In Harpout and Mezre the people have had to endure terrible tortures. They have had their eyebrows plucked out, their breasts cut off, their nails torn off; their torturers hew off their feet or else hammer nails into them just as they do in shoeing horses. This is all done at night time, and in order that the people may not hear their screams and know of their agony soldiers are stationed around the prisons beating drums and blowing whistles. It is needless to relate that many died of these tortures. When they die, the soldiers cry: “Now let your Christ help you!”

 

One old priest was tortured so cruelly to extract a confession that, believing that the torture would cease and that he would be left alone if he did it, he cried out in his desperation: “We are revolutionists!” He expected his torture to cease, but on the contrary the soldiers cried: “What further do we seek? We have it here from his own lips!” And instead of picking their victims as they did before, the officials had all the Armenians tortured without sparing a soul.

 

Early in July 2,000 Armenian soldiers were ordered to leave for Aleppo to build roads. The people of Harpout were terrified on hearing this, and a panic started in the town. The Vali sent for the German missionary, Mr. Ehemann, and begged him to quiet the people, repeating over and over again that no harm whatever would befall these soldiers. Mr. Ehemann took the Vali’s word and quieted the people. But they had scarcely left when we heard that they had all been murdered and thrown into a cave. Just a few managed to escape, and we got the reports from them. It was useless to protest to the Vali. The American Consul at Harpout protested several times, but the Vali takes no account to him, and treats him in a most shameful manner.

 

A few days later another 2,000 Armenian soldiers were dispatched via Diarbekir, and in order to hinder them the more surely from escaping, they were left to starve on the way, so that they had no strength left in them to flee. The Kurds were given notice that the Armenians were on the way, and the Kurdish women came with their butchers’ knives to help the men. In Mezre a public brothel was erected for the Turks, and all the beautiful Armenian girls and women were placed there. At night the Turks were allowed free entrance.

 

The permission for the Protestant and Catholic Armenians to be exempted from deportation only arrived after their deportation had taken place. The Government wanted to force the few remaining Armenians to accept the Mohammedan faith. A few did so in order to save their wives and children from the terrible sufferings already witnessed in the case of others. The people begged us to leave for Constantinople and obtain some security for them. On our way to Constantinople we only encountered old women. No young women or girls were to seen.

 

In November we knew already that there would be a massacre. The Mutessarif of Mush, who was a very intimate friend of Enver *****, declared quite openly that they would massacre the Armenians at the first opportune moment and exterminate the whole race. Before the Russians arrived they intended first to butcher the Armenians, and then fight the Russians afterward. Toward the beginning of April, in the presence of a Major Lange and several other high officials including the American and German Consuls, Ekran Bey quite openly declared their intention of exterminating the Armenian race. All these details plainly show that the massacre was deliberately planned.

 

In a few villages destitute women come begging, naked and sick, for alms and protection. We are not allowed to give them anything, we are forbidden to do anything for them, and they die outside. If only permission could be obtained from the authorities to help them! If we cannot endure the sight of these poor people’s sufferings, what must it be like for the sufferers themselves?

 

It is a story written in blood.

 

Story of Red Cross Nurses

 

One of the most terrible of all the tales of horror collected by Lord Bryce was supplied by two Danish Red Cross nurses, formerly in the service of the German Military Mission at Erzerum and engaged early last year in Red Cross work at Erzingan, (Both of which places have since been occupied by the Russians.) While they were at Erzingan the Armenians of the city were notified that they were to be deported, and were compelled to sell their property at ruinous prices. A convoy of these wretched creatures, were driven from the city toward Harpout, and soon stories were brought back by survivors of the wholesale butchery of the Armenians by their Turkish guards. Later the two Danish nurses learned of this from some of the very soldiers themselves, and determined to accompany one of the caravans of unfortunates, believed that they could prevent further slaughter.

 

The following morning, at a very early hour, we heard the procession of exiles passing in front of our house, along the high road leading in to Erzingan. We followed them and kept up with them as far as the town, about an hour’s walk. Mr. G. came with us. It was a very large gang -- only two or three of them men, all the rest women and children. Many of the women looked demented. They cried out: “Spare us, we will become Moslems or Germans, or whatever you will; only spare us! We are being taken to Kamakh Boghaz to have our throats cut!” and they made an expressive gesture. Others kept silent, and marched patiently on with a few bundles on their backs and their children arms. Others begged us to save their children.

 

Many Turks arrived of the scene to carry off children and girls, with or without their parents’ consent. There was no time for reflection, for the crowd was being moved on continually by the mounted gendarmes brandishing their whips. On the outskirts of the town the road to Kamakh Boghaz branches off from the main highway.

 

At this point the scene turned into a regular slave market; for our part, we took a family of six children from 3 to 14 years old, who clutched hold of us, and another little girl as well. We entrusted the latter to our Turkish cook, who was on the spot. She wanted to take the child to the kitchen of Dr. A.’s private house, and keep her there until we could come to fetch her; but the doctor’s adjutant, Riza Bey, gave the woman a beating and threw the child out into the street. Meaning, with cries of agony, the gang of sufferers continued its march, while we returned to the hospital with our six children. Dr. A. gave us permission to keep them in our room until we had packed our belongings. They were given food and soon became calmer. “Now we are saved!” they had cried when we took them. They refused to let go of our hands. The smallest, the son of a rich citizen of Baibourt, lay huddled up in his mother’s cloak; his face was swollen with crying and he seemed inconsolable.

 

Once he rushed to the window and pointed to a gendarme: “That’s the man who killed my father!” The children handed over to us their money, 475 plasters, (about $5,) which their parents had given them with the idea that perhaps the children, at any rate, would not be shot.

 

We then rode into the town to obtain permission for these children to travel with us. We were told that the high authorities were in session to decide the fate of the convoy which had just arrived. Nevertheless, Sister B. succeeding getting word with some one she knew, who gave her the authorization to take the children with her, and offered to give them false names in the passport. This satisfied us, and, after returning to the hospital, we left the same evening with baggage and children and all, and installed ourselves in a hotel at Erzingan. The Turkish orderlies at the hospital were very friendly, and said: “You have done a good deed in taking these children.” We could get nothing but one small room for the eight of us.

 

During the night there was a frightful knocking at our door, and we were asked whether there were two German ladies in the room. Then all became quiet again, to the great relief of our little ones.

 

Efforts to Save Children

 

Their first question had been, Would we prevent them from being made Mohammedans? And was our cross (the nurses’ Red Cross) the same as theirs? After that they were comforted. We left them in the room, and went ourselves to take tea in the hotel cafe. We noticed that some discharged hospital patients of ours, who had always shown themselves full of gratitude toward us, behaved as if they no linger recognized us.

 

The proprietor of the hotel began to hold forth, and every one listened to what he was saying: “The death of these women and children has been decreed at Constantinople.” The Hodja (Turkish priest) of our hospital came in, too, and said to us, among other things: “If God has no pity on them, why must you have pity? The Armenians have committed atrocities at Van. That happened because their religion is ekzik, [inferior.] The Moslems should not have followed their example, but should have carried out the massacre with greater humanity.” We always gave the same answer -- that they ought to discover the guilty and do justice upon them, but that the massacre of women and children was, and always will remain, a crime.

 

Then we went to the Mutessarif himself, with whom we had succeeded in obtaining an interview before. The man looked like the devil incarnate, and his behavior bore out his appearance. In a bellowing voice he shouted at us: Women have no business to meddle with politics, but ought to respect the Government!” We told him that we should have acted in precisely the same way if the victims had been Mohammedans, and that politics had nothing to do with our conduct. He answered that we had been expelled from the hospital, and that we should get the same treatment from him; that he would not stand us, and that he would certainly not permit us to go to Harpout to fetch our belongings, but would send us to Sivas. Worst of all, he forbade us to take the children away, and at once sent a gendarme to carry them off from our room.

 

On our back to the hotel we actually met them, but they were hurried past us so quickly that we had not even a chance to return them their money. Afterward we asked Dr. Lindenberg to see that this money was restored to them; but, to find out where they were, he had to make inquiries of a Turkish officer, and just at the moment of our departure, when we had been told that they had already been killed, and when we had no longer any chance of making a further search for them, the aforementioned Riza Bey came and asked us for their money, on the ground that he wanted to return it to children! We had already decided to spend it on relieving other Armenians.

 

At Erzingan we were now looked askance at. They would no longer let us stay at the hotel; but took us to a desert Armenian house. The whole of this extensive quarter of the town seemed dead. People came and went at will to loot the contents of the houses; in some of the houses families of Moslem refugees were already installed. We had now a roof over our heads, but no one would go to get us food. However, we managed to send a note to Dr. A., who kindly allowed us to return to hospital. The following day the Mutessarif sent a spring less baggage cart, in which we were to do the seven days’ journey to Sivas. We gave him to understand that we would not have this conveyance, and upon the representatives of Dr. A., they sent us a traveling carriage, with the treat to have us arrested if we did not start at once. * * *

 

One day’ we met a convoy of exiles, who had said good-bye to their prosperous Villages, and were at that moment on their way to Kamakh Boghaz. We had to draw up a long time by the roadside while they marched past. The scene will never be forgotten by either of us; a very small number of elderly men, a large number of women -- vigorous figures with energetic features -- a crowd of pretty children, some of them fair and blue eyed, one little girl smiling at the strangeness of all she was seeing, but on all the other faces the solemnity of death. There was no noise; it was all quiet, and they marched along in an orderly way, the children generally riding on the ox carts; and so they passed, some of them greeting us on the way -- all these poor people, who are now standing at the throne of God, and whose cry goes up before Him. An old woman was made to get down from her donkey -- she could no longer keep the saddle. Was she killed on the spot? Our hearts had become as cold as ice.

 

The gendarme attached to us told us then that he had escorted a convoy of 3,000 women and children to Mama Khatoun (near Erzerum) and Kamakh Boaghaz. “Hep gildi bildi,” he said -- “all far away, all dead.” We asked him: why not kill them in their villages?” answer: “It is best as it is. They ought to be made to suffer; and besides, there would be no place left for us Moslems with all these corpses about. They will make a stench!”

 

We spent a night at Enderessi, one day’s journey from Shabin Kara Hissar. As usual, we had been given for our longing an empty Armenian house. On the wall there was a pencil scrawl in Turkish “Our dwelling is on the mountains, we have no longer any need of a roof to cover us; we have already drained the bitter cup of death, we have no more need of a judge.”

 

The ground floor rooms of the house were still tenanted by the women and children. The gendarmes told us that they would be exiled next morning, but they did not know that yet; they did not know what had become of the men of the house; they were restless, but not yet desperate.

 

Shot in Cold Blood

 

Just after I had gone to sleep I was awakened by shot in our immediate neighborhood. The reports followed one another rapidly, and I distinctly heard the words of command. I realized at once what was happening, and actually experience a feeling of relief at the idea that these poor creatures were now beyond the reach of human cruelty.

 

Next morning our people told us that ten Armenians had been shot -- that was the firing that we heard -- and that the Turkish civilians of the place were now being sent out to chase the fugitives. Indeed, we saw them staring off on horseback with guns. At the roadside were two armed men standing under a tree and dividing between them the clothes of a dead Armenian. We passed a place covered with clotted blood, though the corpses had been removed. It was the 250 road makers, of whom our gendarme had told us.

 

Once we met a large number of these laborers, who had so far been allowed to do their work in peace. They had been sorted into three gangs -- Moslems, Greeks, and Armenians. There were several officers with the latter. our young Hassan exclaimed: “They are all going to be butchered.” We continued our journey, and the road mounted a hill. Then our driver pointed with his whip toward the valley, and we saw that the Armenian gang was being made to stand out of the highroad. There were about 400 of them, and they were being made to line up on the edge of a slope. we know what happened after that.

 

Two days before we reached Sivas we again saw the same sight. The soldiers’ bayonets glittered in the sun.

 

At another place there were ten gendarmes shooting them down, while Turkish workmen were fishing off the victims with knives and staves. Here ten Armenians had succeeded in getting away.

 

Later on, in the Mission Hospital at Sivas, we came across one of the men who had escaped. He told us that about 100 Armenians had been slaughtered there. Our informant himself had received a terrible wound in the nape of the neck and had fainted. Afterward ha had recovered consciousness and had dragged himself in two days to Sivas.

 

Twelve hours’ distance from Sivas we spent the night on a Government building. For hours a gendarme, sitting in front of our door, crooned to himself over and over again: “Ermenleri hep kesdiler” -- “the Armenians have all been killed!” In the next room they were talking on the telephone. We made out that they were giving instructions as to how the Armenians were to be arrested. They were talking chiefly about a certain Ohannes, whom they had not succeeded in finding yet.

 

One night we slept in an Armenian house where the women had just heard that the men of the family had been condemned to death. It was frightful to hear their cries of anguish. It was no use of our trying to speak to them. “Cannot your Emperor help us?” they cried. The gendarme saw the despair of our faces, and said: “Their crying bothers you; I will forbid them to cry.” However, he let himself be mollified. He had taken particular pleasure in pointing out to us all the horrors that we encountered, and he said to young Hassan:” First we kill the Armenians, then the Greeks, then the Kurds.” He would certainly have been delighted to add: “And then the foreigners!” Our Greek driver was the victim of a still more ghastly joke: “Look, down they’re in the ditch; there are Greeks there, too!”

 

Heroic Work of Armenians

 

At the important City of Van a small group of American missionaries, doctors, and nurses behaved splendidly trying to do what they could to succor the Armenians. Matters in this region were complicated by the Russian campaign against the Turks, which embittered the latter greatly against the Armenians, who were accused of Sympathy with the Russians, and by the fact that the Armenians resisted the Turks by force of arms in an endeavor to save their lives and property. Several of the Americans during the Van reign of terror died of disease, which ravaged the city and outlying districts. The persecution against the Armenians of Van was carried out by Djevdet Bet, a brother-in-law of the renowned Enver *****, leader of the Young Turks. One of the hordes of Armenian refugees who sought shelter within the group of buildings of the American mission at Van Gratefully exclaimed:

 

“What would we do without this place? This is the third massacre during which I have taken refuge here.”

 

From the annual report for 1915 presented by the Medical Department at Urmia to the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States these extracts are taken:

 

A sad case was that of the mother of a girl of 12 who was being taken away to a life of slavery. The mother protested and tried to save their child, who was ruthlessly torn from her. As the daughter was being dragged away the mother made so much trouble for her oppressors, and clung to them so tenaciously, that they stabbed her twelve times before her wounds. Some people were shot as they ran, and children that they were caring were killed or wounded with them. In some cases men were lined up so that several could be shot with one bullet, in order not to waste ammunition on them.

 

One of the most terrible things that came to the notice of the Medical Department was the treatment of Syrian women and girls by the Turks, Kurds, and local Mohammedans. After the massacre in the village of --------, almost all the women and girls were outraged, and two little girls, aged 8 and 10, died in the hands of Moslem villains. A mother said that not a woman or girl above12 (and some younger) in the village of ------ escaped violation. This is the usual report from the villages

 

One man, who exercised a great deal of authority in the northern part of the Urmia Plain, openly boasted of having ruined eleven Christian girls, two of them under 7 years of age, and he is now permitted to return to his home in peace and no questions are asked. Several women from 80 to 85 years old have suffered with the younger women.

 

The most diabolically cold-blooded of all the massacres was the one committed above the village of Ismael Agha’s Kala, when some sixty Syrians of Gawar were butchered by the Kurds at the investigation of the Turks. These Christians had been used by the Turks to pack telegraph wire from over the border, and while they were in the City of Urmia they were kept in close confinement, without food or drink. On their return, as they reached the valleys between the Urmia and Bardost Plains, they were all stabbed to death, as it was supposed, but here again, as in two former massacres, a few wounded, bloody victims succeeded in making their way to our hospital.

 

Armenians of Moush Wiped Out

 

A refugee called Roupen, from the district of Sassoun, communicated these details to the Armenian community of Moscow, whither he escaped:

 

In the month of May the Turks attempted to force their way into Sassoun, and at the same time the massacres began again without warning at Harpout, Erzerum, and Diarbekir. The Armenians repulsed the town of Moush, [also spelled Mush,] where a large number of Turkish troops were concentrated. This was the situation when the Turks perpetrated the great massacre of Moush at the end of June. Half the inhabitants of Moush were massacred, the other half were driven out of the town. The Armenians never knew that at that moment the Russian troops were only two or three hours’ distance from Moush.

 

The massacres extended over the whole plain of Moush. The Armenians, who had managed to retreat on to the heights of a slender supply of munitions, attacked the Turks in the valleys and gorges of Sassoun, and inflicted considerable losses upon them. A fraction of the Armenians who escaped the massacre broke though the Turkish lines and reached Van, which was already in the hands of the Russian troops. The number of Armenian victims is very large. In the town of Moush alone, out of the 15,000 Armenian inhabitants there are only 200 survivors; out of the 59,000 inhabitants of the plain hardly 9,000 have escaped.

 

Early in June the authorities ordered the Armenians to surrender their arms and pay a large money ransom. The leading Armenians of the town and the headmen of the villages were subjected to revolting tortures. Their finger nails and their toe nails were forcibly extracted; their teeth were knocked out, and, in some cases, their noses were whittled down, and the victims thus done to death under shocking, lingering agonies. The female relatives of the victims who came to the rescue were outraged in public before the very eyes of their mutilated husbands and brothers. The shrieks and death cries of the victims filled the air, yet they did not move the Turkish beast. * * *

 

In the town of Moush itself the Armenians, under the leadership of Gotoyan and others, in trenched themselves in the churches and stone-built houses and fought for four days in self-defense. The Turkish artillery, manned by German officers, made short work of all the Armenian positions. Every one of the Armenians, leaders as well as men, was killed fighting; and when the silence of death reigned over the ruins of churches and the rest, the Moslem rabble made a descent upon the women and children and drove them out of the town into large camps which had already been prepared for the peasant women and children. The ghastly scenes which followed may indeed sound incredible; yet these reports have been confirmed from Russian sources beyond all doubt.

 

The shortest method of disposing of the women and children concentrated in the various camps was to burn them. Fire was set to large wooden sheds in Alidjan, Megrakom, Khaskegh, an other Armenian villages, and these absolutely helpless women and children were roasted to death. Many went mad and threw their children away; some knelt down and prayed amid the flames in which their bodies were burning; others shrieked and cried for help which came from nowhere. And the executioners, who seem to have been unmoved by this unparallel savagery, grasped infants by one leg and hurried them into the fire, calling out to the burning mothers: “Here are your lions.” Turkish prisoners who had apparently witnessed some of these scenes were horrified and maddened at remembering the sight. They told the Russians that the stench of the burning human flesh permeated the air for many days after.

 

Killed by Official Order

 

Armenian refugees who reached the Caucasus supplied details of their experiences from which the following has been recorded in the Bryce report:

 

The Turks gathered together about 5,000 Armenians by treachery and deception from twenty Armenian villages around the monastery of St. Garabed, at Mush, and massacred them. This took place near the wall of the monastery. before the massacre began, a German officer stood on the wall and harangued the Armenians to the effect that the Turkish Government had shown great kindness to and had honored the Armenians, but that they were not satisfied and wanted autonomy; he then, by the report of a revolver, gave the signal for the general massacre. Among the massacred were two monks, one of them being the father superior of Sourp Garabed, Yeghishe Vartabed, who had a chance of escaping, but did not wish to be separated from his flock, and was killed with them. From the Sahajian district about 4,000 Armenians found refuge in the forests of the monastery, and fought against themselves alive on wheat, raw meat without salt, turtles, frogs, &c. Some of them finally surrendered, but no one knows the fate of the remainder. The monastery of St. Garabed was sacked and robbed. The Turks opened the tomb of St. Garabed and destroyed everything. Turkish chiefs took up their quarters in the monastery with imprisoned Armenian Girls.

 

According to another report no one was spared in Mush, not even the orphans in the German Orphanage. Some of these were killed and others deported. The Rev. Krikor and Mr. Marcar Ghougaxsian, teachers in the German Orphanage, were killed, and only two escape death, Miss Matgarid Nalbandian and Miss Maritza Arisdakesian. These were graduates of the German Seminary at Mezre, and owe their lives to a kind German lady.

 

According to the reports of some Armenians who had found refuge in the forests of Sourp Garabed and finally made their way to the Caucasus, Hilmi Bey was appointed for the purpose of clearing the Armenian provinces of Armenians. This man reached Erzerum on May 18, and then went to Khnyss, Boulanik, Khlat, &c., massacring every Armenian in these places. According to a letter dated June 19, (July 3,) written to one of these refugees, Hilmi Bey had three army corps (?) with him, a body of gendarmes, and the volunteers of Hadji Moussa Bey and Sheik Hazret, who had come to Mush to massacre the Armenians. TO these forces were joined the Turkish mob of Mush, the Turkish refugees from Alashkerd and Badnotz, Keur Husein ***** and Abdul-Medjid Bey. The Massacres were directed by Governor Djevdet of Van, Commander Halil of Diliman, Governor Abd-ul-Khalak of Bitlis, and Governor Servet Bey of Mush. The order for massacre was given on June 28, (July 11.) According to Turkish Government statistics 120,000 Armenians were killed in this district.

 

Slaughter at Trebizond

 

The Armenians of the important port of Trebizond, which has since been occupied by the Russians, also went through the troves of deportation and massacre. The decree of deportation affecting the Trebizond Armenians was promulgated on June 24, 1915. Subsequent happenings are thus described by G. Gorrini, late Italian Consul General at Trebizond:

 

From June 24, the date of the publication of the infamous decree, until July 23, the date of my own departure from Trebizond, I no longer slept or ate; I was given over to nerves and nausea, so terrible was the torment of having to look on at the wholesale execution of these defenseless, innocent creatures.

 

The passing of the gangs of Armenian exiles beneath the windows and before the door of the Consulate; their prayers for help, when neither I nor any other could so anything to answer them; the city in a state of siege, guarded at every point by 15,000 troops in complete war equipment, by thousands of police agents, by bangs of volunteers, and by the members of the Committee of Union and Progress; the lamentations, the tears, the abandonment’s, the imprecations, the many suicides, the instantaneous deaths caused by sheer terror, the sudden unhinging of men’s reason, the conflagrations, the shooting of victims in the city, the ruthless searches through the houses and in the countryside, the hundreds of corpses found every day along the exile road, the young women converted by force to Islam of exiled like the rest, the children torn away from their families or from the Christian schools, and handed over by force to Moslem families, or else placed by hundreds on board ship in nothing but their shirts, and then capsized and drowned in the Black Sea and the River Dere Mendere -- these are my last ineffaceable memories of Trebizond, memories which still, at a month’s distance, torment my soul and almost drive me frantic.

 

When ones has had to look on for a whole month at such horrors, at such protracted tortures, with absolutely no power of acting as one longed to act, the question naturally and spontaneously suggests itself, whether all the cannibals and all the wild beasts in the world have not left their hiding places and retreats, left the virgin forests of Africa, Asia, America, and Oceania, to make their rendezvous at Stamboul.

 

Unfortunates of Baiburt

 

Baiburt, mentioned often in the news as the scene of fighting between Russians and Turks, was also the scene of terrible outrages. According to an Armenian lady deported from Baiburt, who communicated her experiences to the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief. the Armenian population of the place was deported in three batches. She went with the third batch. She told of her sufferings on the road as follows:

 

We had got only two hours away from home when bands of villagers and brigands in large numbers, with rifles, guns, axes, &c., surrounded us on the road, and robbed us of all we had. The gendarmes took my three horses and sold them to Turkish mouhadjirs, pocketing the money. They took my money and the gold pieces from my daughter’s neck, also all our food.

 

After this they separated the men, one by one, and shot them all within six or seven days-- every male above 15 years old. By my side were killed two priests, one of them over 90 years age. The brigands took all the good-looking women and carried them off on their horses. Very many women and girls were thus carried off to the mountains. Among them my sister, whose one-year-old baby they threw away; a Turk picked it up and carried it off, I know not where. My mother walked till she could walk no further and dropped by the roadside on a mountain top.

 

We found on the road many of those who had been deported from Barburt in the previous convoys; some women were among the killed, with their husbands and sons. we also came across some old people and little infants still alive but in a pitiful condition, having shouted their voices away.

 

We were not allowed to sleep at night in the villages, but lay down outside. Under cover of the night indescribable deeds were committed by the gendarmes, brigands, and Villagers. Many of us died from hunger and strokes of apoplexy. Others were left by the roadside, too feeble to go on.

 

One morning we saw fifty or sixty wagons with about thirty Turkish widows, whose husbands had been killed in the war; and these were going to Constantinople. One of these women made a sign to one of the Gendarmes to kill a certain Armenian whom she pointed out. The gendarme asked her if she did not wish to kill him herself, at which she said: “Why not?2 and, drawing a revolver from her pocket, shot him dead.

 

The worst and most unimaginable horrors were reserved for us at the banks of the Euphrates and in the Erzingan Plain. The mutilated bodies of women, girls, and little children made everybody shudder. The brigands were doing all sorts of awful deeds to the women and girls that were with us, whose cries went up to heaven. At the Euphrates the brigands and gendarmes threw into the river all the remaining children under 15 years old. Those that could swim were shot down as they struggled in the water.

 

In a recent cablegram Lord Bryce adds: “All the civilized nations able to assist the Armenians today should know that the need is still extremely urgent. Several hundred thousand exiles who survived the horrors of deportation are now perishing of exposure and starvation in the Arabian Desert. Latest reports of neutral eyewitnesses describe terrible conditions. Sick people are throwing themselves into graves, begging grave diggers to bury them; women are going mad and eating grass and carrion; parents are putting children out of their misery, digging their own graves and awaiting death. The future of the Armenians Nation depends of saving the refugees in Russia, but this requires worldwide assistance for feeding, clothing, housing, and repatriation.”

 

New York Times

Edited April 24, 2008 by Ashot

[Ashot]

THE CALVARY OF A NATION

 

NOVEMBER --1916

 

Early in the spring of 1915 the following proclamation was sent to all the officials in the interior of Turkey:--

 

‘Our fellow countrymen the Armenians, who from one of the racial elements of the Ottoman Empire, having, under foreign instigation, for many years past, adopted false ideas of a nature to disturb the public order and brought about bloody happenings and attempted to destroy the peace and security of the Ottoman State, the safety and interest of their fellow countrymen as well as their own; and, moreover, as they have presumed to join themselves to their moral enemy, Russia, and to the enemies now at war with our State,

 

‘Be it known that our Government is compelled to adopt extraordinary measures both for the preservation of order and security of the country and for the welfare and the continuation of the existence of the Armenian people itself.

 

‘Therefore, as a measure to be applied until the conclusion of the war, the Armenians shall be sent away to places which have been prepared in the Vilayets of the interior; and a literal obedience to following orders is categorically enjoined on all Ottomans:

 

‘First. All Armenians, with the exception of the sick, shall leave their villages or quarters, under the escort of the gendarmerie, within five days from the date of this proclamation.

 

‘Second. Though they are free to carry with them on their journey such articles of movable property as they may desire, they are forbidden to sell their lands or their extra effects, or to leave the latter with other persons, as their exile temporary, and their landed property and the effects they are unable to take with them will be taken care of under supervision of the Government, and stored in protected buildings. Any one who sells or attempts to dispose of his movable effects or landed property in a manner contrary to this order, shall be tried by court-martial. Persons are free to sell to the Government only such articles as may answer the needs of the army.’

 

The third clause contains a promise of safe conduct.

 

The fourth threatened with severe punishment any one attempting to molest the Armenians on their way to the interior.

 

The fifth clause reads: ‘Since the Armenians are obliged to submit to the decision of the Government, if any of them attempt to resist the soldiers or gendarmes by force of arms, arms shall be used against them, and they shall be taken dead of alive. In like manner, those who, in opposition to the Government’s decision, refrain from leaving or seek to hide themselves, shall be sent before a court-martial; and if they are sheltered of given food and assistance, the persons who shelter or aid them shall be sent before the court-martial for execution.’

 

In these few sentences a responsible government sanctioned and set in motion one of the most terrible of recorded tragedies -- the Armenian deportation.

 

To the average person, these two words convey little but a vague sense of injustice done, of suffering endured. Such, after all are the chief associations connected with the name of the Ottoman Empire, which has enjoyed most if its world-prominence through wholesale barbarities. Massacres have been one of the common occurrences of Turkish history. The Turk came from the heart of Asia to the land he now occupies, massacring; by intermittent massacres he held down the vanquished peoples. The nineteenth of these black deeds: the period of the Greek Revolution, 1821-27, when Ibrahim ***** boasted that he would reduce Greece to a desert, and almost fulfilled his boast; the Syrian massacre of 1860; the Serbian atrocities, and those of Bulgaria in 1875-76, when Mr. Gladstone declared that ‘the Turk must leave Europe, bag and baggage’; the long and terrible record of Armenian slaughter. Down through the reign of Abdul Hamid the bloodstained story goes, straight on to the inauguration of the Young Turk regime, which was ushered in by such slaughter of the Armenians as surpassed the Hamidian outrages; and at each visitation of fire and sword upon unoffending peoples the would has trilled with horror and sympathy, though it has been slow to realize that these things have come to pass chiefly through the protection afforded the Turks by the great European powers’ jealousy of one another. Time and again the story has been repeated, until (must it be confess?) Americans and Europeans have become weary of it, and have begun to regard the Armenians, with more to less resignation, as a race appointed to suffer.

 

No wonder, the, that at a time when all Europe is filled with blood and tears, and desolation stakes abroad among her nations, it is difficult to get people to lend an ear to the supreme ordeal of the Armenians, and to convince them that at this moment the Turks are writing unhindered what Professor Gibsons justly calls the ‘blackest page in modern history.’ It is difficult to convince them that the cruelties of Abdul Hamid were merciful by comparison with this final turn of the screw. The suffering cause by massacres was scattering; it smote only a fraction of the people, a thousand here, ten thousand there, while the bulk of the race survived. Such was the policy or wisdom of the Old Turk; he kept the cow alive that he might continually milk her. Not so with the Young Turk. Intelligent, cultured, irreligious, and unscrupulous, the old-fashioned method of dealing with the Armenians was too slow for him; he set problem once for all, and devised the scheme of deportation -- which, bluntly, is another way of saying the extermination of the Armenian race of the Ottoman Empire.*

 

[*I shall not attempt here to go behind the Turks in trying to find the moving power that devised and organized the deportation. I personally believe Germany to be the real instigator. Germany, they say, planned for a bona-fide transfer of the Armenians to places in the interior. If this be true, the Turk took the hint only too well; he deported his victims into eternity. Certainly it would seem to be paying too great a compliment to the intelligence of the Turk, who for centuries had been able to devise more efficient brutality than the old-style massacres. to give him credit for happening on the new scheme unaided.--THE AUTHOR.]

 

The full story of the deportation will never be written, for the reason that it deals so largely with suffering that is indescribable, heartlessness that is incredible. The central fact is, however, that under the pretext of war-measures the Armenians have been driven en masse from the shores of the Black Sea and Marmora southward as far as the Syrian Desert. People who were comfortably settled in their homes in region where their ancestors had lived for centuries, were forced, on short notice, to abandon their all and march under the whips of the gendarmerie into the desolate hinterland, without provisions or shelter. Women whose husbands had been serving in the Turkish army for months were herded along with children in their arms.

 

The happenings that I saw in Marsovan will give a specific instance of what was going on all over the country. Marsovan, which lies in the Vilayet of Sivas some sixty miles south of the Black Sea, had a population of about 30,000 souls -- half Turks, half Armenians. Of Greeks there were very few. On the last Thursday in April, 1915, twenty-five of the leading Armenians were arrested without warning -- among them the professor of Armenian in the American College and several graduates of the same institution. Next day they were dispatched under escort to Sivas, the capital. That was the end of them. Not one was seen alive again. Those who did not fall victims to the typhus that raged among the prisoners succumbed to tortures that were worse than medieval. The professor’s fate was particularly terrible. Credible reports had it that his eyes were gouged from their sockets, his nails torn out by the roots, and his hair and mustache plucked out slowly, hair by hair. The wretched man survived these ordeals, and was finally executed. No one knows what charges were brought against him as pretext for this maltreatment. Stories of similar tortures came in from all quarters. A dentist and a prominent merchant of Amasia, both friends of mine, good citizens and men who had been of service to the Turkish government, were first thrown into solitary confinement, the guards preventing them from sitting or lying down for days, and then subjected to the bastinado, or beating with rods on the soles of the feet -- a punishment too terrible for description. when unconsciousness mercifully came to them, they were revived and tended by their ruffian keepers, only to be put through the same process again. While they writhed under the rods, all kinds of questions were asked them, particularly concerning revolutionary plans, persons imaged to be involved, concealed arms, and so on.

 

The arrests continued through the months of May and June. It was one long reign of terror. No one knew whose turn would come next. Hundreds were carried off, usually at night, -- taken from their beds to the jail, and then, as we afterwards learned, to places of execution. The scenes outside the prison were beyond description. I could see them from my bedroom window, every day -- groups of women and children waiting outside the gates with little bundles of food for their relatives inside, although they knew how little chance there was its reaching their loved ones. Quietly they stood there, though the silence was often shattered by the cries of some woman who had just learned that her husband had been taken away. This was the way mothers heard of the departure of their sons, sisters of their brothers, little children of their fathers. These sights were too heartrending to watch, but it was worse still when the poor people came to my study, begging me to offer intercession that I knew was utterly useless.

 

At last, toward the end of June, all male Armenians over the age of twelve were arrested. The place where they were herded was a subterranean chamber under the town barracks. According to the description of friends who were temporarily released, the chamber was literally packed with prisoners, there was just standing-room for many; the air at the entrance, they said, struck the face like the blast of hot air from an oven, and foul as the breath of the Black Hole of Calcutta, for one corner, perforce, had to be used for the necessities of nature.

 

Finally, numbers of the men imprisoned here were taken out one night and driven off in the direction of Amasia or Zileh. They never reached their destinations, however. At a distance of some three or four hours from Marsovan they were led aside in groups of five or ten, with their hands tied behind them, and, after they had been made to kneel down, they were butchered with axes or daggers and thrown into ditches. This comes straight from the testimony of eye-witnesses -- Turks all, and some of them the gendarmes who had helped consummate the massacre. According to one official, 1215 men were disposed of on this way. Before their bodies were abandoned, they were stripped of all their outer garments, and whatever was found on the way of valuables or trinkets went to the executioners, many of whom, penniless before the killing began, came back with bulging, clinking pockets. The shoes of the Armenians and their clothes were recognized by the merchants as belonging to this or that victim.

 

The last Saturday in June, the Governor of the town called the surviving men over sixty and under eighteen years from the jail, and told them that the Sultan had pardoned their offences. Let them return home and pray for the Sultan! The rejoicing over this clemency was unbounded; but on the next day the town-crier went through the streets of Marsovan, proclaiming that all Armenians must leave the place within three days and start for Morsul and Der-Zor, more than 1000 miles to the south! The men released the day before were to accompany the women and children. This was the first intimation the people had as to the real fate that awaited them.

 

On the morning of the third day, before dawn, ox-carts began to pour into Marsovan from all the neighboring villages; the Armenians were forced by the gendarmes to get into them with such belongings as they could hastily snatch up, and so the exodus began. The great, lumbering wains, loaded with terrified victims, rumbled slowly through the streets, while those who had been left behind stood watching in silence, knowing that their turn would come. And come it did, sooner even than they expected; for in two or three days the oxcarts returned, empty, to receive fresh loads. They had gone a comparatively short distance into the interior, then the Armenians were commanded to get out and continue the southward journey on foot. The real ‘deportation’ had begun.

 

It should be kept in mind that the tragedy of Marsovan was being enacted, on a greater or lesser scale, in hundreds of other villages and towns, in all of which the eliminative processes had been working on the Armenians in the same general fashion. Before the wretched people were driven wholesale from their homes, the finest young girls and women were carried off to the Turkish harems. Their position, professedly, was to be that of servants, but their real status can easily be imagined. This ‘selection’ continued methodically all along the caravan routs which the refugees were following. Kurds, Turks, Arabs, attacked the defenseless victims and tool their pick of them unhindered. The rest were forced to go on under the whips of gendarmes and other officials worse than slave-drivers.

 

As fatigue and hunger made their inroads on the Armenians, the conditions became indescribable. Mothers, with small children in their arms, staggered along until their outraged bodies succumbed, and they fell fainting by the wayside. Many others plunged from cliffs or flung themselves into rivers, in order to escape what they knew was worse than death. More terrible still was the predicament of women nearing confinement. The gendarmes had no mercy on them. When their hour had come they were scarcely allowed to wait until labor was over before the drivers’ whips urged them to their feet, and on and on -- until hemorrhage put an end to their misery. The newborn children were in most instances dashed to pieces against rocks.*

 

[*For further information the reader is referred to the bulletins of the America Committee on Armenian and Syrian Relief, 70 Fifth Avenue New York City.-- THE AUTHOR.]

 

For the completer evolution of the ‘deportation’ system, we may again examine the case of Marsovan. This town is an important missionary center. Under the American Board, an extensive medical, evangelical, and educational work was carried on here. There was Anatolia College, with more than four hundred students; a girls’ boarding school of almost three hundred pupils; a hospital, a theological seminary, and an industrial institution. Forces for good were at work which spread their influence throughout the Ottoman Empire, and beyond -- into Russia, Greece, and Egypt. Ambassador Morgenthau had secured promises from Enver ***** and Tallat Bey the college people should not be molested, but the governor of Marsovan declared that he had been notified of no such promise, and had received no orders save those to deport all Armenians. Once more the Turks had pulled wool over the diplomat’s eyes.

 

And so, on August 10, 1915, sixty-one ox-carts entered the college compound. The gendarmes forced the great gates open, and battered down every closed door. They entered even the homes of Americans, and took away every Armenian on the premises. Professors, teachers, students, nurses from hospital who had cared for Turkish soldiers for months, servants -- all had to go. According to the testimony of the wives of the professors, seen near Sivas, they were all kept together until they passed Zieh (the region whence Julius Cesar sent his famous ‘Veni, vidi, vici’), then they were separated. The men, bound with ropes, were driven in one direction, the women and young children in another. According to the testimony of the gendarmes, all the men were killed. No word has been received from them to this day. Their number included Professor V. H. Hagopian, a scholar trainer in the University of Constantinople, author of several books and legal adviser to the college; Professor A. G. Sivastian, who occupied the chair of mathematics and astronomy, -- an experienced teacher and true Christian gentlemen,-- and many other members of the faculty. None of these had any connection with revolutionary movements; all were loyal and useful citizens who would have been welcome in any country and would have added to its welfare. That, it seems, was their chief crime.

 

The day after the evacuation of the college came the turn of the Girls’ School. Early in the morning the gendarmes appeared and took all the pupils away. Before they were sent from the town each girl was put through a separate inquisition by a Turkish official, during which she was given the choice between adopting the faith of Islam and remaining in safety, and being deported. One the way similar propositions were made to them, to an accompaniment of threats. Fortunately the principal of the school, and American woman, begged permission to follow the girls and overtook some of them in Sivas, where she managed to get the Vali to consent to her bringing back forty-eight to Marsovan. The rest had been carried father on, and were beyond help.

 

While the deportation was in full swing, various committees of government officials went about taking inventories in the houses and shops of the exiles, and going through the form of sealing them up. Many an official, however, got a fat pocketbook and a full house on the course of his duties; in fact, the property of the Armenians vanished so fast that, when the inventory-taking was over, the sum total of what was found in the houses scarcely sufficed to pay the expenses of the committees! And yet the Armenian homes had been full of carpets, furniture, copper utensils, bedding, and so forth, all of which had to be left behind when the owners were driven forth to perish.

 

The terrible demoralization that prevailed in Marsovan from the time of the deportations decided me to leave the country; on the late summer, therefore, I set out for Constantinople, accompanied by Mr. J. Arozian, Professor of Chemistry in Anatolia College, -- an American citizen, -- and his wife, his daughter, and his aged mother. With us also went Mrs. Gullienthian, with her four daughters, who had come over from England to visit relatives (these two families held special permits from Enver ***** to go the capital), and the Rev. K. Domirgian and his wife and daughter. The railroad to Constantinople starts at Angora, and the long ride from Marsovan to the terminus had to be made in carriages. While we were still two days’ journey from Angora, as we were climbing a steep hill near the village of Yaghly, we were stopped by a gendarme, fully armed, with an escort of eight or ten ruffians with axes in their hands. He asked us if there were any Armenians in our party, adding that all Armenians must return at once to the place whence they had started. I argued and pleaded with him, laying special stress on the passes from Enver *****, whose name, I thought, would work miracles; but the man cut me short with an oath, saying that he could neither read nor write; that he was put there to send back Armenians, and back they should go.

 

While we were arguing with him, up came a dozen or so men on horseback. They repeated the same order; ‘Armenians back!’ Our drivers, all Turks, came forward and pleaded for their customers; once more we showed the signature of Enver ***** -- thus time to the headman, who immediately became very friendly, shook hands with me, and babe us go our way in peace. We learned later that these men were one of the chette’s bands, which had been armed by the government and set loose to hunt Armenians. Convicts from the prisons were similarly armed and released for the same purpose. I was also told by eye-witnesses that numbers of Armenians had been killed near the very spot where we had encountered the horsemen.

 

But my friends had only a temporary escape. It was our bad fortune to reach Angora at the time when deportation had just begun. The previous Vali and the chief of police of this city had been opposed to the measure, and had held it off until they were summarily replaced by successors who were only too willing to obey orders from Constantinople. They succeeded in a very short time in rounding up the twenty thousand Armenians, among them the professor and the pastor who had journeyed with me from Marsovan. The driver who took them in his carriage to a lake four hours’ ride to the south of Angora told me that they were shot before his eyes.

 

During my stay in Angora all the male Armenians were deported, chiefly toward the southern interior. Villagers and gendarmes reported that great numbers of them were killed a short distance outside the city. Every day I saw them hurrying through the streets in miserable droves, with the police brutally following them up. The Armenians of Angora were mostly Catholics. No massacres took place among them loyal to the Turks; they took no part in nationalistic movements. They did not even call themselves Armenians. The Young Turks, however, made no discrimination of creed: Gregorians, Protestants, and Catholics were all put on the same footing and ruthlessly deported. Gregorian’s and Catholic priests were often driven off in the same wagon and decapitated with the same axe. It is worth nothing that while I was still in Angora the leaders of the Turkish Union and Progress Committee sent word to the Catholic bishop of the city that if he and his people would embrace Islam, they would all be spared. The refusal was unanimous.

 

As I continued my journey to Constantinople, further details of the great tragedy presented themselves. At every railroad station large groups of men, women, and children of all ages were waiting, silent and dejected, for the arrival of the freight cars that were to transport them toward Konia and remoter places of the interior. At some of the stations the police, with clubs in their hands, were waving their arms to and fro, hitting women and children indiscriminately, under the pretext of ‘keeping order’ among the poor terror-stricken creatures. Trains passed by us packed with exiles as with animals for slaughter; and never shall I forget the expression of their eyes as they peered from the slats of the slow-moving cars that were carrying them relentlessly toward the desert. This was the fate that met the Armenians of Eski Shelil, Biledjjik, Adabazaar, Ismid, Bardegag, and the regions around Brussa and the shores of Marmora -- including the Greeks of the latter region.

 

It is impossible to give any definite statistics as to the number of Armenians who have perished in the deportations. Even the exact number of these people in Turkey before the beginning of the war is not known. It is generally assumed, however, that there were about two million Armenians; and of this number it is no exaggeration to say that one million have been killed by actual violence or by exposure, disease, and starvation. According to a dispatch to the Department of State at Washington in May, 1916, there were some five hundred thousand scattered through Syria and Mesopotamia; And three hundred thousand more are believed to be distributed in various parts of Asia Minor. Practically all of these are exposed to constant danger of further deportation and siftings from point to point -- and every such shift means the disappearance of thousand. Those in the Syrian Desert were found ‘eating grass, herbs and locusts. In desperate cases, the carcasses of dead animals and human bodies are reported to have been eaten.’

 

If these conditions continue, the result is plain. The Turks will succeed in exterminating the Armenian race by the action of ‘natural cases,’ -- sickness, hunger, exhaustion. They will continue to drive them from place to place in the desert until are gone.

 

No one can hear the terrible tale of the Armenian deportation without asking what the underlying reasons for it all might be. Even beats of prey, it will be said, do not kill for the mere lust of killing; what is the object to be attained? What results do the Turks hope to get in return for the energy they have expended in prosecuting this extermination?

 

1. According to the Turkish Government, the plan was necessitated by the exigencies of war. ‘Turkey,’ they said, ‘was engaged overwhelming odds, fighting for her very life. The Armenians were plotting with the enemy and preparing internal disturbances; therefore they had to be removed to a place where they could be rendered harmless.’

 

This charge of plotting is groundless. The only instance in which the Armenians made armed resistance to the Turks are at Van -- and then only when they had been attacked and saw that they were doomed to extermination. It is true that, when the sale of arms was generally permitted after the revolution of 1908, many Armenians took advantage of the occasion to secure weapons of defense. The source of these arms was controlled by the government, however, coming as they did direct from Germany; and when, after the declaration of war, the Armenians were commanded to give them up, they voluntarily obeyed, those persons who were at first inclined to conceal their weapons finally yielding to the persuasion of their priests or pastors.

 

Some slight excuse for the action of the Turks might seem to be found in the existence of the organized Armenian ‘Hinchakist’ and ‘Tashuagist’ societies which, under the reign of Abdul Hamid, were perforce kept secret. But after the revolution of 1908, these societies openly proclaimed themselves, and won the approval of the Young Turks, who declared that ‘the Armenian revolutionists were among the pioneers of Ottoman liberty.’ Their program was broadly socialistic and educational, aiming at the instruction of the people and their elevation to those ideals which the Young Turks themselves had espoused with such high-sounding phrases. When the test came, it was shown how empty these phrases really were.

 

2. Race-jealousy is a factor to be reckoned with. The Turks are really aliens in the country they rule: they came as conquerors, and have maintained their supremacy by force. The Armenians, when they were subjugated by the Turks, were an ancient and civilized people, with an organized society which the Turks, in long centuries, have never been able to approximate: an enterprising race, thrifty, energetic, and capable of progress and culture along all lines. In spite of savage repression, they became the leading merchants, traders, lawyers, doctors of the country, especially in the interior. Even in the reign of Abdul Hamid the Minister of Finance was usually an Armenian. They amassed great wealth and property, and the Turkish peasant was usually dependent on them.

 

Now the real program of the Young Turk party is ‘Turkey for the Turks.’ Under the name of ‘Ottomanization,’ they were determined to assimilate or eliminate all the non-Turkish elements in the Empire, and uplift their own race at the expense of the non-Moslem peoples of the country. They were drunk with the idea of nationalism. They condemned the statesmanlike policy of Mohammed II, conqueror of Constantinople, in organizing and establishing the Greek Patriarch, with its special privileges and immunities, and bewailed the fact that the Old Turks had allowed the Greek, Armenian, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Jewish elements of the Empire to keep intact their religious, linguistic, and racial peculiarities for so many centuries. They were determined to be supreme in the land they conquered, absolute masters over the subject peoples.

 

3. All attempts to reform Turkey have been shattered against Mohammedanism. The very first article of the Turkish Constitution declares: ‘The religion of the Ottoman Empire is Islam.’ The Young Turks are mostly indifferent to matters of faith, if not actually irreligious, but they know the power of Islam over the people, -- its value has often been proved in assimilating the non-Turkish elements of the Empire, -- and in the present case they effectually roused the inherently intolerant spirit of Islam against the ‘rebellious’ Armenians.

 

Religious fanaticism was especially appealed to when the Russians withdrew from Van and Gallipoli campaign collapsed, and the idea of the Jehad or Sacred War gained in popularity. That the cause of the Armenian atrocities was not wholly religious, however, is shown by the extremely limited categories of persons to whom the choice between deportation or acceptance of Islam was offered.

 

4. As a fourth factor one must mention the conflicting interests and the intrigues of European diplomacy. The Christians of Turkey have suffered untold misery because Europe cannot agree. Turkey owes her existence today to the backing England gave her in the nineteenth century. Had it not been for the Crimean War, Russia would have swallowed up the greater part, if not the whole, of Turkey, and the world would never have heard of the Hamidian massacres. In 1878, when the Russian forces advanced to the very gates of Constantinople and the Sultan was glad to sign the treaty of San Stefano (with its Article 16, providing for necessary reforms in Armenia), It was England that stepped forward, vetoed the treaty, and arranged for the Berlin Conference, which resulted in the Treaty of Berlin, its sixty-first article stipulating even greater relief for Armenia.* [*Art. 61 of the Treaty of Berlin. (July 13, 1878). ‘The Sublime Porte undertakes to carry out without further delay the improvements and reforms demanded by local requirements in the provinces inhabited by Armenians, and to guarantee their security against the Circassians and Kurds. It will periodically make known the steps taken to this effect to the Powers, who will superintend their application.’--THE AUTHOR.] That article was the starting-point of the Armenian troubles. Turkey promised; six great powers guaranteed the reforms -- with the result that the Armenians are now in danger of extermination.

 

TO the credit of England be it said, she used her influence with Turkey for the betterment of the fate of the Christians; but as a matter of fact, it was her backing that kept Turkey alive. British interests demanded the Territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire --and what an integrity it was! After repeated clippings on all sides -- Bosnia, and Herzegovina going to Austria, the Caucasus to Russia, Cyprus and Egypt to England, traceably to Greece, Eastern Romania to Bulgaria -- the ‘territorial integrity’ of Turkey remained intact, for so it had been decreed by the Concert of Europe!

 

But when the interests of England changed; when it suited her plans better to see the Russian Bear on the shores of the Bosphorus than the German Eagle, the Conference of Reval was held, and Turkey’s disintegration determined on. But it was too late. A new defender had risen up, with more ardor and zeal that the Turk had ever known before. Kaiser and Sultan had clasped hands, and under the electrifying influence of this new rapprochement the Young Turks startled the world. In six month they succeeded in doing what the Old Turks were unable to accomplish in six centuries. The extermination of the Armenians is well under way. Thousands of Nestorians and Syrians have vanished from the face of the earth. More than 300,000 Greeks have been deported from the Ottoman Empire, and many more sent to the interior. The fate that awaits the surviving Christians and Jews -- in fact, of all the non-Turkish elements -- depends on the term of the fratricidal war and its fortunes. The Young Turks are watchfully waiting to carry out their program: ‘Turkey for the Turks.’

 

Atlantic Monthly

[Ashot]

The Total of Armenian and Syrian Dead

The Total of Armenian and Syrian Dead By William Walker Rockwell, Ph. D. (Professor in Union Theological Seminary and Member of American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief)

 

HOW many Armenian and Syrian noncombatants have died of disease, hardship, or violence during the last two years?

 

There are no perfectly reliable statistics of the racial elements which compose the population of Turkey. The ordinary Turkish figures for the Armenians and other Christian groups are too small, for two reasons: First, the Turks are anxious to minimize the strength of the Christian minorities, in order to block European demands for internal reforms; second, some Christian families fall to report all their men to the Government, in order to evade their full duty in the matter of military service. The Armenian figures, on the other hand, are collected by the Armenian Patriachate, till recently in Constantinople; and they certainly do not underestimate the numbers of their own millet or community. Though some German writers have inclined to accept the Turkish figures, the consensus of foreign opinion holds that there were in Turkey before the war at least 1,600,000 to 2,000,000 Armenians. How many of them are alive today?

 

No official list of the deaths has been kept. Nameless and unrecorded corpses have marked every trail down which the exiles straggled on their weary march toward the region of Aleppo. The scows of Trebizond and the flatboats of the Euphrates did not record passengers "lost overboard." In the desert vultures were the only coroners. Along the line of the Baghdad Railway, where imported system prevails, more accurate information may perhaps exist; but those who may know won't tell.

 

In some localities the death rate has been terribly high. From one small group of villages only 15.2 per cent. of the inhabitants are known to have reached what was, for the time to have reached what was, for the time at least, the goal of their deportation. A common estimate of the morality has been 50 per cent. of the total Armenian population; in other words, that from 800,000 to 1,000,000 have perished. In May, when I tabulated in the "Fifth Bulletin of the Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief" what we then knew, it seemed probable that the number of survivors was under 1,150,000. The total Armenian losses to that date would then be between 450,000 and 850,000 according as we estimate the population before the war at 1,600,000 or at 2,000,000. In view, however, of the frightful starvation since reported in the Deir-el-Zor region and elsewhere, it is quite possible that by this time the losses have reached 50 per cent.

 

How many Armenians have died in massacres? During the siege of Van the Turks are said to have slaughtered 55,000 Armenians in the surrounding country. That is the report brought back by the Americans who were in Van during the siege; one of them told me that the Russian authorities forbade people after that to eat fish drawn from the great inland lake Van, because of the multitude of the floating corpses of massacre victims. How many tens of thousands have died like the 1,213 men of Marsovan, who were marched up into lonely valleys and "deported" by knives at their throats or by bullets in their backs? Who can number the Armenian soldiers in labor regiments who were divided up into squads of 300 or 400 to mend roads, only to be shot and sabered to a man on suspicion of revolutionary plots? How numerous were the bundles of those drowned by the Kurds at Kemakh, that rolled down the Euphrates and were washed ashore near the railroad bridge at Jerablus, only to be refused burial by a local Turkish official because he could affiliations of the long-since deceased? If we add horror to horror, we must at the end confess that we do not know. To van add Marsovan; pile on Bitlis, Trebizond, Erzerum, Erzingan, Harpot, and thrice-savage Kemakh; exhaust even the villages of those provinces (now conquered by Russia) which formed what we may style massacre zone; make all possible deduction for exaggeration or downright lies, and you reach a ghastly total that must remain forever ringed around with impenetrable gloom.

 

How many Armenians are left? In May, 1916, the best figures were as follows:

 

Aleppo, Zor, Damascus, and southward...................................486,000

Constantinople and Smyrna, natives not deported, about............150,000

Armenians in other parts of Turkey, perhaps............................300,000

Refugees in the Russian Caucasus.......................................182,800

In districts of Turkey occupied by Russia...............................12,100

In Salmas, Persia, (some of them refugees from Turkey)..............9,000

______________________________

Total living Armenians.....................................................1,139,900

 

 

The largest item tabulated in May was 486,000. That number was, however, reported of Feb. 3. Concerning those regions we have had later cables that hundreds are dying daily; that mothers are throwing babies into the Euphrates in despair; that survivors in many regions had to eat grass -- until the fierce rays of the Mesopotamian Summer dried up the grass, when some of the more desperate turned to cannibalism or attacked carrion. Therefore we may lop off another hundred thousand or two as the terrible toll of the year in which America has been toying with the problem of relief. There may be a scant million of Turkish Armenians still unburied.

 

The Armenians are not the only unfortunates; the Syrians also have been decimated. There are many varieties of Syrian Christians. Some lived near the Persian border and in ancient Assyria, and are known as Nestorians, or Assyrian Christians. Some of these living north of Mosul have been massacred. The Nestorian Highlanders, who, according to figures I communicate from a pamphlet now in press, claimed before the war to number 90,000, had to fight their way out to Persia in the Autumn of 1915. Our committee fed during November and December, 1915, no less than 30,000 of these refugees from Turkey, in addition to an equal number of destitute Christians whose homes were of the Persian side of the boundary. Though the death rate has been high, it not perhaps reacted the one-third to one-half reported through native channels of information. Before the war there were from 160,000 to 200,000 Syrian Christians (inclusive of Nestorians, Roman Catholic Uniats, Protestants, and some scattered communities of Jacobites) living in the Tigris region, exclusive of Diarbekir, in the Highlands of Kurdistan, and in Northwestern Persia, (Adarbaijan.) Great numbers have perished, but no one knows how many. During the Turkish occupation of Urmia (Jan. 2-May 20, 1915) 4,000 died of want and of epidemics in that town, and 1,000 were killed in outlying villages. That is the outstanding item in the long roll of death in Persia.

 

The woes of the Syrians in modern Syria, near the Mediterranean, are also crying. It is said that at least 80,000 of the inhabitants of the Lebanon have died of starvation; and some have been deported into the region of Sivas, Asia Minor. (See " The Near East," London June 9, 1916.) The Syrian Mount Lebanon Relief Committee, a native organization in New York, asserts that 100,000 have perished in the Lebanon alone. An American traveler, just back from Beirut, says that in that center of Information the estimates vary from 80,000 to 120,000. In addition, there has been awful misery among the Palestinian Jews.

 

The number of marchers in New York's great "preparedness" parade last May was about 125,000. They took about thirteen hours to pass a given point, marching twenty abreast. If the ghosts of the of the Christians civilians who have perished miserably in Turkey since the commencement of the great holocaust should march down Fifth Avenue twenty abreast there might be a million of them, and they would then take four days and eight hours to pass the great reviewing stand -- in fact, longer, for most of them would be women and children.

 

New York Times

[Ashot]

WHY THE ARMENIANS WERE KILLED

The Literary Digest for November 11, 1916 THE ARMENIANS, it appears, has only himself to blame for all his woes. If he would stay conquered and have no national aspirations and contribute his intelligence to the furtherance of Turkish wealth and comfort, the Turk would not massacre him or send him into exile. The massacres began almost as soon as the war started, and it has taken two years for an explanation to be forthcoming. The position of the Turkish Government has never been fully understood, says the Turkish Foreign Minister, Halil Bey, in an interview with the Associated Press representative, which comes from Vienna be way of Berlin and London. "The Young Turks have always looked upon the Armenians as a valuable assert of the Turkish Empire," says Halil Bey. "The fact is, we needed them," he acknowledges, and for these reasons:

 

"The country's commerce was largely in their hands, and as farmers the Armenians have a great value. We did not look upon them as valuable chattels, however. We were willing to give them an equal share in the Government, which we did, as is shown by the fact that before the outbreak of the war we had a large number of Armenians in the Chamber of Deputies and also several Senators and a Minister. Nearly all the Vice-Ministers were Armenians, because we recognized the ability of the Armenians and were ready to give them their political rights in the tenancy of a proportionate number of public offices.

 

"After the revolution all went for time, and the Young Turks hoped they had finally found a solution to the problem which had vexed the old regime in Turkey for many years and had retarded the progress of the country. The Balkan War, However, caused the Armenians again to take up their separatist ideals. Committees formed an organization with the intention of securing for the Armenians an autonomous Government."

 

The Turkish Minister would be "the last man to deny a people self-government," but the case of the Armenians, he thinks, was not one for autonomy:

 

"The Armenians spread throughout Asia Minor and southern Russia are merely a majority in the districts usually designated as Armenian. Armenian autonomy, therefore, would lead to the loss of the independence of the other Ottoman races. Under these conditions even the Young Turks were opposed to the Armenian plan, but in justice they wanted to give the Armenians a fuller share in the Government, which was done, and even our worst traducers can not deny that.

 

"When the war broke out we knew exactly what the Armenians were doing. More bombs, rifles, ammunition, ad money had been brought into the country, and their organization was made even more perfect. I was then President of the Chamber of Deputies and was very fond of the Armenians members, as I had always been a friend of that race. So I called the Armenian representatives together and asked what they intended doing. At the end of the conversation I told them I could sympathize with their ideals and had always done so as long as they were not entirely separatist.

 

" 'Gentlemen.' I said. 'I fully understand your position and hope that you understand ours. We have engaged in a war in which we may go down. That will be your opportunity to make arrangements with the Entente, but bear in mind that the Ottoman Government will apply the most severe measures if you act against the Turks before you can meet the Entente Powers with clean hands, which you can do by supporting us so far and no further than the law demands. I think the Entente statesmen will see the correctness of such conduct and will recognize your claim to autonomy. You can then take up the work where we left off and to which I wish you every success, but bear in mind that we are not gone yet, and that the slightest false move on your part will bring trouble to all Armenians. Sit quiet and let us try this issue. When you are sure we have lost, go over to the Entente and get from them all you can.' "

 

Halil Bey represents the Ottoman Government as one on this point, "realizing that the opportunity for the Armenians might come"; but despite this "the Armenians rose when the Russians invaded Asia Minor, and the Turkish Government took the measure which had been outlined to the Armenian leaders beforehand." The Armenian organization, it is declared made it impossible to confine the steps taken against them to a single locality in rebellion, "because the organization was so perfect that only a sweeping measure at the first hint of an uprising could meet the situation," Halil Bey continues:

 

"I will say that loss to the Ottoman Empire through the deportation of the Armenians has been immense. The Armenian is able and industrious, and, therefore, valuable in the economic scheme; but what could be done? We were at war and obliged, therefore, to employ every means to make secure our own position, which was betrayed so basely through our confidence."

 

Literary Digest

[Ashot]

Turkish Foreign Minister's Defense of Armenian Massacres

 

CURRENT HISTORY

(Published by New York Times Company, Times Square, New York, N. Y.)

The Turkish Foreign Minister, Halil Bey, in an interview with The Associated Press representative at Vienna, Oct. 25, attempted to throw the blame of his Government's massacres of Armenian men, women, and children upon the Armenians themselves, on the ground that they had risen in revolt when the Russians invaded the country. He said:

 

THE Young Turks have always looked upon the Armenians as a valuable assert to the Turkish Empire. The fact is, we needed them. The country's commerce was largely in their hands; and as farmers the Armenians have a great value. We did not look upon them as valuable chattels, however. We were willing to give them an equal share in the Government, which we did, as is shown by the fact that before the outbreak of the war we had a large number of Armenians in the Chamber of Deputies and also several Senators and a Minister. Nearly all the Vice Ministers were Armenians, because we recognized the ability of the Armenians and were ready to give them their political rights in the tenancy of a proportionate number of public offices.

 

After the revolution all went well for a time, and the Young Turks hoped they had finally found a solution to the problem which had vexed the old regime in Turkey for many years and had retarded the progress of the country. The Balkan war, however, caused the Armenians to again take up their separatist ideals. Committees formed an organization with the intention of securing for the Armenians an autonomous government.

 

I think I would be the last man to deny a people self-government, but the case of the Armenians is one where this must be done. The Armenians, spread throughout Asia Minor and Southern Russia, are merely a majority in the districts usually designated as Armenian. Armenian autonomy, therefore, would lead to the loss of the independence of the other Ottoman races. Under these conditions even the Young Turks were opposed to the Armenian plan, but in justice they wanted to give the Armenians a fuller share on the Government, which was done. and even worst traducers cannot deny that.

 

When the war broke out we knew exactly what the Armenians were doing. More bombs, rifles, ammunition, and money had been brought into the country and their organization was made even more perfect. I was then President of the Chamber of Deputies and was very fond of the Armenian members, as I had always been a friend of that race. So I called the Armenian representatives together and asked what they intended doing. At the end of the conversation I told them I could sympathize with their ideals and had always done so as long as they were not entirely separatist.

 

"Gentleman," I said, "I fully understand your position and hope that you understand ours. We have engaged in a war in which we may go down. That will be your opportunity to make arrangements with the Entente, but bear in mind that the ottoman Government will apply the most severe measures if you act against the Turks before you know we are against the Turks before you know we are conquered. Make your plans so that you can meet the Entente Powers with clean hands, which you can do by supporting us so far and no further than the law demands. I think the Entente statesmen will see the correctness of such conduct and will recognize your claim to autonomy. You can then take up the work where we left off and in which I wish you every success, but bear in mind that we are not gone yet, and that the slightest false move on your part will bring trouble to all Armenians. Sit quiet and let us try this issue. When you are sure we have lost, go over to the Entente and get from them all you can."

 

[Enver *****, the leader of the Young Turks, Halil Bey said, called in the Armenian patriarch one day and told him the same thing, but despite this, he said, the Armenians rose when the Russians invaded Asia Minor, and the Turkish Government took the measures which had been outlined to the Armenian leaders beforehand. The Turkish Foreign Minister said that the Armenian organization made it impossible to confine the steps taken against the Armenians to a single locality in rebellion, because the organization was so perfect that only a sweeping measure at the first hint of an uprising could meet the situation. Halil Bey continued:]

 

I will say that the loss to the Ottoman Empire say that the loss to the Ottoman Empire through the deportation of the Armenians has been immense. The Armenian is able and industrious, and therefore, valuable in the economic scheme, but what could be done? We were at war and obliged, therefore, to employ every means to make secure our own position, which was betrayed so basely through our confidence.* * *We stand or fall with the Central Powers, and at present there is nothing to indicate that any of our troops will fail -- not so long as we have Germany to head the combination.

 

The German cannot be beaten in this war, because with the spirit to win they combine an unusually high ability as organizers. Germany's will to win and her organization are for Turkey every guarantee for success and victory. A people of 70,000,000 imbued with such a spirit is unconquerable.* * *

 

We in Turkey are one with the Central Government in the determination to defend our national integrity. Though we have been shorn in recent years of much of our territory, there remains enough of the Empire in point of extent and wealth of soil to build up a prosperous State, in which opportunity will come to all. That is the program of our Party of Union and Progress.

 

New York Times - Current History

[Ashot]

BEHIND THE TURKISH BARRIER

 

BY WILLIAM T. ELLIS This was the longest professional interview of my friend for Turkey talked steadily on the one subject from ten o'clock at night, with one hour's intermission; and then we resumed the theme for two hours the next morning, when the incomplete discussion was adjourned, to be resumed later. Now to compress into one brief article the high points of the interview.

 

This autumn my friend is out of Turkey, where he has spent more than a quarter of a century. TO tell how he got out -- an interesting story in itself -- would be to tell whence he came, which would never do, since Turkey has a genius for bitter reprisals. I owe too much to this man to be the means of hurt to him or his. My first clear understanding of the Turkish question came one memorable night in Constantinople when I was a listener in a group comprising my friend, an official of the United States Government, the Constantinoploe correspondent of Reuter's, and a representative of Great Britain, all of them veteran specialists on the Near Eastern question. Of these four, the man who knew the theme best was my American friend. He seemed to think first in Arabic and then translate into English. He has a trick of illustrating his meaning by the familiar Arabic gestures. He it was who spoke the last word of the talk of the mysterious Bruses and who gave the historical setting to the "Arabian Nights" tale of the Salonika Jews and how they have become, ostensibly, Moslems, until now they are in control of the Young Turk party.

 

Other and more personal debts I owe to this Yankee in Turkey. When I would have gone into Arabia with only a brace of automatic pistols for defense, he made plain by the story of one of his own narrow escapes why a rifle carried in plain sight on the saddle bow is almost indispensable. From him I learned the trick, which did me good service clear down into the desert of Mesopotamia, of having target practice when making camp, for the benefit of inquisitive natives. What to look for when I went to Petra, and -- only the initiated will understand this -- what to look for, and where, when I rode a camel, I learned from his book of experience. With him amid the ruins of Phoenicia I discovered that the Crusaders were grave-robbers, and by him I was instructed in the merits of sweet lemons as thirst-quenchers in desert travel. He translated for me the Arabic slogans of the party of liberty and traced their roots clear back to free soil of America.

 

So, because he really knows, and because he is possibly the last man out of Turkey, I interviewed for The Outlook this American who is the better patriot for being a wise internationalist. our talk swept round the whole circle of Turkish affairs, from the inexplicable defeat of the British in Mesopotamia to their strange failure to enter Constantinople when it was open to them, during the Gallipoli campaign; from the revolt of the Arabs to the anti-Young Turk Movement on Anatolia; from the feud between Djemal *****, Governor of Syria, and the Germans, to the manner in which Enver ***** has "dug himself in" with the Germans. Insults to America and Americans, death for even Moslem leaders, starvation for the people of the Holy Land, plague for soldiers and civilians alike, death in most dreadful forms for the Armenians, exact news a concerning the progress of the Bagdad Railway, and startling forecasts as to the war's outcome, all were crowded into this comprehensive interview.

 

We talked first, and often, of Constantinople:

 

2Enver ***** and Talaat Bey and Bedry Bey and Khalil Bey are the men now in control there. That secret governing group of Young Turks is still hidden far out of sight, but Khalil Bey is supposed to be of them. Enver ***** has dug himself in with the Germans. More and more, as the Turks are showing their resentment toward his conduct of things, he is keeping safety by increasing German support.

 

"Constantinople is almost a Teutonic city. Germans are everywhere. Although the use of all languages except Turkish on public signs of officially prohibited, the city is placarded with German notices. (Did I tell you that, while the English language is prohibited in Turkey, the American language is permitted?) There are two great wireless stations in the city, one of which, though operated by Germans, is supposedly under the control of the Turkish Government. The other is German absolutely, with no pretense of Ottooman interference. There is a strong German garnizon in Constantinople, which is Enver's measure of self-protection.

 

"Poverty? It is beyond words. People are literally dying of starvation in Constantinople, as in most other cities of the Empire. Soldiers' widows and orphans fare worst, perhaps; for while a pittance is given to the family of the living soldier, this ceases when he is killed. I have seen the people grow black in their faces from long-continued hunger. The poor have gone to a mission hospital and actually begged for the dish-water, hoping that they might get a few scraps. I have seen them working over the garbage for the bits of orange peel. After that the family served all scraps and placed them in clean paper and left them where the poor could find them, instead of throwing them into the garbage-can. Night after night people would steal into our yard and beg for even a crust. Night after night we saw them in a dying condition, but had nothing with which to help them. We knew of entire families dying of typhus one after another. Some missionaries, in order to avoid the unpleasant notice of unfriendly officials, took women and children into the hospitals as patients and after feeding them up for a week or two had send them away again. The Government buried the dead from disease and starvation at the rate of forty to fifty daily!

 

"For sixteen months the people have been gathering every possible plant and root that that could be eaten. My native neighbor planted a few potatoes almost under our windows, but the starving people came by night and dug up the seed potatoes and ate them!

 

"Bread is sold by the Government on tickets -- a capital device for getting all metal money into the hands of the authorities; and also for the extortion of baksheesh. Practically the only money in circulation is this paper currency, printed in Germany." My friend then gave me for examination a tewntpiaster note, which almost any printer cold duplicate. "This money has depreciated forty per cent, and is still going down. You can imagine the effect upon an already impoverished.

 

"The 1915 crop was in good part lost. owing to the deportation of the Armenians at planting time. What was left, together the army. It, too, is below normal, one reason being, in addition to the loss of men, the requisitioning of all the animals of the farmers. Instead of being a great storehouse of food for Germany, Turkey itself is going hungry. When I passed through Germany, the commonest question asked me by the officials who examined my passport was whether Turkey had plenty of food. I told them that the price of flour had increased eight fold, and that the poor people had sold even their cooking utensils in order to buy food.

 

"There is no commerce whatever, of course. Of sugar there is none; coal is almost entirely lacking. Oil is four dollars a gallon, and hard to get. Medicines are not to be had; one of the reasons for the spread of the plague in Turkey is the lack of medicines and the high mortality among the native physicians."

 

"Did you see much plague?"

 

"It is everywhere, both cholera and typhus. Plague camps for the soldiers were within a few feet of us at several halting-places on the journey. One hears in Turkey that half the army has perished from disease. we took all possible precautions, and were very fortunate, finding on us only one Pediculus vestimenti" --- only the word he used to describe the busty little traveling salesman of the typhus plague was not Latin.

 

"Who are hardest hit? It is not easy to say. The Jews in and the American war ships are in a pitiable plight, because they look to the foreign mails for their support, and these have been closed. In all Syria it is estimated that from eighty to one hundred thousand persons have died either from acute starvation or from malnutrition. The situation grows worse daily. There will have to be relief from Merica if the people of the Holy Land are to be saved."

 

I hasten over the Armenian news; it was more of the same awful tale of deportation, outrage, and death. This summer the atrocities broke out afresh, especially among the Armenians who had secured work under the Germans at road-making and tunnel-digging. These, too, had to move on to the fate of their deported compatriots. My friend said that it is the opinion of himself and other Americans in Turkey that certainly less than twenty per cent of the deported Armenians, and probably not more than ten, have survived to reach their destinations. And over a million were deported" When the native Christians in one place wanted to carry food to an arriving horde of Armenian survivors, they were prevented by the Turks. The matter was carried up to the governor, who brutally answered, "These people were not sent here to live."

 

An American missionary who resides near one of the colonies of Armenians, and who has been made desperate by the scenes he daily witnesses, said to my friend, "Government of no Government, prison no prison, if I can get hold of food or money, I'm going to feed these people."

 

"The man who has never experienced the stench of dead bodies in his nostrils, and who has never lying on the roadway, and has never witnessed with his own eyes of heard from the lips of beholders, in all the plainness of Oriental speech, the foul-minded why Americans in Turkey are ready to indorse any measures that will stop these horrors. Nor can we comprehend the indifference of America.

 

"Perhaps if you had seen a dying woman dig with her own hands a shallow grave and strive to cover herself in it, so that the dogs -- who are full fed these days -- might not get her body before death came, you would count this matter an urgent one."

 

At this point my friend let light in upon an interesting diplomatic situation. "Of course you know that Turkey refuses to allow the United States Consuls to send seals pouches of mail to the Embassy at Constantinople, as is the immemorial usage. Consular mail in censored, just like everything else. The immediate reason is that the Turks do not want the stories of local conditions and atrocities to get out of the country through these official channels."

 

Here I delete certain vigorous observations concerning America's duty to uphold her National Prestige abroad and to protect her nationals. The man ten thousand miles from American soil may be expected to see vividly and state strongly this principle. We have for many years allowed Turkey to take liberties with American dignity and rights which, if generally known, would have aroused our people to the highest pitch of indignation. The deaths of Rogers and Maurer, American missionaries slain at Adana in 1909, go unavenged. Some of us have not forgotten that at the siege of Van, more than a year ago, the American flag was riddled with Turkish bullets and Americans were fired upon by Turkish troops. The destruction of American property, by order of the Ottoman officials, has been on a scale that makes one wonder whether the fact of war justifies the United States in acquiescence in these latest outrages.

 

Honor is a delicate thing and has curious ramifications. Hear my friend explode: "The seal of the United States Government is supposed to be inviolable. When the consuls of the Allied nations left Turkey, their consulates were turned over to the United States Government. Protection of them became duty of honor. So these consulates were officially sealed and guarded by the authority of the United States of America. They were a trust that could not be violated without shame greater than that involved in an efferent to our Government directly. Nevertheless the Turks broke the seal of the American Government upon the French Consulate at Beirut and ravaged the archives that were under the solemn protection of the United States. out of those files they secured the names of various persons in Syria, especially leaders in the Maronite Church, and straightway executed them as having been in correspondence with an enemy country. The American flag was not big enough to shelter those men, among them the most enlightened and influential citizens of the Lebanon."

 

There is a kink in the Turk's brain that turns him to reprisals and espionage. In the days of Abdul Hamid his spy system was like a shadow of death over the land. Now the news is that a horde of informers and secret police infest the country, especially at the Centers of population. All mail entering the Empire is opened, and every clue that leads to any critic or enemy of Turkey is vindictively followed out, Both against natives and foreigners. Nobody knows when his hour to become the object of suspicion will strike. This terrorism, amid a people wasted by war and want, is a form of "frightfulness" the now stalk through the land.

 

Not a scrap of paper was brought out of Turkey by my friend. The border examination looks well to that, with its meticulous examination of travelers, from the hair of their head, where tiny rolls of tissue paper might be concealed, to the soles of their feet, upon which maps may be drawn with invisible ink. "What they do to one reveals their own mind and methods," sententiously remarked this man, in comment upon the indignities he had undergone. No written memoranda were needed, however, for the most significant news of all -- the two new "pan"--oply of this war.

 

"Pan-Turanianism and Pan-Arabia are today real movements in Turkey. There is a clear and formidable effort being made to bind all the Turks together as a unity, independently of Islam. It rather takes one's breath -- doesn't it? -- to attempt to conceive of a Turkey that is not dependent upon Mohammedanism for its law, its institutions, its standards, its power, its life. The Young Turks, who never were really good Moslems, have cut the Gordian knot of their difficulties over the faith by boldly projecting a nation that will separate Church and State, I stead of the religious tie, they will substitute the racial tie, rallying all Turks to the ancient tribal standards under which they grew unto power. Freed of the fetters of the faith, they aim to subjugate the Arabs and the Christian peoples, and to deal by a strong hand with the old and reactionary Moslems.

 

"The rebellion of the Arabs, under the Shereef of Mecca, which has cost Turkey the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and also Jiddah, the Red Sea port thereto, has intensified the purpose of these radicals to separate the nation from all connection with the religion of the Prophet. They say nothing, naturally, of what it will mean to deprive the Sultan of all his spiritual offices and titles, as Commander of the Faithful. All of this, to my mind, is purely speculative, for I neither believe nor hope that there will be any Turkish Empire left after the war to become an experiment in Pan-Turanianism or anything else.

 

"As for the Arab rebellion, that has several causes. For years the Turks have been trying to repress the Arabs and to abolish the use of the Arabic language. Long before the war there was a deep unrest among the peoples of the Arabic-speaking parts of the Empire, including all Syria and Palestin, over the repressive measures of the Young Turks. For their part, the Arabs, who are Semites and fundamentally religious, have regarded with increasing disfavor their progressive rulers, whom they call 'infidels.' To them the religious bond is supreme. So, making an excuse of the hanging of a number of eminent Moslems by the Government, they have declared the independence of Arabia and have set up a separate nation, with the Shereef of Mecca, and kinsman of Mohammed himself, as Caliph.

 

"This is not small, tribal politics. The fine Italian hand of Britain is behind it. King George rules over more Moslems than any other sovereign, and more Moslems than any other sovereign, and he cannot afford to take chances with another 'holy was.' So long as the caliphate, or headship, of Islam is vested in the Sultan of Turkey there is trouble in prospect for the British Moslem peoples. Therefore the British have fomented the Arabian revolt, less to make trouble for Turkey and for the Turco-Teutonic expeditions to Suez and Mesopotamia (though it will do that also) than to assure the spiritual headship of all Mohammedans to a place and a people that cannot be a manace to the 'Pax Britannica.' Moslem everywhere will recognize the appropriateness of recognizing a Caliph who is seated at the Holy City of Mecca, and who is also, as the Law directs, of the Prophet's own blood."

 

From this tremendous news, with all its far-reaching consequences, it was an easy step to a discussion of the [action of Turkey after the war. My friend has clear-cut ideas, the summary, I gather, of the view of himself and other internationalists both in the Levant and in Great Britain. "of course Britain will get Arabia and southern Persia. Only so can she safeguard the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean. The Queen of the Weves must guard her waters. Likewise, since really high politics always regards the springs of action of her Moslem peoples. Therefore all the holy places connected with Islam -- Mecca, Medina, Kerbela, and Nejef, and possibly also Damascus -- will come under British suzerainty, if not direct rule. Incidentally, Great Britain will thus possess beyond all menace the Great oil-fields of southern Persia and of the lower Tigris Valley, as well as the immense agricultural tracts in Mesopotamia which are being opened by the Willcocks irrigation scheme.

 

"France will get at least upper Syria, and perhaps also Palestine, although the latter's prospects as an autonomous state, under the protection of the Powers, are good; for thus the Jews could fulfill their dream. Russia will have upper and eastern Asia Minor, and free access through the Bosphorus, if not control of Constantinople. Italy will have some of the littoral of Anatolia, as well as opportunity on the Egean shores and some island acquisitions.

 

"One reason why it will be safe for Russia to hold Constantinople is that Britain is to have the sentinel islands of Mitylene and Lemnos, as well as Salonika. So, with Cyprus, Malta, Port Said, and Gibraltar in addition, she will still control Miditerranean.

 

"By the way, General Townshend, the defender of Kut-el-Amara, is now a prisoner on one of the islands on the Sea of Marmora, and his wife has been permitted to join him. The other Kut-el-Amara prisoners are in Asia Minor, and Tokat, where Henry Martyn died, seems to be their objective. There has been considerable sickness among them."

 

Here we were back again among the fighting men and their doings. "There has been a deal of fine road-making in Turkey under the Germans. Prisoners and Armenians have been used for this. Anew motor road has been laid through the Cilician Gates and around the head of the Mediterranean. There are two big gaps in the Bagdad Railway construction, one of forty-two kilometers at Bozanti, where the Taurus Mountais are being tunneled, and another of seventy-five kilometers at the tunnel through the Amanus Mountais. Army motor lorries supply the missing transportation over fine new roads. Some of these huge motor trucks have gone, loaded, all the way from Essen, in Germany, to Bagdad. What an 'ad' for some German motor manufacturer!

 

"All the military supplies for the armies in Asia Minor and Mesopotamia and Syria are dependent upon this one line of communication with Germany. If the Allies should break it in the Balkans, the jig would be up with Turkey. The country is absolutely blockaded by sea and land, except where the railway from Europe enters. At present the end of construction on the Bagdad line is at Ras-el-Ain, or a little beyond; the tracks have crossed the Euphrates River, but they have not reached the Tigris. A decisive battle probably will be fought at Ras-el-Ain, where there is a great storehouse of supplies. Great Britain has made all things ready to retrieve this winter her defeat on the Tigris."

 

Which again brings us into the realm of prophecy, and that is a good place to stop, with the simply reminder that the Allies have an open road to Turkey from nearly all sides, and that they command the sea routes. Whereas Turkey has nothing; she is dependent upon her masterful confederate for every bullet she shoots, and every rifle that shoots it, and every pound of powder that is behind it. She does not manufacture a single steel rail or car or motor truck. Even the uniforms of her soldiers must come from Austria and Germany, from the European shoes to the new cap called the "Enverine," "Enver *****'s one constructive contribution to the war." Disease has devastated the troops, and their foreign officers are hated and feared. Considering their handicaps the Turkish soldiers have made a wonderful record, but it cannot save their country from paying the price for their ruler's sins.

 

Outlook Magazine

[Ashot]

THE NEW REPUBLIC

Massacre by Decree

 

HALF a million Armenians were killed by order of the Ottoman government within the year 1915-16. Most of the men were massacred. Most of the women started to death; though some were herded into wooden sheds and burned, and others were sold at auction. Hundreds of children were tied together and drowned. The remainder of the Armenians under Turkish rule -- another half million -- are dying in the fever marshes and deserts to which they have been deported.

 

These charges are made by Viscount Bryce in his report on "The Treatment of Armenians in 1915-16." They are too sweeping to be accepted without considering the basic evidence. Obviously one can not take, per se, the testimony of a native who is inflamed by hatred of his hereditary oppressors, and prone to calor his narrative with eastern exaggeration. Nor should too much weight be attached to the report of a woman missionary perhaps influenced by religious prejudice, and made half hysterical by the stress of terrible circumstances. Skepticism must even tinge one's attitude toward witnesses of the Allied nations.

 

Much of the evidence in Lord Bryce's report falls into these groups. Equally much, however, can not so easily be is counted. A heavy balance of testimony comes from doctors, nurses, consuls, foreign residents of proved neutrality, and, most significantly of all. from German eye-witnesses. It should be noted that there are cases corroborated by people who could not possibly have communicated with each other, and who yet tell the same story of certain events. The reports which one would most prefer to disbelieve are usually fortified by just such evidence. For that matter there have been few or no attempts at denial, although, as in the case of Belgium, attempts have been made to invent extenuating circumstances. But it is hard to explain away the killing of 600,000 civilians, by massacre, starvation, and torture, as incidental to protection against sniping, or as incidental casualties in a country at war. This explanation becomes especially difficult in the face of the fact that here there was no war. It was simply an organized extermination.

 

With really remarkable system -- all the administrative genius of Turkey seems concentrated in its police department -- the plan was carried out. It the eastern vilayets the whole Armenian population was put to the sword. In the northern part they were deported and then massacred on the road. In Cilicia they were deported and murdered by the indirect but equally certain means of starvation.

 

The procedure most generally followed was to take the men outside of the village and shoot them. the rest of the inhabitants were then escorted away by a guard of gendarmes to exile somewhere in the south. These convoys dwindled very quickly. The infirm and aged were bayoneted, and Kurds and Brigands made frequent attacks; attacks which were never prevented by the gendarmes. The women and girls often killed themselves rather than be violated, and mothers drowned their babies in preference to seeing them starve. In these ways the number of exiles soon decreased. Some details of their experiences are found in "A Memorandum of a Convoy" by a foreign resident:

 

On the fifty-second day they arrived at another village, and here the Kurds took from them everything they had, even their shirts and drawers, so that for five days the whole convoy marched completely naked under the scorching sun. For several days they did not have a morsel of bread, nor even a drop of water. They were scorched to death by thirst. Hundreds upon hundreds fell dead on the way, their tongues turned to charcoal. . . . On the sixtieth day the gendarmes gathered together all the men and the sick women and children and burned and killed them all. The remainder were ordered to continue on their way. . . . On the seventieth day, when they reached Aleppo, 35 women and children were left out of the 3,000 exiles from H. and 150 women and children altogether out of the whole convoy of 18,000.

 

From the zone where straight massacre was in favor a German eye-witness sends a report. He was in the city of Moush, and Moush was being efficiently destroyed by bombardment.

 

We all had to take refuge in the cellar for dear of our orphanage catching fire. It was heartrending to hear the cries of the people and children who were being burned to death on their houses. But the soldiers merely laughed at them.

 

The survivors were sent to Ourfa (there were none left but sick women and children); I went to the Mutessarif and begged him to have mercy on the children at least, but in vain. He replied that the Armenian children must perish with their nation. all our people were taken from our hospital and orphanage. Under these atrocities circumstances Moush was burned to the ground. Every officer boasted of the number he had personally massacred as his share in ridding Turkey of the Armenian race.

 

We left for Harpout. Harpout has become the cemetery of the Armenians; from all directions they have been brought to Harpout to be buried. There they lie, and the dogs and vultures devour their bodies. In Harpout and Mezre the people have had to endure terrible tortures. They have had their eyebrows plucked out, their breasts cut off, their nails torn off; their torturers hew off their feet, or else hammer nails into them just as they do in shoeing horses. this is all done at night time, and in order that the screams and agony may not be heard soldiers are stationed round the prison, beating drums and blowing whistles.

 

In Mezre a public brothel was erected for the Turks, and all the beautiful Armenian girls and women were placed there. At night the Turks were allowed free entrance.

 

The people begged us to leave for Constantinople to obtain some security for them. On our way there we encountered only old women; no young women or girls were to be seen. . . . In a few villages destitute women come begging, naked and sick, for alms and protection. We are not allowed to give them anything, we are not allowed to take them in -- in fact, we are forbidden to do anything for them, and they die outside. If only permission could be obtained from the authorities to help them!

 

The work of extermination seems to have been simplified by the nearness of any body of water. In Trebizond children were placed by hundreds on board ship and then capsized into the Black Sea; and every day the river Yel-Deyirmeni brought down to the sea a number of corpses, mutilated and absolutely naked, the women with their breasts cut off. The Euphrates was of especial service to the Ottoman Government, as witness a report published in a German missionary journal (promptly confiscated by the German censor). Among other things this report conveys the information that for a whole month corpses were seen floating down the river. Certain prisons were filled every day, and emits every night into the Euphrates.

 

Only one way remains of possibly protecting one's peace of mind from Lord Bryce's report, of rendering it a sad but negligible document; and that is by sanctioning "military necessity." The Ottoman government, reinforced by German apologists who could not deny the evidence corroborated by their own countrymen, took this one way. They explained that no measures were taken until after the spring of 1915. At this time, it was asserted, the Armenians near the Russian border revolted, and some joined the Russian army. "In the face of his," argues a German writer, "it was the Ottoman government's duty to uphold public law and order. In wartime, measures of this kind assume especially weighty character."

 

Unfortunately Bryce does not leave the premise on which to hang these comforting conclusions. With proof and counter-proof, reference and cross-reference, he shows that the Armenian persecutions began long before the spring of 1915.

 

The Turkish campaign of 1914 was a failure. The dream of swift territorial expansion vanished. As the next best thing the Young Turks of the government decided to "Ottomanize" Armenia, while Europe was disarmament. Already in February, 1915, the search for weapons began. Sporadic massacres and outrages accompanied this inquisition for arms, especially in the vilayet of Van, near the Russian border. In the city of Van the alarmed Armenians refused to disarm and attempted a defense against the Turkish troops. This was the only shred of an excuse which the government had for considering the people "in revolt." It was admitted that the revolt was confined to the Armenians living near the Russian border, but the authorities at Constantinople declared that, in the present crisis, they could not be bothered with searching out among the large number of Armenians within the Turkish empire the comparatively few guilty ones and punishing them alone. Tallat Bey and Enver ***** wept their regrets, but, "Alas," the former said, "Those who are innocent to-day may be guilty to-morrow", and, to protect Armenian innocence, one must supposed, they ordered the entire Armenian population systematically massacred of exiled.

 

How thoroughly the decree was carried out a certain traveler bears witness. He records what he saw on the shores of Lake Van:

 

Several search parties had already buries the dead and cleared the ground; nevertheless; here and there I saw remains of human bodies, of men and women, under piles of stones of scattered about the roadside. I discovered decomposing and horribly disfigured bodies of children; and on the shores of the lake and the banks of streams were skeletons, pieces of clothing, bones of human beings and animals lying all around. The stench of putrefaction was simply sickening. The country from Igdir to Van had indeed been a slaughterhouse a few months before. Entire villages had been completely wiped out. Except for some casual travelers, not a single soul was to be seen -- there were but vultures and howling dogs who fed upon the putrefied human remains.

 

Sinister reports have come that Berlin abetted Constantinople. One would rather not believe this; hoping instead that those were isolated cases where German officers were found in command of Turkish troops, and receiving a share in the booty of women and reassure. One would also prefer to discredit the well founded statement that the governments of the Teutonic Allies did not so much as protest against the massacres. Humanity refuses to think that a civilized nation was even fractionally responsible for such desolation as that on the shores of Lake Van.

 

New Republic

[Ashot]

Horrors of Armenian Encampments

 

CURRENT HISTORY

(Published by New York Times Company, Times Square, New York)

 

THOUSANDS of exiles Armenians are held in Turkish prison camps in the Valley of the Euphrates and in Northern Arabia and Syria. The first neutral to visit these camps ( he is not an American) has written a report of what he saw and handed it to the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, which vouches for the reliability of the witness. The writer of the report says that he was permitted to visit the Armenian encampments all along the Euphrates, and was able to see and to gather data concerning the exiles.

 

"It is impossible," he writes, "to give an account of the impression of horror which me journey across the Armenian encampments scattered all along the Euphrates has given me, especially those on the right bank, between Meskene and Der-i-Zor. These can hardly be called encampments, because of the fact that the majority of these unfortunate people, brutally dragged out of their native land, torn from their homes and families, robbed of their effects upon their departure or en route, are penned up in the open like cattle, without shelter, almost no clothing, and irregularly fed with food altogether insufficient."

 

The writer says that the remnants of the Armenian nation disseminated along the Euphrates are composed of old men and women and children.

 

"Meskene, through its geographical position on the border between Syria and Mesopotamia," the writer continues, "is the natural point of concentration of deported Armenians coming from the vilayets of Anatilia and sent afterward all along the Euphrates. They arrive there by the thousands, but the majority leave their bones there. The impression which this immense and dismal plain of Meskene leaves is sad. This information was obtained on the spot, and permit me to state that nearly 60,000 Armenians are buries there, carried off by hunger, by privations of all sorts, by intestinal diseases and resultant typhus. As far as the eye can reach mounds are seen containing 200, or 300 corpses buries in the ground pell mell, women, children and old people belonging to different families. At present nearly 4,500 Armenians are kept between the town of Meskene and the Euphrates. These are but living phantoms.

 

"I saw under a tent of five or six square meters about 450 grams of bread a day. However, at time, and this is more often the case, they remain two days without eating anything them. This tent was sheltering 450 victims while I was passing through. Eight days afterward, upon my return, disease had carried off seventeen of them.

 

"About Herrera is a small place north of Meskene on the bank of the Euphrates. It is the worst part of the desert. On a small hill 200 meters from the river are confined 240 Armenians under the surveillance of two gendarmes."

 

Similar conditions of suffering were found at Hammam, where there were 1,600 Armenians; at Rekka, where there were encamped. In conclusion, the writer says.

 

"I believe there are some 15,000 Armenians scattered about all along the Euphrates between Meskene and Der-i-Zor, passing through Rekka. As I have already said, these unfortunate people, abandoned, ill-treated by the authorities, are gradually dying of starvation. Winter cold and dampness will add their victims to those of famine. I funds are not sent, these unfortunate people are doomed."

 

The London Times has received the personal narratives of two Mussulmans whose former official standing is known and those veracity has been tested by personal examination.

 

"In the month of August, 1915," relates one of these eye witnesses, "at about two hours from Zaart I saw masses of Armenian bodies piled up in two ravines. I estimated the number at about 15,000. I learned that the Armenian Bishop of Zaart was not killed with the others, but at his own request had been shot in a cave near by. On my way back from Zaart to Mush there were 500 Armenians herded together in a stable near Mush and locked in. Through an opening in the roof gendarmes threw flaming torches. I saw the flames and heard the screams of the victims, all of whom were burned alive.

 

"At Mush the streets were strewn with Armenian ventured out he was killed on the spot. Neither old, blind, nor sick was spared.

 

"On the way from Mush to Hanis I saw headless Armenian bodies at short intervals in the fields by the roadside. Between Hanis and Sherkiskeui I saw two ravines filled with Armenian corpses, mostly men. there were about 400 in each ravine."

 

The second eyewitness was stationed at Erzerum in April, 1915, when the order came from Constantinople that the Armenians should be deported to the interior. He says:

 

"At Kamach I saw in prison a Kurdish chieftain, Mursa Bey. I asked him why he was there. He said:

 

" 'I have killed 70,000 Armenians, and now they have arrested me for striking a gendarme.'

 

"He was afterward secretly executed."

 

This eyewitness says he saw no German officers actually connected with massacres, but that the German military authorities in Turkey knew of them and made no attempt to stop them.

 

New York times - Current History

[Ashot]

Armenian and Civilization

 

CURRENT HISTORY

(Published by New York Times Company, Times Square, New York)

IN the history of the struggles and triumphs of various nations the world is thrilled with the romance of conquest and exploration, of revolutions sweeping over the land, of dynasties that rise, flourish, and pass away. From these annals emerge the heroes, immortal names upon the scroll of national honor: great men and women whose personality and appearance are preserved by the genius of sculptors and the skill of painters. All this gives birth to that peculiar pride which we call patriotism, and which in turn renders a nation's flag a sacred emblem.

 

It is therefore with a species of sad surprise that we contemplate a people, superior in every way, chronologically the first Christians in the world, highly educated, enterprising, ambitious, who after twenty-five centuries of existence are without unity as a nation.

 

I am referring, of course, to the Armenians. Peaceable, law-abiding, eager to amass wealth and acquire culture, they have ever turned their attention to the arts and crafts rather than to arms and conquest. The result has been endless persecution through the ages, until today Armenia may be regarded as a vast community sacrificed upon the altar of barbarity and greed.

 

During the last six centuries the tormentors have been the Turks, whose cruelty has outdone all the others. They have confiscated or demolished property, despoiled women, massacred Armenians by the thousand, and prevented them from developing the great resources of their fatherland.

 

It is high time the world should know the truth concerning the whole Turkish Empire. Its people are practically without ambition, almost devoid of commercial energy, and steeped in a religion that is the very quintessence of predestination. "Whatever is to be is to be. So what is the use?" That which was good enough for their forebears is good enough for them. Such is their attitude toward progress. They have always regarded with a mixture of envy, spite, and suspicion any innovations the inaugurate. Such evidences of advanced civilization -- railroads, quays, great buildings, modern inventions -- as are to be found in Turkey today have been forced upon them by foreigners and constructed by foreign engineers; and the Turks have tolerated them because the building of such vast improvements offered great opportunities for graft.

 

During the last generation or so extraordinary care has been taken by the crafty Turk to conceal the true condition of his depraved country. Wealthy and influential tourists, as well as gifted writers, have been led astray, deliberately misinformed by the oily tongues of diplomats and officials. The result has been numerous books, stories, and reports of "the delightful home life," the "clean Turkish baths," the magnificent cities and the pleasing aspect with romantic Turkey presents to the world. In many instances, no doubt, writers have been well paid to convey these "impressions," and along with them misrepresentations concerning the character and status of the Armenians. The latter have been pictured as mutinous, troublesome, filled with treachery and deceit, lacking in national faith and patriotism, their only thought being to accumulate riches at the expense of the poor Turk. The world must now learn that most of these were honeyed lies.

 

In this executive capacity the Turk has always been a tyrant. Look into the history of his relations with the Bulgarians, the Syrians, the Persians, the Greeks: you will find oppression, tyranny, everywhere; only he has treated the Armenians with the greatest severity, for the reason that the descendants of Haig have never been able to fight back to any great extent. They have never been permitted to organize themselves into a State or nation of their own, with an adequate army at their command. Since the days of their lost kingdom, centuries ago, the Armenians have been merely a helpless part of the Ottoman Empire, subject to unjust taxation, plundered, and murdered at irregular intervals. That the civilized world should have stood aside, as it were, and allowed such a gigantic exhibition of injustice to go on is a circumstance calculated to impair one's faith in human nature. All the printer's ink in Christendom and all the eloquence of diplomats plenipotentiary cannot blot out the crimson stains that redden the pages of Turkish history during these shameful centuries.

 

If coming events cast their shadows before them, it would seen to an observant person that the opportunity is soon to be given to certain leading powers to redeem themselves by securing for Armenia the independence to which that country is rightfully entitles. Let us hope they will do this, and do it cheerfully.

 

In this connection one cannot help wondering just what Germany's attitude is toward Armenia and what is to be Armenia's fate in the event Germany is finally triumphant. It is to be hoped her conscience and her heart will be touched, after having witnessed so must distress, both at home and among the enemies with whom she has fought, and that, as a result, she will do her share in freeing forever the Armenian people from the thralldom in which they have been held.

 

I am sure the opinion is widespread that England is the logical nation to intervene in Armenia's behalf. During the last four decades, beginning with the treaty of Berlin in 1878, Great Britain has had brilliant opportunities to bring about much-needed reforms in Turkey. But for reasons that (with a little study) will become obvious to the reader, England has always acted in such a halfhearted manner as to leave the Turks free to continue their dastardly course.

 

Had a people as energetic and resourceful as the Armenians been able to realize their ambition to become an independent nation, and had they long since organized an efficient army of nearly a million men, what a different state of affairs might now be prevailing in the eastern theatre of the present war! Allied with France or England, they could have given efficient service against the Turks on many a "front," and perhaps materially changed the aspect of things. For the Armenians are great warriors when given the opportunity. There is a saying among the Turks: "Let not fifty Armenians get together, armed. They will conquer the world!"

 

Another country that should aid materially in gaining independence for Armenia is Russia owes it ti the Armenians to lend her assistance; for did she not at one time promise this very thing?

 

Soon after the war began the Turks attempted to induce a large number of Armenians to join the two million or more of their fellow-exiles in Russia, create a reign of terror and revolution in that country, and, if possible, deliver vast numbers of Russian soldiers into the hands of the Turks. This the Armenians indignantly refused to do, becoming so disgusted with the tactics of the Turkish Government that many thousands, already drafted into the army, deserted, while every Armenian that could manage to do so got out of the country and enlisted in foreign armies.

 

There are millions of Armenians scattered throughout the civilized world who would welcome an opportunity to return to their native land.

 

Eminently able to govern themselves, they deserve to have the same independence that has been enjoyed for hundreds of years by nationalities hardly their equal in intelligence and ambition. They want the whole world to know the truth: how for untold generations the Turks have ground them beneath the heel of oppression, woefully retarding the progress of the entire country. It is time some great power intervened and brought to an end the spectacle of a brutal people trampling the very souls out of human beings infinitely their superiors.

 

New York Times - Current History

[Ashot]

OUR ARMENIAN ALLIES / MUST ARMENIA PERISH?

 

OUR ARMENIAN ALLIES (BY CHARLES E. HUGHES)

PROBABLY at no time in the history of the world have there been so many fatherless and motherless children as threr are today. Tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands in Armenia, Syria, Caucasus, Persia, Mesopotamia and Palestine are not only without parental government to give them the help and protection which orphan children of other lands enjoy.

 

American Consuls and missionaries cable the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief almost daily regarding the situation. One message from the Russian Caucasus pleads for the support of 10,000 children at an average expense of two dollars per month per child. Another from Tiflis reports 40,000 children in one region waiting for an answer to a previous cablegram requesting help. Reports from other points indicate similar conditions. Among the many appeals it is possible for this committee to assume responsibility for only the most pressing cases, and it is upon these that the committee would focus the attention of the American people. Splendid help has been rendered the little ones in other lands, but these in Western Asia are less human than those who have already been aided by American charity. It is the duty of Americans, as well as a privilege to respond to this great opportunity and keep alive the best civilization that Western Asia has developed.

 

All expenses of administration for this relief are met privately so that every dollar sent to the committee is used directly by their agents in purchasing food for the needy who, according to the best advices and from audited reports, receive the full benefit if the funds sent them.

 

Out of the horror and nightmare thru which these people have passed comes the gratifying word that we can be of assistance; that our efforts will prove availing, and that we can share with these orphan children the bounty which we, as Americans, have enjoyed for years. The work done by this committee has been most unselfish and effective under conditions of great personal sacrifice. Many America respond to their appeals.

 

MUST ARMENIA PERISH? (BY FRED P. HAGGARD)

 

The setting of the "Armenian Question" is a task for statesmen, but the feeding and rehabilation of Armenia, which is being carried on by the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, is a task for every man and woman in America. -- THE EDITOR.

 

Arug merchant's shop on Madison Avenue is a long way from Turkey, but it proved to be an open window thru which I beheld Armenian's of from a new angle. Recognizing the man's nationality, I ventured to express my interest in his people. his reaction was immediate and his trembling voice and moist eye led me to suspect that his feeling was not due simply to race loyalty. Yes, there was more and he would tell me his story.

 

"It was nearly thirteen years ago that I came to America with my little Armenian bride. Bussiness opened favorably for me and I prospered. When the time came to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary, we talked over different plans, but at last I said, 'I have it! I teed of a celebration here with presents, I will send you and the children back home. We will not tell the old folks. You will surprise them.' So in the fateful summer of 1914 they sailed. I confess I cried. It was hard to be separated for the first time from my dear ones, but what joy would come to the aged parents! And then," and the man bowed in agony, "came the war! They had just arrived at their destination and I acted promptly, you may believe. The authorities at Washington were most kind. Thru the Embassy at Constantinople they located my wife and the children and forwarded money to them. I learned that my dear ones were well, but alas! I could not hear from them. More than two years have passed and still there is no personal letter, though I am assured that they are still preserved. While they are not permitted to return, I have not lost hope that I shall see them again. But you can imagine my feelings in view of what I know is taking place all around them, that practically all the Armenians of the town where they are have been killed or driven away and that any day I may learn that they are no more -- or worse!"

 

The haunting fear express by this one man rests like a nightmare upon thousands of Armenian homes in America, only in hundreds of cases the full story is known -- their loved ones have perished or have been droved as exiles into the mountains or deserts, from which they may not live to return.

 

But Armenian homes are not the only ones in which anxiety and sorrow have found lodgment, as there are not the only people in Turkey who have suffered at the hands of the Turks. Syrians and Greeks have shared a like fate, and also the Jews who just now are seriously threatened in Jerusalem and its vicinity. It is estimated that more than one million Armenians, Syrians and Greeks, resident in the Sultan's dominions at the outbreak of the war, have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of others cannot be accounted for. Two and one half million are in a starving condition. A recent communication regarding one Syrian town of nearly 7000 people revealed the fact that eighty-five percent of the population is missing. Hundreds of villages have been blotted out. Photographs show nothing but heaps of ruins and practically every pile contains the mones of the once happy dwellers.

 

The evident intention of the Turkish authorities was to exterminate these Christian races. "Turkey for the Turks" became a watchword of the leaders who thought it possible at last, once for all, while the powers were busily engaged elsewhere, to rid themselves of those who were so provokingly prosperous and who were, when harassed, able to secure sympathy from western nations.

 

The Shot sightedness of the Turks in this matter is almost incredible. While all other nations engaged in the war are doing everything in their power to conserve their resources, to anticipate the day of reconstruction, to train those made blind and lame by the war for later careers of usefulness, Turkey sets about the destruction of those of her own population upon whom alien she could depend for her commercial, mechanical and agricultural resources. For where the people dominant in numbers and authority were indolent, uneducated and non-progressive, these persecuted races of Christian ancestry were industrious, alert and eager for education. From their numbers were recruited the farmers, mechanics, merchants, lawyers, doctors and bankers of the empire. Turkey even went to the length of murdering Armenian and Syrian soldiers in her armies. Thousands of them perished miserably in their barracks. So it came about that "this once thriving and prosperous population; innocent, unoffending, industrious; possess of homes, of business property, farms and gardens; living in comfort and in many cases in affluence, were suddenly stripped of all possessions, driven from their homes and left to wander in the interior, or to find such live hoods as they could obtain in places already overcrowded people to whom they were strangers and where their coming seriously complicated an already well-nigh insoluble food problem."

 

Not Belgium, Serbia nor Poland has suffered as Armenia and Syria have suffered. In a history covering more than thousands years, the last six hundred of which have been marked by almost constant persecutions, they have now reached the lowest depth of misery, want and wo. A catalog of the methods of torture and of extermination leaves little room for the imagination. Hundreds of authenticated cases under each of these various forms could ne given. There was that finer play of "requisition." Receipts may or may not have been given, but never money.

 

One missionary telling of the gratitude of many Mohammedans for what the missionaries had done for their people, related how one Kurdish chieftain came secretly in the middle of a dark night to his besieged mission filled with refugees, to escort twelve girls from fourteen to seventeen years of age whom he had rescued fro a gang of his fellows. While not a Christian, he "could not endure to see them destroyed."

 

This case was typical of many, for the rank and file of the people lived together without much thought of their religious or social differences. It will be recalled that one of the most striking features of the inauguration of the Young Turk movement in 1908 was the spontaneous and natural outbreak of joy on the part of all the people that at last it was possible officially and by law to mingle freely. Christians, Jews and Moslems embraced one another, drove in triumph thru the streets together and sat down at the same table in harmonious counsels. This state of affairs exhibited the real spirit and attitude of the people. It represents their present disposition. Cruel autocracy has for the time triumphed over the better human instincts and practically compelled a reign of terror which naturally draws together the weak, the depraved, the murderous of all classes to prey upon the innocent and helpless.

 

When it came to the application of force there was nothing lacking -- beating to death, torture by pulling out the finger nails or the hair, the cutting off the tongue, nose or ears, and other nameless cruelties. Naturally the women and girls suffered most. Some escaped life in a harem by self destruction, while Dr. Clarence S. Ushers tells of an instance in which a father shot in turn his wife and daughters and then turned the weapon himself -- all to prevent a worse fate.

 

Thousands died in massacres. Favorite methods were literal butchery, burial alive and burning. To latter a house would be selected, the doors and windows fastened up, a hole made in the flat roof thru which the hapless people would be thrown until the house was filled. Buckets of oil were then poured over the struggling mass and the match applied.

 

Naturally there were some forced conversations to Mohammedanism, for this step always secured immunity with promise of food, clothing and shelter. An interesting sidelight on this question was thrown by a letter recently received from an American at the headquarters of the Armenian and Syrian Relief Committee. The writer argued that the committee should urge wholesale denial of faith be the Armenians to save further trouble! But these people are not built that way. They have martyr's blood in their veins. In the case of many whose conversion was sought, days and even weeks elapsed while persuasive powers were employed to secure a change of heart. In all cases of ultimate failure of the proselytes, however, death or expulsion followed. The latter usually resulted in death since, even in the case of women, they were stripped absolutely naked and driven out to find shelter if the sand or among the rocks, foraging for food after nightfall, when their shame would be mercifully covered.

 

That which has distinguished the persecutions of this period from the many that have preceded it has been the deportations. The testimony regarding these is full and unimpeachable, including the report of Lord Bryce to Lord Grey, 1916. While it has been difficult to bring photographs out of the country enough are in existence to eliminate even the shadow of the doubt. First and last the deportations combined the cruelties of all other methods mentioned. "Military necessity" was said to require concentration, so that populations of whole villages and towns and the residents of the Christian quarters of great cities were ordered to move. At first every courtesy was shown, the people were in many instances given time to pack up their belongings and even place them in carts. Guards were supplied, and then the caravans started. As a rule the men were left behind or otherwise separated from the women and children. So far as known few of these caravans reached their destinations. Individuals managed to escape, but the others suffered robbery, population, exhaustion, starvation, death by the roadside. After months the bleaching bones of these travelers may be seen along the main highways and the paths that lead to the wilderness. Their sufferings may be imagined but not described. Never in the world has there been anything like it. The very thought of it congeals the blood and arouses all the indignation of which men are capable.

 

From districts contiguous to friendly territories -- for example, that portion of Armenia - in -Turkey which lies next to the Russian border -- thousands escaped, in some cases under the protection of Russian soldiers who the protection of Russian soldiers who had come to the rescue. But even in these instances there was untold suffering. many died, children were born on the road and, perhaps saddest of all, thousands of orphans are left to bear testimony to the sacrifice of mothers and fathers on the way.

 

Gruesome as this recital has been, not half the story has been told. Letters, pamphlets, photographs, reports and books by eye witnesses and investigators lie before me in profusion as I write. But further draft upon these sources is unnecessary. The case is established. Armenian's centuries-long persecution has reached its climax. Flesh and blood cannot endure more.

 

Is there any hope? Can the remnant be saved? Hope lies in the spirit of the race which, but for that, would long ago have become extinct. Even in those who still survive amid the scenes of their desolation that spirit remains unbroken. Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of the sons and daughters of Armenia and Syria, now living in western lands, comprise a fellowship whose love and loyalty have not failed and will not fail. These people will live. Their waste places will be rebuilt.

 

But while diplomats and statesmen are working on a solution of the "Armenian Question," and without doubt it will, this time, be a final and satisfactory solution, the duty of America is clear. It must feed the starving millions, it must get ready to rehabilitate them when the war is over. It is a gigantic but worthy task. Its accomplishment is entirely within our power.

 

Independent Magazine

[Ashot]

The Armenian Tragedy

 

ONE of the best things that are being done in Bagdad is the salvage of Armenian women and children who have survived the massacres and who are now living in Mussulman families. These are being gathered into homes financed by the British Government, and their own community is looking after them.

 

I visited one of these institutions yesterday. The inmates were all young, many of marriageable age, and there were a great number of children under 6 who have already forgotten their language and their faith.

 

The bald statement of what they have suffered and seen is a damning and answerable arrangement against the Turkish Government. The first girl I saw was a child of 10 from a village near Erzerum. She and her family had started on donkeys with a few of their belongings, but in three days the Kurds had left them nothing, and they had to walk. The Turks had issued a proclamation in all the villages that the Armenians were to be sent away to a colony that was being prepared for them, and that their property was to be kept under the care of the Government during the war and then restored. This was more than a year ago. The gendarmes were very pleasant to them in their homes, and told them that they were to be given new land to cultivate, and that their journey would not be long. The first assurance, as they guessed, was visionary. In the second the gendarmes did not lie.

 

For many of them it was all over on the third day. Two or three hundred of the men were separated from the women and killed at a distance, shot or cut down with the sword. After that the same thing happened nearly every day. The guards were very haphazard; there was no system. Some of the women were pushed into the river, others thrust over precipices. Twelve hundred left the two villages near Erzerum; 400 only reached Ras-el-Ain. The survivors were all women and children; there was not a man among them, or a child over the age of 9.

 

I met a refugee from the Kara-Hissar district who, with six companions, had been saved by some Armenian women he found established in a Bedouin camp. Eight hundred families in all had left Kara-Hissar. Half of these were capsized and drowned on Arabs boats on the Euphrates. The survivors, when they reached Deir-ez-Zor, were placed in an interment camp. While here they approached the Mutesarrif, hoping to purchase their release. They offered him 3,000 liras. It was not enough. They made a second collection; every piastre they could raise was thrown into the pool. This time the sum was nearly 5,000 liras, and the Mutesarrif accepted the bribe on condition that they should sign a paper, "We, the Armenians of---, give this sum willingly to the Turkish Army." But it did not save them. The hated gendarmes accompanied them on the march began. Sticks and stones and knives and daggers were employed, and a few merciful bullets. But, as always happens, the assassins tired of their work; even the physical part of it was exhausting, and the last act was postponed from day to day. In the end a tired gendarme gave them the hint to of. The night was dark, and the guard more careless than usual, and the last remnants of the party, fifty-five in all made their escape.

 

Another man I heard of was the sole survivor of a group of refugees who disappeared between Ras-el-Ain and Nisbin. They were taken into the desert and formed in line, as in a Chinese execution, to be dispatched with the sword. There was no shortage of ammunition, I was told, but the sword was employed for reasons of economy. While waiting for his turn, it occurred to the Armenian that a bullet would be an easier death. So he broke from the line. In the confusion the gendarmes missed him. It was almost dusk; he hid in the brushwood; by a miracle he escaped, and found his way to Bagdad.

 

The main features of the massacres are much the same. The emigrants, if they are not killed on the road, are taken to some depot, where they are kept a few days. Here they find a large camp of two of three thousand or more. Soon notice comes from Constantinople that the refugees of a certain district have been allotted land for cultivation, and they are told they must start on their journey again. This, they know, is probably the death sentence, but they nourish a thin hope. For the first half day they are generally safe, as murder on a large scale is deprecated near a town. Nobody, for instance, saw any one killed in Trebizond; but left the city their bodies came floating down the river. The desert is a non-conductor. What is done there leaves only vague rumor.

 

The refugees, though unarmed, sometimes turn on their guard. More than once the assassins have paid dearly. There is a woman in Bagdad who was one of a band of 200 or 300 Armenian women from the hills who held a pass near Urfa. Their men had been treacherously killed off earlier, and they knew that obedience to the proclamation of exile was as fatal as resistance. They held the pass with their rifles nearly a week, and the Turks had to bring up artillery. Some fifty of them escaped. The woman who is now in Bagdad was rescued by a Turk of the better school, who respected her honor and on the journey treated her as his own daughter, though he failed to convert her to Islam.

 

Few Armenian women were so fortunate. Many were killed with as little scruple as the men. Planers or good looks were fatal in different ways. The old and ugly died by violence or were starved; the young were taken into the families of the Turks. A traveler now in Bagdad was given a letter by an official at Ras-el-Ain to deliver to the gendarme in charge on the road. "Choose a pretty one for me," he wrote, "and leave her in the village outside the town."

 

At Aleppo and Ras-el-Ain German officers stalked sode by side with these specters of famine and murder and death, and not a finger was raised or a word said.

 

New York Times - Current History

[Ashot]

THE LITERARY DIGEST

WHO IS ARMENIA!

 

SO LITTLE FIRST-HAND INFORMATION concerning the sufferings of the Armenian peoples reaches us that the letter of a British officer, printed in the New York Evening Post, deserves notice. The source of the letter is Bombay and the writer, who is ill in hospital there, declares that before he got his wound in the fighting beyond Bagdad he came in contact on several occasions with a highly educated Armenian who had escaped from the Turks and was being employed as an interpreter. The stories he told of the inhumanities inflicted upon his compatriots were so appalling that the officer made notes of his conversations and reproduces them "in something like his own language," so that "you can get at the heart of the man and realize what he and all educated Armenians feel." This is his story:

 

"What you have read and heard about Armenia is not a hundredth part of the truth. Dante's 'Inferno' was a heaven compared with the hell that the Turks have made of my country. Something of the awful reality of the past twelve months I have myself seen in passing through on the way to the front.

 

"At Aleppo there are four factories in which, under the supervision of deported Armenians, two thousand Armenian women are being employed under terrible conditions. The women are all deportees. One of them said to me: 'On a halt during our deportations I saw a gendarme bury a sick woman alive. Cold-blooded murders were an every-day occurrence. Our guards had orders to kill on the spot any one who lagged a pace behind on the journey. Often several were killed at once, and there was ditch together and covered. It was all horrible to behold, but our eyes eventually became hardened to the sight.'

 

"Bab, Messguene, and Zor are three places never to be forgotten by us Armenians. I have visited them. Do you know what happened there a few months since? By the order of Governor Afif, nearly one hundred of my brothers were murdered, massacred by armed Circassians.

 

"At Bosanti, I saw six railway trucks of little Armenian children being dispatched 'to an unknown destination.' What had these little innocents done to offend? Was it the mere fact of being alive and children of our thrice unhappy race?"

 

The German soldiers that one sees around the station in Armenia, he describes as "generally of a low type and not far behind the Turks in their disregard for the rights of our people":

 

"Their cruelty is a little different from that of the Turk, but the difference is only one of kind. The Turk, for example, often respects certain things which we have learned to associate with our religious or racial belief; the German has no respect for anything, nothing is too sacred from his profane hands. The Turk frequently used to show some respect and deference to the upper-class Armenians, the educated people, regarding them as perhaps capable of being useful even in a Turkish dominion. The German, as soon as he arrived here, pointed out the educated Armenian as the most dangerous of all, and instigated the Turks into organizing a ruthless persecution of the intellectual classes of Armenians.

 

"One day I walked from a place thousands of innocent women, girls, and children were bivouacked, suffering nameless miseries. I walked away because I could not bear any more to gaze upon them, and I came to a hill where I saw a little child. I was in Turkish uniform. The child came near and cried in Turkish: 'Give me for God's sake a piece of bread. For five days I have eaten nothing but this.' He pointed to some melon-skin that had been left lying on the road. I answered him in Armenian and the poor jumped up into my arms, saying: 'Art thou Armenian?' He remained there a minute uttering no other word. But I felt warm tears falling down my cheek.

 

"The waters of the Euphrates, the sands of the deserts of Mesopotamia, are the grave of the Armenian nation. I can no longer weep. My tears have frozen in my eyes."

 

Literary Digest

[Ashot]

THE LITERARY DIGEST

A CALL TO RESCUE ARMENIA

 

OVER TWO MILLION wretched victims of war are reported actually destitute and in need of daily food in western Asia. Of this number four hundred thousand are orphans. This is the body of people that the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief is undertaking to succor by raising a fund the amount of which, measured by the need, months into many millions. The help is to go mainly to the Armenian nation, already depleted by massacre, famine, and deportation, and now washed up on alien shores after surging through desert lands where only in hospitality and death met them on every hand. In another part of this issue is the story of an Armenian lad, the only male survivor of the people of his native place; his narrative could be matched by those of hundreds of others from Asia Minor, Syria, Persia, and the Caucasus. Up to September of this year, the Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief has disbursed $4, 255,420.60. This amount is declared to be about $4,000 in excess of its received gifts, the sum accruing as interest on daily book balance held against drafts sent abroad. None of the funds received have been used for expenses, as the cost of maintaining the work of the committee has been met from a private voluntary source. In various organs of the religious press where the work of this committee is reported, we gathering the situation to be met in the future, that ---

 

"The cost of sustaining life varies in different areas from three dollars to sixteen dollars, averaging throughout the entire field not less than five dollars per person per month. Many of these people are now living on the charity of their Moslem neighbors, whose scanty food-supplies are nearly exhausted. The committee is convinced that to prevent wide-spread death by starvation during the coming six months of winter, at least $30,000,000 is needed. In addition to this, for repatriation and rehabilitation, an additional $15,000,000 should be planned for, of which $3,500,000 are needed at once in the Caucasus and Persia."

 

Staggering as is this burden, in view of other demands due to the war, it is declared that only America can meet it. From cable dispatches received by the committee and from a few workers returning from these fields we get such bits of information as these, the first coming from Costantinople:

 

"Estimate number of deported destitute Armenians, Syrians, and Greeks, now in Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine, at one and one-half millions. Demands for help are inexorable. Bread-winners generally have perished through massacre, deportation, or in army. Practically all now destitute were self-supporting before war.

 

"Property taken from these people by military or destroyed in deportations totals millions of dollars. The number of destitute is increased by the deportation of Greeks from the sea-coast. Refugees from regions occupied by military are increasing the poverty. Business paralyzed. Animals requisitioned. Schools and churches generally closed. Buildings used by military. Prices of food and other necessaries of life increased several hundred fold, going higher. Needs greater, because needy people are more numerous than last year.

 

"Extermination or material diminution of Christian races greatly deplored, as the hope of future up building lies with this progressive element, which is most useful for regenerating the empire. American and Swiss missionaries remain on the field for continuing the work for destitute as in the past. They are now imploring that we continue usual appropriations."

 

From F. Willoughby Smith, United States Consul at Tiflis, in the Russian Caucasus, comes this cable message:

 

"Estimates place the number of Armenian and Syrian refugees in Caucasus at 250,000,000, Eastern Turkey, 100,000. Total slowly increasing by newcomers. Two hundred and fifty thousand of these without employment. Large proportion women and children. Minimum estimate necessary for individual, three dollars per month. In order to meet needs of situation, minimum estimate, $500,000 per month. Condition reported in previous telegrams now more acute. Strongly urge need of support for gatherless children in their homes, 5,000 now on our lists, about 15,000 others require immediate help, widows as well as children; thus aided, families are intact; no funds available at present for this department. Weaving of clothing material for refugees now going on in Alexandropol, Erivan, and Etchmiadzin. Starting orphanage for 300 boys in Erivan, boys over ten being selected, good intelligence and sound physique with reference to quick training of leaders in industry, agriculture, and education. Will open girls' orphanage if women supervisors sent out. Other industrial work to be opened in Gamarloo, Novoobayazid, Ashdarag, and other centers. Medical relief department in Erivan now caring for many old and sick and new-born babies. Need great in other centers. Repatriation postponed on account of local conditions. Send new workers at once as follows: One doctor and nurses; two ladies for orphanage; Harry White for agriculture; one man well trained for leader of technical industrial work; three or four general workers. We urge that not less than the following sums be sent immediately for the departments indicated. Repatriation, $1,000,000; fatherless children in homes, $500,000; industrial relief, $500,000; animals, $150,000; orphanages, $100,000; medical relief, $100,000; seed,$100,000; tools and implements, $100,000; individual, $550,000; total, $3,100,000. If possible arrangements should be made to send out machines, looms, and engines, for weaving wool would greatly help to meet needs of coming winter and be of permanent value in establishing industry beneficial to the refugees and this country."

 

The fate of the Armenians on many sections may be imagined from the following account of those in one section rendered by Dr. George E. White, present of Anatolia Collge in Marsiva, Turkey:

 

"Marsivan contained a population of 30,000, of whom, as the Governor had told me, a majority were Armenians. The situation for the Armenians did not become excessively acute until the spring of 1915, when the Turks determined to elinating the Armenians on the ground of searching for deserting soldiers, concealed bombs or weapons, seditions literature or revolutionists. The Turkish officers arrested about 1,200 Armenian men and accompanied their investigations with horrible brutalities. Several were sent to Malatia and executed, although there was no revolutionary activity in our city jail or the Barracks Building and then were sent out in lots of 100 to 200 in the night 'deportations' to be placed among the mountains where trenches had been prepared before the men were sent from the city. Peasants who were employed to do what was done said it was a pity to waste bullets and they used axes. These 1,200 Armenian men met their fate.

 

"The Turks turned on the women and children, the old men and little boys. Every night scores of ox-carts were gathered at the barracks Building and in the early dawn as they passed one side ot another of the American premises, the squeaking of their wheels left memories that make the blood curdle even now. As they passed on their way to another quarter of the city which had been decided for 'deportation' on that day, thousands of women and children were swept away. Where? Nowhere. No honorable destination was stated or intended. Why? Simply because they were Armenians and Christians."

 

From Syria the news is no more encouraging. Missionaries arriving in New York from Beirut confirm all previous reports. Deaths in one section of Syria from starvation and resultant diseases reached the rate of one thousand per day. There are at least fifty thousand orphans in Lebanon alone.

 

page 179 WHITHER DOES THE WAY LEAD?

One of the thousand bands of deported Armenians sent out on an aimless journey through the trackless desert.

 

page 179. SIGNS OF THEIR PASSING.

The desert of Asia Minor are strewn with heaps bones cleaned by the wild beasts along the routes of the hopeless Armenian caravans.

 

page 180. AN ARMENIAN REFUGEE.

Whose extraordinary and heartrending tale will appear in our department of "Personal Glimpses" next week.

 

Literary Digest

[Ashot]

GERMANY'S SINS INDICTED BY A GERMAN

 

THE RESPONSIBILITY for the slaughter of Armenia is placed by a German writer squarely on the shoulders of a "criminal gang of Young Turks," abetted by the German authorities. This writer, like the author of "J'Accuse," is sickened by the deeds of his country's Government. The charge of made by Dr. Harry Sturmer, a former war-correspondent and officer in the German Army. Extracts from his book, "Two War-Years in Constantinople," published recently in Bern, are printed in the New York Evening Post, which observes by way of explanation: "It was the certain evidence of the German Government's responsibility for these Armenian atrocities which led Dr. Sturmer eventually to turn against Germany and to write the truth about what he knew and had seen while in Constantinople." It is the Turkish Government again, and not the Turkish people, which is charged with carrying out the atrocities. Eighty per cent of the common people are, by some, acquitted of holding any sympathy with these acts, and many of the Armenians still living, orphans principally, exist on Turkish charity. Dr. Sturmer writes:

 

"The Turkish Government . . . had condemned the whole Armenian people, not only that part which lived in Armenia, but also that part inhabiting the 'Deaspora,' in Anatolia and in the capital. That meant several hundred thousand more. But the pretext used in the six Armenian vilayets, 'evacuation of the war-zone,' would not serve for a population living hundreds of kilometers from the front. Therefore, other means were used. A general conspiracy was discovered among the Armenians throughout the Empire. The Government could accomplish its ends only by such a cynical falsehood, and so attain to the extermination of the entire Armenian race.

 

"Carefully deceiving the general public of the whole world, the Turkish Government invented, in fact, ordered, local plots to be invented, and forged proof to be supplied, so that it might quietly go on with its program of extermination covering a number of months. A series of official articles was published in the newspapers of Young Turk Committee's control stating that all Armenians were dangerous conspirators, who had intended with arms and bombs, and with English and Russian gold in their pockets, to massacre all the Turks on the day the English Fleet forced the Dardanelles; their avowed object was to shake off the Ottoman yoke.

 

"I wish particularly to sate in this connection that I know all the arguments that the Turkish Government could bring to bear against the Armenians; enough was written on this subject by official and unofficial publications, such, for instance, as the transactions of the Society of Turkenkenner. I have investigated all the material available, even at the very beginning of my stay in Turkey, when I was still a Turcophil. . . . Not till much later were my sympathies aroused through personal acquaintanceship with and appreciation for the race's high intellectual qualities.

 

"Here I can only give my judgement of all this argument pro and con, according to my best knowlidge and conscience; my conclusion is that, aside from the first act of murder en masse in Armenia proper, the deportation to exterminate additional hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the capital and the interior, constitutes the basest, most cynacal, most deceitful, most criminal deed due to the consciousness, on the part of its perpetrators, that they were inferior in industry and culture to this non-Turkish element, due to a desire to equalize the inequality by brute force. . . . It was a deed perpetrated with the cowardly consent of the German Government, in full possession of all the facts,"

 

Dr. Sturmer gives an inside picture of the manner, with the key to the method, employed in ridding Turkey of its most thrifty people:

 

I myself, with my own eyes, have often seen the first link forged in that terrible chain of crime. I had hardly returned from my first Dardanelles trip when the persecutions in Constantinople and Anatolia broke loose simultaneously. They furnished the most striking street scenes of the war, continuing, with short interruptions, until shortly before I left. In Anatolia, in Brusa, and Adabazar are well-cultivated Armenian farms, which must have been a thorn in the flesh of a Government bearing the inscription of 'forcible nationalization' on its banners. Here the household goods of respectable families were thrown out on the streets and sold for a song, because the poor creatures had often not even an hour in which to settle up their affairs before the waiting policeman took them away. Here the house-furnishings, which could not be sold on account of a hasty departure, fell, without any payment, to savage Mohadjirs (Mohammedan immigrants). These Mohadjirs frequently broke out into open violence. They had been armed to the teeth by the 'Committee (of Union and Progress). These disturbances were then attributed to 'Armenian plots.' Those were the days when mothers in the depths of despair drowned their children because they couldn't bear to see the poor little things perish on that dreary march into the interior.

 

"How often have I not to look at that typical picture of a little troop of Armenians marching through the capital, escorted by two policemen, savage and dull of countenance, clothed in ragged, dark-gray uniforms. Behind this group walked a policeman who could read and write, with a notebook in his hand. Now and then he would beckon to some one among the bystanders and coolly include him in the procession in case the newcomer's papers showed him to be an Armenian. Then he would go forward to deliver his daily cargo of Armenians at the Caracol in Galata Serai, the principal police-station of Pera (the European quarter).

 

"The way in which the arrests and deportations were made definitely gives the lie to the Government's attempted justification through indignant allegation of a great conspirasy. On the contrary, the deportations of Armenians, conducted in the most cold-blooded manner, covered a period of many months, almost a year and a half. The deportations only began to slow down at the time the Armenian Patriarch was banished, in the summer of 1916, an act which gave a death-blow to the race's cultural existence; when, later, in December, 1916, all the men who had secured military exemption through payment of an exemption tax -- and most of the Armenians prominent in commerce were of this number -- nevertheless found themselves called to the colors, then, finally, the end of the persecution was in sight. What is to be said about this 'justifiable, spontaneous indignation' which' for instance' deported one of two brothers, Armenian laborers, this week and the other two weeks later? And what of the system that settled the quota of deportable Armenians to be furnished by each quarter of the city daily at a certain figure, at two hundred, a thousand, as the case may be? I was sure that this was the way things were arranged by Turks in close touch with the police officials who knew how the machinery of deportation worked.

 

"In general, the observation was made that the number of daily deportations increased whenever the Turks were wrought up by a new defeat at the hands of the Russians; on the other hand, when the fall of Erzerum, of Trebizond, and Erzingan gave the Government serious food for thought and the country's rulers began to reflect that the hand of a retributory Nemesis might be coming down on them, then the deportations fell off noticeably.

 

"And now for the method of method of transportation. Every day, toward evening, the unhappy creatures were gathered at the police-stations, and then the trolley company would furnish several cars, into which the women and children were crowded. The men and boys had to walk down to Galata, carrying a few blankets and the most indispensable of their belongings packed in bundles. This procession was made up not only of poor people. It was recruited from all classes, from trades-people and hucksters to the best families. This thing might happen to any Armenian at any hour; I personally know of cases where men of good education, belonging to long-established and prominent families, engineers, doctors, and lawyers, were taken in this unspeakable manner at twilight out of Pera, and had to lie throughout a freezing night on the platform of the station at Haidar-*****, and then were sent by the Anatolian Railroad to the interior. Naturally they had to pay for their own railroad tickets. Once in the interior. Once in the interior they perished of typhus, or, in exceptional cases, after having survived this terrible disease, broken in body and spirit, were allowed to return after endless representations to the Government that they were 'harmless.' "

 

Always, it is said, in deportation, the women were separated from the men. A special case of a disrupted family will be found in the personal narrative of an Armenian lad now in this country printed in the department of "Personal Glimpses." Dr. Sturmer proceeds:

 

"By destination of all family ties, it was calculated that the kernel of the race's strength would be destroyed. In this way disappeared a large part of the race. . .

 

"While Anatolia was thus empties of all those elements which hither to had signified progress, while brutal Mohadjirs -- hordes of vagabond Mohammedan immigrants -- seized this prey of deserted villages and cities and blooming acres, the stream of unfortunates, on their way to a distant goal, gradually melted away, leaving behind the corpses of women and children, of old men and boys, as memorials. The few who managed to reach the place of 'settlement,' that is to say, the concentration-camp infested with fever, surrounded by hostile Bedouins and Kurds, camps offering only starvation as an inducement to settlement, these few faces a slow but much more frightful death.

 

"Sometimes matters did not move quickly enough for the Government; in the fall of 1916 occurred a well-authenticated case -- authenticated by German officials of the Bagdad Railway -- when several thousand Armenians, sent to this stretch of railroad as laborers, simply disappeared without leaving a trace behind ['spurlos verschwunden' are the words the author uses, similar to those of Count Luxburg]. It is to be assumed that they were simply taken into the desert and massacred. Official book is being kept of the signs of Talaat's Government -- in spite of the censorship, and the watch kept on the border. This book is being kept by the American Embassy as well as in the neutral and Entente countries. And when peace negotiations begin this criminal gang of Young Turks will be relentlessly charged with the balance against them in court where all the civilized nations will sit as judges."

 

Literary Digest

[Ashot]

GERMAN GUILT FOR ARMENIAN BLOOD

 

NEVER has Germany been connected so intimately with the Armenian horrors as in the testimony of the Rev. Alpheus Newell Andrus, senior missionary for the Congregational Station at Mardin, Mesopotamia. The plan to extirpate the Armenian Christians from Turkey was "made in Germany and suggested to the Turks by German officials," he declares, with the further information that wherever the Armenians made a stand against their Moslem oppressors "it was German officers and German cannon that broke them up." The far-sighted Germans, he explains in the New York Evening Post, were looking forward to the time when "they expected to gain complete dominion in Turkey, and they wanted to eliminate the Armenian question by getting rid of the Armenian race." If details can add anything to the appeals for pity and succor for this unfortunate race, Dr. Andrus has accounts of deeds that exceed in barbarity even those already recorded:

 

"One of the ways the Turks went about it was to load Armenian men on goatskin rafts on the understanding that they were to ne deported -- and then they were taken out and dumped into the Tigris River and drowned. This was the fate of at least 2,500 men from the vicinity of Diarbekir and its suburbs in northern Mesopotamia.

 

"Armed soldiers were on the rafts, which each carries about 75 to 100 victims. Kurd boatmen rowed them out into deep water. Then the soldiers would drive the Armenians to one side of the rafts until they tilted and dumped them into the river. If they tried to climb back on the rafts the soldiers and boatsmen beat them and shot them until all perished."

 

The Germans and the Turkish Government, Dr. Andrus continues, looked upon the destruction of the Armenians in Turkey as a cold-blooded political move, and gave the actual execution of it into the hands of the Kurds and Turkish soldiers, who went about it with the ferocity of Moslem religious fanaticism.

 

"At first the Turkish Government objected to the German suggestion of the removal of the Armenians on the grounds that they were valuable as artisans and business men and necessary to the economic life of the country, but the Germans promised to supply men to take their places. Having persuaded the Turks, the Germans then left it to them to put the plan into effect.

 

"But the Turkish soldiers in some places could not overcome the Armenians. At Urfa, the city of suffering, the Armenians resolved to resist deportation and defend their innocent families and their church. They barricaded themselves in their stone houses in their quarter. For ten days they withstood all the efforts of the Turkish soldiery to dislodge them. In the end they would have prevailed but that German officers brought and trained cannon upon their stronghold and forced them to flee.

 

"Surely such a people should not be allowed to perish. There still remain of them to be cared for 6,300 in Urfa and near by. Will not the American people help care for them? Conditions in Mesopotamia have not been brought much to the public's attention, for the reason that there has not been any one to report the state of things there, and because no report could get past the rigid Turkish censorship.

 

"More than 30,000 Armenians were deported from Dearbekir and its suburbs. It was some of these who were dumped into the Tigris and drowned. The leading and rich men were among these. The others were detailed to dig trenches and to do other work with only an insufficient allowance of bread daily. Later they were shot in groups when no longer able to endure the hardships imposed. There followed an epidemic of cholera, and then a scourge of typhus. Before the war and deportations the city contained some 60,000 inhabitants. The last I heard there were only 7,000 citizens left there.

 

"Women were clubbed, stabbed, or shot down on the Mesopotamian plans and left for death in piles on the ground or thrown into old cisterns. Some, coming to consciousness, crawled out from the piles and up from the cisterns and dragged themselves up the mountain to our hospital at Mardin to have their wounds drest.

 

"Some of the Moslems at Mardin took pity upon more than a thousand babies of deported women who, in passing through, left those they had no milk to feed nor strength to carry as they went on to their lingering deaths on the plans below. When the local government officials learned that Moslems had the little ones they issued an order that whoever harbored any Armenian would be visited with the treatment dealt to the Armenians.

 

"The Moslems, therefore, secretly turned the little ones over to Christian families, who clandestinely cared for them until their resources were exhausted. And now the latest information from Mardin is that unless funds are immediately forthcoming the thousand orphans must be turned out upon the streets to starve."

 

The Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief has decided that &5 a month per child will be necessary. That is about seventeen cents along with what is spent daily on the other children and at the end of each month send the five dollars to the committee. Dr. Andrus, it is said, himself narrowly escaped execution at the hands of the Turks because of his work at Mardin in aiding the suffering. He was ordered to be court-martialed, which under the conditions, he said, meant a "mock trial and the cutting off of the defendant's head." The American Embassy, however, heard of the order and interfered so that it was rescinded and a decree of exile issued instead.

 

Literary Digest

[Ashot]

GERMANY AND THE ARMENIAN ATROCITIES

 

Cowardice of the Policy That Permitted and Abetted the Crime Denounced by a German

 

Dr. Harry Sturmer, a former German army officer and war correspondent, has written a book entitled "Two Years in Constantinople," in which he describes the cruelties with which the Turks almost exterminated the Armenians, while German diplomats and military leaders looked on without a protest. Writing from Switzersight of the Armenians' sufferings changed his life.

 

I HAVE spoken to Armenians who said to me: "Formerly Sultan Abdul Hamid massacred us from time to time by thousands. At stated intervals, in regular pogroms, we were turned over to the knives of the Kurds, and certainly suffered terribly. After that the Young Turks, at Adana, in 1909, showed they, too, could shed the blood of thousands of us. But since our present sufferings, rest assured we look with longing back upon the massacres perpetrated under the old regime. Now we have to complain not of a definite number of murdered people; now our whole race is slowly but surely being exterminated by the chauvinistic hatred of an apparently civilized, apparently modern, but, for that very reason, terribly dangerous Government. Now they are taking our women and children, who die on those long wearisome trips on foot that they have to make while being deported, or in the concentration camps without anything to eat. The few pitiful survivors of our people in the villages and cities of the interior, where the local authorities eagerly carry out the Central Government's orders, are then forcibly converted to Islamism, and our young girls are put into harems and houses of prostitution.

 

"Now that the Young Turks find themselves bleeding white in a disastrous war, they are trying to right the balance of the races and permanently establish themselves as the predominant element in the country. That is why these are not merely abortive outbreaks, but calculated political measures against our people; and therefore we can hope for no mercy. Since Germany, weak and conscienceless, permits our extermination, if the war lasts mush longer the Armenian people will simply cease to exist. And so we now look back with regret to Abdul Hamid's times, terrible as they were."

 

Was there ever any more terrific tragedy in the history of a race? And this was a race quite free of all illusions of nationalism, cognizant that it would be helpless crowded in between two great nations. The Armenians had felt no real impulse toward Russia until the Young Turks, whose comrades they had been in revolt against Abdul Hamid, Foully betrayed them. They had been completely loyal to their Osmanli citizenship, more so than any other element of the empire, with the exception of the Turks themselves.

 

Torture of a Victim

 

I believe I have in these few paragraphs sufficiently characterized the spirit animating this policy of extermination, as well as its results. I only wish to put in evidence one more incident, which affected me most because it was a matter of personal experience.

 

One Summer's day in 1916, at about noon, my wife went alone to the Grand Rue de Pera to do some shopping. We lived only a few steps from Galata Serai, and daily could see the troops of unhappy Armenians enter the police of unhappy Armenians enter the police station under escort of the gendarmes. Eventually you get hardened even to such sad sights and come to regard them not as individual but as political misfortunes. But this time my wife returned after a few minuets, all a-tremble. She hadn't been able to go on. As she passed the "Caracol" she heard the sound of some one being tortured, muffled groans as of some animal in agony, half dead of pain. "An Armenian," was what a person standing at the entrance of the building told her.

 

At that moment the crowd was driven away by a policeman.

 

"If such things can be done in the bright light of day in the busiest part of the European city of Pera, then I wonder what they do to the poor Armenians in the uncivilized districts of the interior?" asked my wife. "If the Turks behave like wild beasts here in the capital, so that a woman can't go into the main street without meeting with this kind of terrible shock, then I can't go on living in this fearsome country."

 

Then she gave utterance to her boundless indignation at what, for more than a year, she had seen whenever we went out on to the streets: "You are brutes, contemptible brutes, you Germans, to allow the Turks to do this. You have the country absolutely in hand. Cowardly brutes you are. and I'm never going to set foot in your accursed land again."

 

At the moment when my wife, in her sorrow, indignation, and disgust at such cowardice, broke out into tears and flung at me her curse against my country, at that moment I mentally tore the ties that bound me to Germany. Truly, I had known enough for a long time.

 

German Assurances Distrusted

 

I remembered the conversations I had had with gentlemen from the German Embassy in Constantinople, and also with the American Ambassador, Morgenthay, about the Armenian question. I had never believed in the assurances, given out by the German Embassy, that it, the German Embassy, had done everything possible to stop the murderous persecutions of harmless Armenians, a long distance away from the front, who, from their very nature and social position, were in no position to meddle with political matters. I equally distrusted the German Embassy's assertion that it had done all it could to prevent the deported women and children -- deported, no doubt, for that very purpose -- from being allowed to perish. On the contrary, I gathered the impression that the German Government's conduct in the Armenian matter was controlled by a mixture of motives -- on the one hand, cowardice and lack of conscience; on the other, by shortsighted stupidity.

 

The American Ambassador, who warmly espoused the Armenian case, naturally preserved a good deal of reserve when talking to a German journalists like myself, and would not give his real opinion of the conduct of his German colleague. Nevertheless, in my many conversations with this sympathetic person, who has done so much for humanity in Turkey, I heard nothing which would tend to destroy my impression of the German Embassy's conduct, and yet I gave some indication of my impression during my conversations with Mr. Morgenthau.

 

Germany's attitude have evidence of the most shameless cowardice, I have said. We certainly had sufficient control of the Turkish Government in military, financial, and political matters to be able at least to force it to observe the most elementary rules of humanity. Enver, no less than Talaat, chiefly responsible for the Armenian persecutions in his capacity as Minister of the Interior and practical dictator, would have had no choice but to follow Germany unconditionally, once the alliance and war were entered into. They would have accepted an order to stop the Armenian massacres with gnashing of teeth, but unquestioningly, nevertheless. * * * I had been witness of the plight of a German lady married to an Armenian deported embolic with many others, who came daily to the embassy antechamber, weeping and asking for help. Yet the embassy always turned a deaf ear to her plea.

 

Even the Turks laughed at us for this boundless exhibition of cowardice; they said that the Russian Government, in spite of the abrogation of the capitulation would, in Germany's position, surely have made happened to a poor Russian Jew. Turks generally, in spite of their accustomed formal amiability, let me feel their contempt for our boundless lack of backbone.

 

German Diplomats Blamed

 

I can't help imagining that, in spite of pretty official speeches, which I often heard at the German Embassy about the Armenian problem, the diplomats at bottom had very little interest in the salvation of this people. How do I come to make such a frightful charge? I was often at the German Embassy when the Armenian Patriarch, after some particularly terrible attack upon his people, came with tears in his eyes, and begged for help. And I never could discern anything in the exited hurrying hither and thither of our diplomats except anxiety to preserve German prestige and wounded vanity, but never a worry for the fate of the Armenia people. I time and again hears from German lips from all sorts of individuals, from the lowest to the highest, expressions of hatred, based on absolute misunderstanding of the facts, against the Armenians, unconsidered repatriations.

 

And, unfortunately, the fact has been established by nurses and doctors returning from the interior that German officers, more eager than some of the Turkish officials of local districts, who hated to carry out the institutions of the Committee of Union and Progress, lightheartedly took part in the extermination and expulsion of the Armenians. A well known instance, and one sufficiently established German officers who came to a little village in further Asia Minor, where some Armenians had taken refuge in the interior of a house, refusing to be driven away like animals. Guns had been placed in position to drive them out of their shelter. But no Turks were to be found with the courage to carry out orders and fire on women and children. These German officers, then, without any orders, took up the matter as a sporting affair, and seized the occasion to show their skill in artillery practice. Certainly such shameful occurrences were not talking place daily, but they exactly fit in with the spirit which inspired the utterances of dozens of highly educated, highly placed Germans -- not military people -- with regard to the Armenians.

 

Just such a case, however, of criminal interference by military persons, in the interior of Anatolia, was officially brought to the attention of the embassy. At that time Count wolff-Metternich happened to be the German Ambassador, a man who, in spite of his years, and in contrast to Freiherr von Wangenheim, victim of a weak and criminal optimism and pro-Turk blindness, now and then dared to oppose the Turkish Government. In the present instance he reported the matter to Germany; whereupon this very crime which he reported was made the pretext for his dismissal. * * *

 

Policy Called Stupid

 

And, finally, it was a shortsighted piece of stupidity on the part of our officials to stand by and witness the extermination of the Armenians without raising a finger to interfere. For the rising tide of Turkish chauvinism eventually had to be faced by our Government. Nobody with any foresight at all could have had a moment's doubt, after the summer of 1915, that Turkey would only stick to us as long as she absolutely needed our military and financial help; that were would be no room for us in a completely victorious entirely Turkish Turkey; that we wouldn't even have a commercial chance. Nevertheless, we allowed a large element of the population, 1,500,000 souls, to be wiped out; an element which was progressive, possessed of a European outlook, intellectually adaptable, without a spark of chauvinism or fanaticism, disposed to be our friend. We simply didn't worry at all about this people, which is bound, eventually, to recover from its fearful misfortunes, and will hereafter be our deadliest in sympathy with German aims.

 

The mixture of "consciencelessness," cowardice, and blindness displayed by our Government in the Armenian matter, alone would suffice to undermine the loyalty of any thinking human being who believes in humanity and civilization. Not every German will light-heatedly, like those diplomats of Pera, face the shame of having history note that the refinedly cruel extermination of a civilized and worthy people coincided with the period of Germany's hegemony in Turkey.

 

I frequently reported home to my newspaper matter concerning the Armenians persecutions and the fact that they were due to a guiding spirit of bestial Young Turk chauvinism. The Foreign Office followed these reports with interest. But I never saw any evidence in my newspaper that my expositions of the situation were bearing fruit.

 

Finally, at the time my wife, in such dramatic fashion, flung her curse in Germany's teeth, I resolved no longer to represent my newspaper. I have to thank the sufferings of those poor massacred and tortured Armenians for my spiritual and moral-political enfranchisement.

 

New York Times - Current History

[Ashot]

ARMENIANS KILLED WITH AXES BY TURKS

 

THE slaughter of all the Armenian Faculty members of Anatolia College, Marsovan, Northern Asia Minor, with 1m200 others, by Turkish peasants, whose pay for the work was the privilege of stripping the clothing off their victims' bodies, was described by the Rev. George E. White. President of the college, upon his return to the United States in the Autumn of 1917. The massacres were committed at night by order of the Turkish Government, he said, the Armenians being sent out in lots of a hundred or two hundred to their doom and their bodies rolled into prepared burial trenches.

 

"One group of our college boys asked permission to sign before they died and they sang 'Nearer, My God, to Three,' then they were struck down," Dr. White said. The number of Armenians who have been massacred is estimated by the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief in New York City at from 500,000 to 1,000,000, while there are a million still living in need of immediate aid. Dr. White, who is now living in Minneapolis, was ordered to leave Marsovan by the Turkish Government. He was formerly pastor of the Congregational Church in Waverly, Iowa.

 

"The situation for Armenia," he said, "became excessively acute in the Spring of 1915, when the Turks determined to eliminate the Armenian question by eliminating the Armenians. The Armenians questions arise from political and religious causes.

 

"On the pretext of searching for deserting soldiers, concealing bombs, weapons, seditious literature or revolutionists, the Turkish officers arrested about 1,200 Armenian men at Marsovan, accompanying their investigations by horrible brutalities. There was no revolutionary activity in our region whatever. The men were sent out in lots of one or two hundred in night 'deportations' to the mountains, where trenches had been prepared. Coarse peasants, who were employed to do what was done, said it was a 'pity to waste bullets,' and they used axes.

 

"Then the Turks turned on the women and children, the old men and little boys. Scores of oxcarts were gathered, and in the early dawn as they passed the squeaking of their wheels left memories that make the blood even now. Thousands of women and children were swept away. Where? Nowhere. No destination was stated or intended. Why? Simply because they were Armenians and Christians and were in the hands of the Turks.

 

"Girls and young women were snatches away at every turn on the journey. The girls sold at Marsovan for from $2 to $4 each. I know, because, I heard the conversation on men engaged in the traffic. I know because I was able to ransom three girls at the price of $4.40.

 

"The misery, the agony, the suffering were beyond power of words to express, almost beyond the power of hearts to conceive. In bereavement, thirst, hunger, loneliness, hopelessness, the groups were swept on and on along roads which had no destination.

 

"I received word from Ambassador Morgenthau that our premises would not be interfered with. Next morning the Chief of Police came with armed men and demanded surrender of all Armenians connected with the college, girls' school, and hospital. We claimed the right to control our grounds as American citizens, More than two hours we held them at bay. They brought more armed men. They again demanded surrender of the Armenians. I refused. They challenged me for resisting the Turkish Government. They said any one who did so was liable to immediate execution.

 

"They broke open gates, brought in ox carts, and asked where the Armenians were. I refused to tell. They went through the buildings, smashing down the doors. They our Armenian friends, feeling that further attempt on our part to save them would bring more harm probably than good, came forth, professed themselves loyal Turkish subjects, and offered to do what was required.

 

"An oxcart was assigned each family, with a meager supply of food, bedding, and clothing. The mother sat on the load with her children about her, the father prepared to walk besides the cart. I offered prayer, and then the sad procession, carrying seventy-two persons from the college and hospital, moved away.

 

"These teachers were men of character, education, ability, and usefulness, several of them representing the fine type of graduates from American or European universities. The company went in safety for about fifty miles. Then the men were separated from the women, their hands were led away. The eight American members of the staff of instruction of Anatolia College were among the slain. The women and children were moved on and on. No one knows where, and no one knows how many of them are still living.

 

"The Government officers plowed the Armenians cemetery in Marsovan and sowed it with grain as a symbol that no Armenian should live or die to be buried there. No Armenian student or teacher was left to Anatolia College, and of the Protestant congregation in the city of 950 souls more than 900, with their pastors, were swept away. I was a Government movement throughout -- a movement against the Armenians people.

 

"These things are typical of what took place through the six provinces of the Turkish Empire known as Armenia. The Armenians are the Yankees of the East -- the merchants, manufacturers, capitalists, artisans, and among the best of the farmers. One-quarter of a million people succeeded in escaping into Russian Caucasus, and among them American representatives have done wonderful work in caring for the sick, giving bread to the hungry, clothing the naked, caring for orphans. Probably a million more went to Syria and Mesopotamia, where they have been dependent upon American relief, which is helping this worth people to pull through alive."

 

New York Times - Current History

[Ashot]

THE MISSIONARY REVIEW OF THE WORLD

THE RESCUE OF ARMENIA

 

OVER a million Armenians have been murdered or have died as a result of the fiendish policy of the Turkish government. These million men, women and children are beyond human aid and beyond earthly cruelty who may be rescued by the prompt help of Christians. Four hundred thousand of these sufferers are orphans, and it is from their number that the future Armenians parents, teachers, preachers, physicians, farmers, manufacturers and merchants must be developed. They are the race that has the ability and the desire to develop the resources and civilization of that important country. They must not land in a position to help them with the necessary funds of feed the hungry, cloth the naked and purchase the implements by which they may again come to self-support. The present situation is worse than can be imagined, and help must be sent soon if it is to be help at all. Telegrams give the following facts:

 

"Bread-winners generally have perished through massacre, deportation, or in army. Practically all now destitute were self-supporting before war."

 

"Extermination or material diminution of Christian races greatly deplored, as the hope of future up building lies with this progressive element. American and Swiss missionaries remain on the field for continuing the work for destitute as in the past. They implore appropriations."

 

"Expense, on moderate basis, for repatriation, rebuilding homes, seed, animals, tools, necessary for self-supporting life, $8,000,000. Present need if for keeping the people alive. Food clothing, shelter for 1,000,000 most needy people, $1,000,000 per month; supporting 35,000 orphans, $30,000, minimum.

 

"People come pleading for work until it seems sometimes as though we must go crazy from being constantly compelled to refuse them. It is one constant stream of ragged, forlorn women with drawn faces, begging with tears, and even demanding work."

 

The Syrian and Armenian Relief Committee (of which Mr. Cleveland H> Dodge is treasurer), has already forwarded to Turkey, Russia and Persia over $4, 250,000 for relief work, and are now making an earnest appeal to American Christians to supply $30,000,000 more needed during the coming six months. The cost of sustaining life in the different areas varies from $3.00 to $16.00 a month, and this does not include money for reestablishing the Armenians in their own land. The Russian Government has already given between $7,000,000 and $10,000,000 for the suffers, but this relief fund has now been exhausted.

 

There are forty- nine missionaries of the American Board still in Turkey, in thirteen centers. Fifty more Americans are in Syria. Through them and through the a Swiss and other neutrals, the money for the relief can be distributed.

 

It is impossible to describe the suffering of these people who have been forced to fly from their homes without any provision for the needs of tomorrow. Many of them are educated and refined; most of them are women, many are aged or children, and all of them could have saved themselves by denying Christ to become Moslems. While these hundreds of thousands have given all their possessions and even their lives for Christ, what have Christians at home been giving in comparison? Today is the day to minister to Christ Himself by feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting the sick who belong to Him.

 

Missionary Review

[Ashot]

THE AMERICAN REVIEW OF REVIEW'S

THE MASSACRED ARMENIANS

 

DECEMBER, 1917

 

THE sad fate that has befallen the Armenians of the Turkish Empire is the theme of a paper in Nuova Antologia (Rome) by the Italian Minister of Finance, Senor Filippo Mada. He considers that one of the chief anxieties aroused by the Russian revolution concerns the future of the surviving Armenians in Asia Minor, which had seemed to be reasonably assured by the Russian victories.

 

He recalls the ringing proclamation of Nocholas II to the Armenians, in which the Czar tells them that after four centuries of oppression "the hour of liberty has at last sounded for you," and assures them that the Russian people will never, never forget its debt to illustrious Armenians, such as Laraseff and Loris Nelikoff, who fought side by side with their Slavonic brothers for the freedom of Armenia.

 

These fervent protestations were accompanies by an abandonment of the attempts to crucify the Armenians if Russian territory by violent means, and by the institution of a more sympathetic policy toward them.

 

It is true that many of the more intelligent Armenians, especially those living in the centers of European civilization, were disposed to be somewhat skeptical as to the Russian promises, in view of previous experiences, after the Russo-Persian war 1828, and the Russo-Turkish war of 1877. Nevertheless, the repeated declarations of the Allied powers as to their determination to satisfy the aspirations peoples, seemed to justify the belief that the hour of Armenia's freedom has at last arrived.

 

Now, however, that revolutionary Russia bodily proclaims a policy of "no annexations and no indemnities," Senor Meda asks what is to be the fate of Armenia, into whose hands will she fall? The history of the past two years shows that unless the world is willing to see the Armenian race disappear entirely, it must be freed, once and for all, from Turkish domination.

 

The frightful sufferings to which this unhappy race been subjected are briefly but convincingly presented by Senor Meda, who draws his data from the "Blue Book" of July 1, 1916, prepared by Viscount Bryce. The latter took every possible precaution to exclude from the recital any statements unworthy of acceptance.

 

In almost every case, the course persuade by the Turks was to summon the male Armenians of a given district to present themselves without delay before the authorities. All who did not obey the summons were driven to the rendezvous by the Turkish gendarmes. On their appearance they were immediately arrested and sat into prison for a day or two, then they were bound one to the other, and driven out of the inhabited regions into the open country.

 

They were told that their destination was Mossoul or Baghdad, but as soon as the wretched exiles, snatched from their families without even taking a last leave of them, had reached a distant point where nothing could be seen of them from the road, they were all massacred. This was done at the order of the Minister of the Interior of War, Enver *****, who had charged himself with the task of exterminating that part of the Armenian population under his jurisdiction.

 

After the departure and the massacre of the able-bodied male population came the turn of the women,. the children, the old men, and the infirm. Notices were put up in every village that they must prepare to leave in a few days. The women were nominally accorded the privilege of escaping exile, if they became Mohammeda converts. But the mere profession of a change of religion did not suffice, they must ratify it by espousing a Mussulman.

 

For the children the illusory promise was made that they could enter Turkish orphanasylums, where they would be educated in the faith of Muhammed. However, in the greater part of the cities and in almost all the villages there were no such asylums in existence.

 

The miserable women were forced to march out into the open country. Under these conditions death by thirst, hunger, sunstroke, or infections diseases soon reduced their numbers, and when they reached the mountainous district the old and infirm were massacred by Kurds.

 

The few exiles who finally reached Aleppo in a state of absolute destitution were assigned to the unhealthiest places, among enemies whose language they did not understand. It has been estimated that as many as 600,000 of the total population of 2,100,000 Turkish Armenians were in this way deliberately done to death by their Turkish persecutors.

 

American Review

[Ashot]

SHADOWS OF WAR

 

January 5, 1918

BY MARKARID GARODIAN

Markarid Garodian is an Armenian girl thirteen years old. She is one of the two and a half million refugees in the Near East for whom the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief are attempting to provide the necessities of life. Markarid's father was massacred, her baby sister starved to death. She was taken into a harem. She escaped, joined her brothers in a long trip over the Dersim Mountains to a relief station in Erzerum, Russia. Two of the children died on the way. Two brothers, and this girl, finally reached safety and joined the throng of homeless people who daily gather about the fire at the relief soup kitchen for their steaming bowls of vegetable soup and coarse bread.--- THE EDITOR

 

MY father was a merchant at Harpoot. He bought and sold beautiful Oriental rugs. Many American people came to him because my father was a Christian and a merchant whose word they could depend upon. He could speak English and he had studied in America when he was a young man.

 

We had a very beautiful home and were very happy then. Our house was shut off from the street by a high wall. A little gate opened from the street into the courtyard in front of our home. This court was a lovely place. There were shady trees and bright-colored flowers all about. In one corner was a fountain or pool of cool ruining water.

 

Our house was two stories high. A hallway opened in the front, running thru the house. My mother had made this place very beautiful with draperies and plants. Here our father often received his friends and our mother served coffee to them.

 

On either side of this hall were rooms with divans and many colored rugs. Our very pretties rooms were on the second floor. To reach our second-story rooms we went up steps outside the house on to a balcony that hung over the garden. We children used to have happy times playing there.

 

The smaller children went to the American Mission School and my brother and I were in the American College, where our uncle was professor. In the school there were five hundred students. We studied history mathematics, literature and languages. My brother and I speak English and French as well as Armenians and Turkish.

 

We lived happy, peaceful lives until two years ago. Our father took us for delightful picnics on holidays. He was very good to us and had planned that our oldest brother could study medicine in America when he grew up.

 

But my father is gone now; everything is gone except my two brothers.

 

One day two years ago we came home from school early in the afternoon. The day was Hrand's birthday and Havanis and I knew that mother had planned a surprise for him. We hurried home from school so that we might help her with the preparations.

 

We found our father at home, although it was only mid-afternoon. One of the city police was with him. The man was telling my father that he must leave his store, his home and his family, and go away to work on the roads.

 

My mother was crying and clinging to father's arm.

 

"You cannot go, you must not go," she kept saying over and over.

 

We children began to cry, too.

 

Our father, turning to us, bid us keep still. Then he talked with our mother, telling her that she must be very brave.

 

The officer stood impatiently waiting and said, "You must come now."

 

Our father kissed us good-by and went away.

 

We never saw him again.

 

We heard that fifty Armenian business men, our father with them, were driven out to work for days and days building roads and then later killed.

 

A well after our father was taken away our uncle and all of the men of the town, including the professors in the colleges and all the rest of the business men were thrown into prison and tortured. We could sometimes hear their screams as we passed by the prison.

 

The head of our mathematics teacher was cut off and put out on a stick outside the prison wall.

 

After our father had gone away with the officer our mother did not send us to school. We were very sad and lonely. We thought we were very, very unhappy then, but we were comfortable and had plenty to eat because our father had left two bags of money and we could go out and buy things in the market place.

 

Then one day a terrible thing happened. An officer came to the house and said our mother would have to go away and leave us.

 

She had only a few hours to get together a little bundle of food and clothing. She took only a small portion of the money my father had left with her; the rest of it she told Hovanis to hide in the garden to use very carefully when we needed it.

 

Our mother and dozen of other women were crowded into spring less carts. Mounted soldiers were in charge of the deportation. There was not room enough in the cars for all the women and some of them were made to walk behind. We stood at the gate and saw them go.

 

Before she went, my mother cut off my long hair, she cut my eyebrows and tried to make me less beautiful. I did not know why then, but I know now. She knew what would happen to all the pretty Armenian girls.

 

My brother and I tried to be brave after our mother had gone because of the little ones. My mother had told us we must care for them. We made up games and amused them in the daytime.

 

I did my best to prepare the food that Hovanis bought in the market with our money. Our house was very lonely and empty, but we had plenty to eat and were warm and comfortable.

 

A few weeks after my mother was taken away all of the twenty-five thousand Armenian people remaining in Harpoot were ordered deported. We were told in the evening that we must be ready to go the next morning. We got together a little bundle of food to carry with us. In the morning we were driven southward toward the desert. The sun was very hot and beat upon the sand so that it burned our feet.

 

The soldiers drove us and on, lashing whips over the people who lagged behind. There were women with little children in their arms and aged people who could scarcely walk. Our little brother and sister grew too weary to walk so Hovanis and I had to carry them struggling on as best we could. Sometimes we would stop because we could walk no farther. Then we would be commanded to go on.

 

The food we carried with us from home was soon gone. The children cried for bread. Sometimes we found berries and sometimes brother pulled up plants and we ate the roots.

 

We passed the bodies of other people who had dropt dead in other deportations.

 

We were all driven on until I was taken away from the others by a Turkish officer. He promised me he would permit Hovanis to go back home with the children. I finally made my escape but I could not find the others again. I knew that they had turned toward home so I went back along the road we had traveled.

 

In the daytime I hid behind rocks and bushes. At nightfall I hurries on again. Sometimes I passed little groups of people but I did not try to join them lest the Turkish officer should find me again.

 

I decided I would not go to Harpoot but that I would attempt to cross the mountains and go to Russia too. Days and days afterward a miraculous thing happened. In the Dersim Mountains I found my brother sitting with two of the children huddled about him.

 

After he had gone home, Hovanis had secured the money from where my mother had hid it in the ground. Then they had started over the mountains to look for safety in Russia.

 

The baby sister, Saturnig, had died before they reached Harpoot when they were returning from the desert. The little brother, Hrand, was blind from want of food. Blindness is one of the most terrible things about starvation. On the desert and here in the relief station I have seen so many people who had gone blind because they had no food.

 

Hovanis had bought some food from a Kurd. We shared it. Then we struggled on over the mountains together.

 

We slept on the ground at night. It was bitter cold. We had no food except roots of plats and now and then something that we bought from the Kurds.

 

We escaped death miraculously many times. Twice Kurdish mountaineers captured us but they were willing to help us on our way when we gave them money.

 

The youngest brother died before we reached the relief station. The exposure and the hunger were too hard for him to bear. The ground was frozen so that we could not bury our brother. We waited two days hoping that he was not dead but at last we had to go on and leave him.

 

The man in charge of the relief station was us coming. He took us into his house and gave each of us a bowl of soup. We warmed ourselves by the fire. We watch every day hoping our mother will come. We hope that all the others who are struggling across the desert will come. The hardest thing is that there is not enough food for everybody when they do come. Some days little children have to be turned away without bread or soup because there is not enough.

 

page 188, "With their faces set toward the desert" A group that typifies the Armenian exile.

 

Independent Magazine

[Ashot]

TALLAT SAYS TURKS FIGHT FOR LIFE

 

CONSTANTINOPLE, Feb. 17, (via London.)--Turkey declared war without being urged by Germany or impelled by any other influences save those of the Empire; she engaged in military operations only when actions on the part of Russia and Great Britain made defensive measures necessary, and today Turkey has taken all the steps needful to carry the war through.

 

"The holy war is not menacing Christians ,but the holy war is a fact which the enemies of the Mohammedan world should bear in mind. Christians in the Ottoman Empire who are participating in the destinies of their country are not suffering from conditions brought about by the present state of affairs ,and any statement to the contrary are a result of British, French and Russian intrigues, the purpose of which is to direct against Turkey the pressure of neutral counties of lower standing in the Ottoman world."

 

The foregoing are among statements made to The Associated Press to-day by Talaat Bey when questioned concerning the political and military situation in Turkey. Talaat Bey today fills the post of Minister of the interior, Minister of Finance and Minister of Marine in the Cabinet. Two weeks ago, in addition to these offices, he was also Minister of War, which gave him the four most important portfolios in the administration. He is Young Turk and is undoubtedly the most important man in Turkey at the present time. His advice is heeded everywhere, and he virtually directs the public affairs of the Ottoman Empire.

 

To the correspondent of The Associated, Press Talaat complained of the attitude of foreign newspapers, including the American press, which, he said, were obvious alike of the position of Turkey under the pressure of the Entente powers and of the efforts of the Young Turks to accomplish the reforms associated with that party.

 

"Oh land and sea alike the Russians and the British provoked hostilities," Talaat Bey declared. " Our action was finally the result of efforts to bottle up our fleet by mining the entrance to the Bosporus.

 

"Turkey is prepared to carry on the war to the end of the European conflict. The fact that we are able to face the enemy on four fronts simultaneously against forces three or four times as great as ours, and to mobilize at the same time an army of more than 1,000,000 men for reserve, is for us, as well as for our allies, a matter of the greatest importance, and for our allies a precious advantage."

 

The interview then turned to the holly war. Answering a question on this subject, Talaat Bey said the holly war was a fact, in spite of the claims of the enemy, and he added that the Christians were the enemies of the Mussulman world. Questioned concerning the oft-mentioned "reprisal policy," the Minister answered:

 

"Turkey decided at the outbreak of hostilities just what retaliatory measures she would employ in case the powers of the Triple Entente acted contrary to the regulations set down by international low.

 

"Russia is our hereditary enemy, and Great Britain is the power which subjugated Islam," the Minister said. "Nothing demonstrates the enthusiasm of the people so well as the formation of volunteer regiments in all corners of our immense Empire.

 

"All the sorrowful eyes of Islam are today turned toward the Turks, who, since their appearance upon the historic scene, always have been the benevolent champions of the disciples of Mohammed and all Asiatics generally. The success of Ottoman arms can have but one result -- the rising of all Mussulmans subject to the domination of Russia, France and Great Britain. Persia is a living symbol of what Turkey would have become if we had not taken part in the present war."

 

The conversation was then turned to the military resources of Turkey, and in this connection Talaat Bey was willing to discuss, although guardedly, the political and military situation of Turkey's allies. In this connection he said:

 

"This situation appears to the excellent from every viewpoint, even admirable. I am not competent to judge of military matters. All I know is that the Germans are fighting continuously and advantageously on French and Russian territory in such a matter that their enemies do not dare go from the defensive to the offensive. Public opinion in Turkey concerning the naval operations of the Germans is simply overcome with astonishment ; the audacious offensive at sea of the Germans has provoked our legitimate admiration."

 

The relations of Turkey with the Balkan States was dismissed by Talaat Bey with these words:

 

"Turkey has most cordial relations with Bulgaria, sincere relations with Rumania, and good relations with Greece, Serbia and Montenegro do not count."

 

New York Times

[Ashot]

HOW YOUR GIFT IS SAVING THE ARMENIANS

 

March 9, 1918

 

Almost in the shadow of Mount Ararat lies Yerevan, the center of Armenian relief-work in the Caucasus. The ancient city is now predominated by fugitives from the persecutions of the Turk, the refugees numbering nearly a quarter of a million. There the representatives of the American relief organizations have their headquarters, and from this point the work is carried on for the aid of the stricken people, of whom William T. Ellis writes in the Buffalo Express:

 

There are no starving Armenians in Yerevan. Yet this is the center of the community that fled from Turkey under the spur of the persecutions of the Turk. The reason is that the American committee for Armenian and Syrian relief, of which Cleveland H. Dodge, Metropolitan Building, New York, is treasurer, has established here a system of organized relief, including industrial work on an extensive scale, that has meant literally life, as well as rehabilitation, to this section of the refugees, who number altogether about a quarter of a million in the Caucasus.

 

Perhaps that industrial work will make the best start for the story. Instead of direct relief, in the form of food or money, the committee, with an eye to the future of the people, has distributed labor, except in the case of children and helpless women. Since clothing as well as food has to be provided the refugees, the committee has begun at the beginning, and distributed cotton and wool among the women to be cleaned, carded, and spun - except that the cotton is first carded, after the ancient bowstring fashion, by men. The wool is given out as it comes from the sheep' backs. This is returned by the women in the form of yarn, for the spinning of which they are paid. Thousands of pairs of socks have also been knitted by the women.

 

Because the Armenians are skilled artisans, they have been set to making knock-down hand-looms, and upon the machines thus built trained weavers are set to making cloth out of the yarn spun by the women. This cloth is used for underclothing, in the case of the cotton goods, and for outer garments made of wool. A fine quality of homespun is produced, which could be sold in the Russian markets at a profit. Instead, all the clothing thus produced is used for the refugees. Last winter 15,000 persons were clothed, and this year an additional 10,000 orphans will be clad in the most comfortable garments they have ever known. Of course, all the tailoring is done by Armenian refugees.

 

This is the sight that old Ararat now looks down upon: a little company of American board missionaries, at present lent to the relief committee, creating anew, amid unusual conditions, an entire industrial organization that will provide, without pauperizing, for the needs of a homeless and utterly destitute people. The Rev. E. A. Yarrow, of Van, the local chairman, began this phase of America's ministry, and George F. Gracey, whose industrial work at Urfa was destroyed by the Turks, has contributed his expert knowledge in building up this organization, although Messrs. Mac Callum, Reynolds, and Maynard have taken to it all as if it were preaching. All the elaborate organization of cards and records and investigation, which social science at home demands, has been kept in operation, that only the deserving might be helped. This is the Orient.

 

No men are helped except to be given work, and no workers are used by the Americans unless they are refugees. No clothing goes to the adult, but for the orphan children there is direct relief in the shape of ten rubles a month, or about one dollar and sixty-six cents, a small enough pittance since only one child in a family receives the amount which must provide for mother and brother and sisters, if there be any. The first allowance was only six rubles, or one dollar a month, but owing to the depreciation of the ruble and the increase of gifts from America the sum was increased to ten rubles. Says Mr. Ellis:

 

I was present when the first distribution of this increased allowance was made, and many were the blessings rained upon the head of the Americans. Naturally, with the present big prices, and rubles worth only six to the dollar, ten rubles a month does not buy many grand pianos.

 

A building and site for an orphanage have been bought by the committee, and is being enlarged by refugee workmen. Dr. G. C. Reynolds, the veteran missionary from Van, whose wife died on the retreat, and who has come out here to end his days in congenial activity, is in charge of the orphan relief and the orphanage. He conducted a large orphanage in Van. His purpose, he says, is not by any means to gather all orphans into institutions, but to train a hundred picked boys and later the same number of girls, who may become leaders of the Armenian people. There are hundreds of orphanages being well maintained by the Armenians themselves, through their joint Armenian committee. Something like 7,000,000 rubles every six months is spent by this committee.

 

All the work upon the new orphanage is being done by refugees, from the building of the walls to the construction of the beds and the tables and garments.

 

Other relief-work for the children is the furnishing of milk for the babies, and the maintenance of a physician, and the opening of a hospital. Dr. Kennedy is working with the Americans, he being a Canadian, and representing the London Lord Mayor's committee. A British Quaker, Mr. Heald, is representing the American committee at Alexandropol, where there is a center of relief work. In 300 villages hereabouts the Americans administer and supervise relief for the women and children. In the Yerevan district, says Mr. Gracey, there are approximately 50,000 persons being aided, directly or indirectly, by the American committee.

 

The shadow of Mount Ararat is not so ever present as the shadow of the great tragedy of the Armenian nation. This man saw a priest shod like a horse, before he was slain; this one saw crucifixions; this little boy and his sister lived for three months in the mountains on roots and berries, before they came up with a force of Armenian volunteers; this woman from Mush witnessed throughout four days, from her hiding-place before she got away to the mountains, the locking of families into houses, many persons being crowded into one house, whereupon kerosene was applied and the victims burned to death. The mind grows numb, and the heart sick, from a constant recital of such tales of horror, as it is difficult to believe the twentieth century could hold.

 

There are 200 orphanages established in the Caucasus with about 6,000 inmates and upward of 300 schools for the refugee children, but, says the writer:

 

The outstanding factor in Armenian relief has been the American committee. Its work has been on a large scale, and systematic form. All of it has been supervised by Americans, and the subordinate workers have been men and women trained in American mission schools, and known personally to the missionaries. Professors have not hesitated to become relief agents in villages, or accountants or actual workers in the industrial department. Had it not been for the fact that there were available a force of American board missionaries knowing the language and the land and the people, and with trusted helpers at hand, the wonders that have been wrought in the way of repatriation, rehabilitation, and the maintenance of life, and self- respect would have been impossible.

 

Could I write the hundreds of tributes to America that have been given to me by high and low for transmission, I would need columns of space, and the stories would all be attuned to the note of America's uniqueness as the brother nation, the friend of the needy everywhere.

 

Literary Digest

[Ashot]

"Gleanings" Reprint

HANDFUL OF EARTH

 

APRIL 1918,

 

Reprinted from Professor Lulejian's book, "Gleanings", (1955) Mshag Press, and Fresno.

 

And just as the more modern tragedy is characterized new refinements of horror, just so much pathetic and appealing is the modern prayer.

 

We are left in no doubt the personality of its author. The same, Donabed Lulejian, will call to many Armenians the vision of a thoughtful and scholarly young man know the them, it may be, at Cornell University where he studied for two years, or at Yale, where he received the degree of M. S. He was also a graduate of Euphrates, the American college at Harpoot, when he came to our country, and it was to Euphrates he returned in 1911 to serve as professor of biology there. He was the last surviving member of the Armenian faculty, until Death took him also.

 

Part of his story comes to us tersely in Viscount Bryce's "Documents presented to Viscount Greay." The testimony is that of the Principal of the College.

 

"Professor Lulejian served college about 15 years. Arrested about June 5th, 1915. Beaten about hands, body, and head with a stick by the Kaimakam himself, who, when tired, called on all who loved religion to continue the beating. After a period of insensibility, taken to Red Crescent Hospital with a broken finger and serious bruises. Now Free."

 

Professor Lulejian contrived somehow to escape from the Hospital, and to flee on foot to Russia, from whence he later returned to Erzerum to assist the American Consul in relief work. There he died of typhoid. It is his young brother, Levon, who was his companion on the flight, that we are indebted for the details of the piteous circumstances which attended the writing of the second prayer:

 

"For four months we had been hiding in a stable," he writes. "When Kurds told us of the fall of Erzerum, we came out from our hiding places and saw the sun again. A few days afterwards, when we were passing through the ruined villages of Unghag, where we saw the bones and hacked bodies of men, women and children, my brother sat near by and began to write this, I, standing at a distance, was crooning a melancholy Kurdish song, and when I turned toward him I saw that his eyes were filled with tears and that he was shaking with emotion. In a few minuets he had finished his Handful of Earth. This is only a skeleton, he said. There is much to add. But I have no more paper. Let us go."

 

This epic of suffering was written a bit of thick window paper, torn from the window-paper, of the stable in which they had been hiding. I use a translation made by Mr. Garabed H. Papazian:

 

"At least a handful of earth for these slain bodies, for these whitened bones! A handful of earth, at least, for these unclaimed dead!

 

"We bury the dead: we keep their memory sacred: the grave is holy to us: we place our dear ones into its bosom, and we imagine them always to be there. We dislike to fancy the bodies of our dear ones worm-ridden; their eyes lonely eyes, filled with worms; their cheeks their kiss-deserving cheeks, mildewed; their pomegranate-like lips food for reptiles. We dislike to fancy the ruin, destruction, and annihilation. Our heart is there under the earth with the embalmed dead, waiting to rise in the glorious dawn of the resurrection. With a handful of earth we cover the scene of death and decay. With a handful of earth we cover our dear bones.

 

"But here they are in the mountains, unburies and forlorn, attacked by worms and scorpions, the eyes bare, the faces horrible, amid a loathsome stench, like the odor of a slaughter-house, -- a dreadful spot from which to flee. We flee from those we love; we abhor those for whom we would give our lives. A handful of earth, to cover this frightened scene!

 

"There are our women with breasts uncovered and limbs bare a handful of earth to shield their hearts and in their heads: a handful of earth to cover them! There are our brides, disemboweled, hacked to pieces, with babies yet unborn: a handful of earth, only to screen from our eyes this sorrowful scene! there are our young men with feet cut away and heads battered against the stone: cruel fiends hacked them to pieces, ferocious Bushmen, wild Kaffirs. A handful of earth to shut from our sight this heart-rending scene!

 

"A handful of earth, God! Sprinkle a handful of earth so that thin eyes, through the stars, may not see the immolation of these weak and defenseless creatures, the piteous sacrifice on the altar of Thy wrath. Throw a handle of earth upon them!

 

"A handful of earth, at least! Let the drama end, the age long drama of Armenian's torture. Let the Armenian become a fossil. Let him to be disgrace of the civilization which tore him to pieces, cruelly and without mercy. Let him be the curse of the religion which abandoned him and left him without succor. A handful of earth, that he may become a fossil inscription to reveal to the man of tomorrow the story of Armenia's woe. Give, God, the handful of earth requested of Thee!"

 

The New Armenia, April, 1918 pic. 191, A photo of the professor as he appeared in 1911 pic 191, A photo of the professor as he appeared immediately after his release from prison, 1915

 

New York Times

[Ashot]

Persecuted Armenia

 

SEPTEMBER -- 1918 By NISHAN DER-HAGOPIAN

 

WHEN a man has been slaughtering human beings for many months, and his eyes have grown accustomed to the sight of blood, his ears used to the scream of shell and shrapnel, and his soul callused to all save his sense of duty, he moves automatically, and it is only when there came a lull, and the black-winged horrors lift for a little, that with clear vision and delicate ear he sees and hears the world around him.

 

ON June 12, 1915, there came to the terror-stricken city of Van, Armenia, such a lull, and for several hours the mind was free to wander over the present and in and out of the past. Taking advantage of this respite, with Captain Ashgar-Beg, assistant professor to the world-famous antiquarian, Dr. Mare, I climbed to the top of Zum Maghre, and, like Moses of old, surveyed the land. It was not a land flowing with milk and honey upon which we gazed, but one drinking in the life-streams of its people. Our minds leaped to the past as we scanned the natural picture before us.

 

Armenia centers in the high mountain rages from which sweep out the great water arteries, the Tigris, Euphrates, Halys, and Araxes rivers. She belongs to hallowed ages. It is supposed that she contained the Garden of Eden. On Mount Ararat rested the ark. Armenia grew in power, in splendor, and in culture. She was one of the first nations to embrace Christianity, her churches dating back to A. D. 34. In the sixth century the kingdom was overthrown by the Babylonians. Following this, many battles were waged with and won from the Assyrians. In 67 B. C. she was allied with Rome; later, for a short period, she became subject to Persia.

 

A beautiful episode in Armenia's Christian history took place in A. D. 451. Prince Vartan Mamigonian was commanding the Armenians. Yesgerd II, king of Persia, who fulfilled all the ordinances of the magi, issued the decree, "All peoples and tongues throughout my domain must abandon their heresies and worship the sun." Accordingly, Mihermish, the grand vizier of the Persian court, wrote a long letter to the Armenians, making charges against their religion. The Armenians replied, repudiating these charges, and adding: "No one can move us from our belief, neither angels nor men, fire nor sword. Here below we will choose no other God, and in heaven no other Lord but Jesus Christ." Whereupon the Persian Declared war, and the armies were arrayed for battle of the plains of Avaraye, by the river Dughmood, near the present site of the city of Van. Before the onslaught Vartan Mamikonian knelt and prayer to God for help and To Christ for his own salvation. Then, turning to his men, he said:

 

"Soldiers, as Christians we are averse to fighting, but to defend our religion and our freedom we must fight. Surely our lives are not so valuable as the life of Christ. If He was willing to die on the cross for us, we ought to be willing to die in battle for Him."

 

With this appeal the Armenians rushed against the vastly superior forces of the Persians, swept them backward, and won the victory. In the engagement Prince Vartan was mortally wounded. He was buried in Eurmia, Persian Armenia, between the cities of Koy and Dizadiz. In gratitude to him, his people built him a great tomb on a tiny hill by the river. Since then this tomb, now falling into decay, has stood under the blue Persian Sky.

 

In February, 1915, our military camp was pitched for a few days about an hour's distance from the tomb. I made a special trip to visit it, took several pictures of the stately ruins, and then on my knees I gave sincere praise to God for the man who had accomplished so much for Christianity and for humanity.

 

Armenia had regained her independence in Cilicia. but lost it again in 1375. The Turks and the Huns had whispered together: "These are the heirs. Come, let us kill them and cast them out, that the inheritance may be ours," and the slaughter which has cried out to the world for the last five hundred years began.

 

Armenia was hemmed in on the west by the Ottoman power, constantly growing in strength and numbers; on the north and east by the Mongolians, under the leadership of Torgrul Bey, Alf Arslan, Genghiz Khan, and Tamerlane, who desired to called the greatest warriors and the most cruel sons of the world; on the south by the Mohammedan of Egypt, under the Mameluke sultan, who was no less formidable than the others in his hatred of the Christians and his cruelty towards them.

 

The church has held the Armenian people together through all these long years of unceasing persecution. The Armenians had missionaries in British India sixty-three years before the British Government took possession of the country.

 

Armenian women are not allowed by the men to work outside the house; all their time is devoted to the care of the home and the education and upbringing of the children. After my father's death, when Turks had pillaged and stolen our property, -- all the old heraldic treasures that were priceless to our family,-- my mother used to gather us together in the evenings and read the Book of Job. Such is the faith of the Armenian women; and it is to their wonderful training, their practical and beautiful Christianity, that the peacefulness and obedience and moral strength of the people are due.

 

An uprising had ever been known among the Armenians, and yet their courage is superlative. An evidence of this was the holding of the pass to Ardjish valley in April, 1915, but four soldiers against several thousand Turks for twenty-four hours, thus giving the villagers of Ardjish time to escape.

 

Physically, intellectually, and morally, the Armenians are the equals of the other world races. In the old Testament Ezekiel mentions their industry. In business fields, both at home and abroad, they have shown remarkable tact. The attain to highest ranks in educational culture; in America to-day many Armenians are holding leading positions in colleges and universities. There is no Orientalism in the Armenian mind. The Turks have nicknamed them the "Anglo-Saxons" of the East. Virtually or other oriental have reached the heights of the Armenians.

 

It is always the geographical position of a country that makes the history and character of its people. Armenia is what may be called a "bridge" country; that is, a buffer state. Now, as in times past, it is of great strategic importance. For this reason its security has always been threatened and frequently attacked. Its people have always been fearing or repelling an invasion, until the nation has become exhausted and almost submerged; but it still survives.

 

Some thirty years ago England began to use her influence to put an end to the Armenian massacres of that period, but German diplomacy blocked the good grace of God. If England at that time had insisted on a termination of the Armenian atrocities, the world war would have been precipitated then. Red Sultan Abdul-Hamid knew how to promise and how not to perform. For the time being he kept both England and Germany deceived. Since then Turkey has become a serious problem for England. After the downfall of Abdul-Hamid the influence of Germany became supreme in Turkey. The Turkish revolution was neither an intellectual nor a moral movement; the people had no part in it: it was the guise under which Janabad Empire to the Germanic Organic League, and under the protection of Germany Janabad Enver murdered more Armenians within a few years than had Abdul-Hamid in the preceding twenty-five.

 

The Germans knew that Sultan Abdul-Hamid was too feeble-minded and too shrewd to be used as a tool in their hands and they set about to destroy him. They began to cultivate the Young Turks, telling them what a paradise their country would be if only Abdul-Hamid were dethroned. Janabad Enver ***** was chosen as the leader of the revolution. He had been educated in Berlin and he knew how to bribe. The world was led to believe that the revolution was a triumph for liberalism in Turkey and that liberty was being born in that nation, but the regime that followed was worse and more cruel than the one which preceded it. The persecutions of the Armenians increased, and the massacres multiplied.

 

One cannot sympathize with the sufferings of the other notions unless he himself has suffered; the lessening of health is not fully appreciated until one is ill. The Turkish Empire is a sickness in Europe, and Europe will not be well until health the horrors of war? Or shall we nobly resolve to fight to the end that liberty and democracy may be established in the world?

 

The hypocrisy of European diplomacy and the misrepresentation of the attitude of neighboring governments by a venal press contributed largely to the making of the conflict. The Berlin Congress of 1878 established a cause for jealousy and mistrust over the ultimate division of the decadent Turkish Empire and the position of Constantinople. In 1877, Germany and England united to thwart Russia's advance upon that city, because neither to these powers was willing to trust the others. In 1878, Russia's relief of Armenia was only a cover under which to extend her power to the Orient, or so at least the English thought. After the unspeakable Armenian massacres of 1896,Great Britain was willing to do something for the relief of that persecuted people and proposed action toward that end. Russia, in return, suspected English motives. Again, in 1912, England proposed to relieve the Armenians from the yoke of the oppressors, but was bitterly opposed by Germany, because Armenia is the High bridge of a possible Russian advance upon Constantinople. Then the self-styled German protector of the Mussulman world and the Young Turks placed themselves in opposition to any assistance to Armenia and, as was shown in the Balkan War, took a negative stand, all the while preparing for this war. If the German dream of the control of Constantinople was to be realized, it would be a long stride toward the fulfillment of her ambition for world dominion, and would enable her to undermine both Russian and British power in Asia.

 

In 1787, Joseph of Austria asked Catharine of Russia who planned the resonation of the Grecian Empire, what would be done with Constantinople. For more than a hundred years this question has remained unanswered, and the conclusion is irrefutable that it is one of the fundamental causes of the present war.

 

The Treaty of Paris, in 1856, was only one of the many efforts to maintain the answer to this question. Now all the world is suffering for the evasions and postponements of a century and for allowing Turkey to hold the balance of power in Europe. Edmund Burke, replying to Pit in the British Parliament, said: "I have never before heard that the Turkish Empire has been considered any part of the balance of power in Europe. They see the crimes, but never act justly." To give Turkey that right was a great wrong. It has contributed toward the present strife, and there is no hope that European diplomacy will ever be sincere and truthful until democracy is triumphant on that continent.

 

The re-alignment of the political map of the Balkan States after that last Balkan War for the advantage of Germany and helped to pave the way for German access to Asia Minor and the absolute control of the territory lying between the North Sea and the Gulf of Persia.

 

After the Armenian massacre of 1896 Germany pretended a sincere interest in that unhappy country and professed to be protector of the Christian population within the Turkish Empire. Germany established missions, and the German missionaries have been agents in the hands of Germany. Particularly was this the case in the 1915 outrages. Never until its alliance with the Kaiser did the Turkish Government commit a massacre so cruel, ruthless, deliberate, and extensive as that.

 

Germany has poured great stores of her wealth into Asia Minor. In building the Baghdad Railway she made a direct threat to England's Indian dominions, and her ambition in this region was one of the underlying causes of the war. The Turko-German Alliance was a constant menace to the peace of Europe. The Turks also had a dream of world domination, but though they realize it not, they are broken and cast into the German melting-pot. Their dream in already shattered.

 

From 1895, Armenia has been constantly before the world because of the persecutions repeatedly visited upon her for no other reasons than her faithful adherence to the Christian religion and her persistent refusal to embrace the religion of Islam. These massacres have been organized by successive governments since the Middle Ages. Armenia's sturdy defense of her faith prevented the Mahommadan power from imposing its faith on the whole of Europe in the Middle Ages. Armenia helped to save Christian civilization from perishing at the time of the Crusades. As the Belgian is the hero of the present struggle, so likewise is the Armenia the hero of the Middle Ages.

 

The Armenian question is an important to-day as it has ever been, and this war must result in the liberation and rehabilitation of that land if the Christian nations are sincere in their allegiance to democracy and liberty. The ghastly tragedies which have afflicted that people since 1878 have been explained to the world over and over again.

 

Some may think that the people submit supinely to the atrocities inflicted on them; but during the last fifty years many a Thermopile of which the world has never heard has been fought in her mountains passes. Time after time small bands of Armenian forces have successfully resisted whole Turkish divisions. No people has ever shown a more indomitable resistance, no people has ever fought more bravely against overwhelming odds. Atam ***** has testified that a small Armenian force fought courageously against four Turkish divisions. In 1896, Zaitoomlis destroyed one whole division of Atam *****'s soldiers. To-day the brave and heroic people of Zaitoomlis have been almost obliterated by the Turk.

 

Russia has failed to respond to the hopes of the Armenian people, who had justly expected better treatment as a reward for their loyalty; for it must not be forgotten that from the beginning the Armenians had espoused the cause of Russia at a great sacrifice. For two long centuries the people gave the highest proof of faith and loyalty and absolute allegiance to the Muscovite throne.

 

For fifteen hundred years Christianity maintained itself in Armenia till the fell hand of Moslem jealousy and European rivalry came to root it out. But the Armenians know how to live and how to die. The genius of their nation can steady its faith and life. In 1915 the Turks refused to allow medical aid to reach the victims of their diabolical cruelties, and had the Armenians not known how to care for themselves, they would have passed into oblivion. Eventually they would have died off, anyhow, had it not been for the entrance into Armenia of a mighty Russian army. To-day there are over one hundred thousand Armenian soldiers in the Russian Army.

 

When Germany started the war in August, 1914, for the consolidation of the German Empire from the Bosporus to the Gulf of Persia, had she willed, she could have stopped Turkey's crimes in Armenia. Instead of that she taught the Turks to deport Armenians from their homes and torture them. In 1915 one entire village was deported by German and Turkish officers.

 

I had my own military training in America (all Armenians are as anxious for military achievement as they are for business activity), and when the war broke out in 1914, I was in New York. I feared this would mean the destruction of my people, for the massacre of 1896 was still fresh in my mind, a never-to-be-forgotten memory. I went to Russia, and immediately from there to the Armenian front. June 5, 1915, I was in Van.

 

Few cities in the world are as ideally and beautifully situated as Van. Before the war she lay like a rainbow across the tender heart of an exquisite garden valley, set in a framework of vine-clad foothills flaked by superb mountain-ranges. Besides her, in crystal purity, stretches a lake. This lake is embosomed in a verdant plain surrounded by an exceedingly beautiful mount-chain, which culminates farther north in the sublime monarch of western Asia, Mount Ararat, and its lesser companion, Mount Masis. This wealth of mountain scenery and sky repeat themselves in inverted splendor inn the lake. Astringe of tiny village of the foot-hills used to surround Van as diamond chips surround a fire opal in a ring. The morning sun picked up these villages in his journey over the mountains, lingered with them all day, and then drew the sunset through them as he dropped into the night.

 

In Van were churches and schools and monasteries, beautiful gardens, fine business places, streets, and boulevards. On one of the islands in the lake was the church built by the Arzroonian Dynasty in the tenth century. Not only was the interior of this church beautiful, but the exterior was decorated with wonderful carvings, the Armenians excelling in architectural skill. As we stood on Zum Maghra, June 12, this church was still standing. On August 26 the Turks riddled it with shrapnel, and the titanic structure, its altar smoke streaming to heaven, went down forever.

 

Northwest of the lake, Varaka Vank (Vank means monastery), built in the eighth century, nestled in a tree-top. In front if this aggregation of buildings a powerful spring of water leaped from the mountain and rushed to the valley below. Lasmone Blossoms, grapevines, and roses, garden beauty and wild nature, lay spilled around them as they faced the lake. Here, too, was one of the greatest libraries and museums of the world, filled with ancient and modern books and works of art. In April, 1915, the Turks burned this wonderful institution to the ground. In the following June our regiment camped for a week upon the sacred ruins, and for the whole time my heart cried out with the misery of it all.

 

After this first stay in Van our entire army moved toward Bitlis. On July 15 a great struggle began under the blazing sun. During that age-long day the smoke of battle rose to the skies; women were dying, children crying, men fighting furiously and courageously, and the Russian soldiers doing magnificent work. Many Armenian refugees were rescued by them that day. About the first of August we forced the Turks from their trenches, and they began to retreat ahead of us toward Bitlis. As soon as they reached Bitlis they reveled in their fiendish work of looting and massacring innocent people; then, after abducting all the young women for slaves to the army, they burned the city, with all its reaming inhabitants.

 

Our forces did not enter the city on reaching it, because of the burning bodies and the stench. I stood upon a hill and watched the smoke of the beautiful city creaming into the clouds, my heart breaking with pity for the multitude of suffering men and children. The moans of women and children could be distinctly heard.

 

The Turks then moved toward Mush, still committing their dastardly crimes. No civilized person will ever forgive the Turks for their abuse of the young women and he suffering of the old women and little children. *****s Kalil and Jauded had three times the army we had, yet they were retreating before us. I seemed to me that they lacked the military knowledge of how to put up a good fight; but they lacked no knowledge of how most villainously to massacre the Christians.

 

At this time, just south of Mush at Sasoon, there were forty thousand Armenians. We were about to set out to their rescue when a report, which was subsequently found untrue, caused our Russian commander to order a retreat. What became of those Armenians I never heard. We fell back hurriedly upon Van, but the retirement did not stop there. On the evening of August 13 I was in a friend's house, where they were holding a mourning party in Oriental fashion, drinking and crying. At midnight came the order the leave the city. Every one rushed to evacuate. In the morning I hurried to the hospital of the sick and wounded soldiers, and we soon had them, in various carry-alls, on the way. Then I went to the American mission to offer my assistance to Miss Usher, an American missionary at Van, but the Russian Hospital Corps had given her good accommodations. At eleven o'clock I again went through the city. It seemed to me that the sun had stopped. There was no more happiness; even the birds had ceased singing. The great city looked like the ruin of the ages. Again had she gone to her rave.

 

When, with my men, I left the city I saw a chain of people numbering three hundred thousand men, women, and children, on the highway of the north bank of the lake. No human being can imagine the misery of that ling procession. In the evening a little boy and girl came to me and many others had said:

 

"We have lost our mother and father. We can't unload the ox. We don't know where to camp."

 

I answered:

 

"I guess, my boy, my place will be good enough for you. Come here." I kept them for a few days, because we could not find their parents.

 

In the morning, on the way, there was a continual stream of agony. I found a blind man and put him on a wagon; later I came upon a woman sitting on a stone with three barefooted little children. She was crying and completely exhausted. She had lost her husband in the crowd and did not know what to do with the little ones. I told her not to be afraid, that my horse would be for her until we found her husband. During that fifteen days' march I never once mounted my own saddle; I tramped to Russia.

 

On August 25 we reached Bargherry village. Beyond this village we had to pass by a narrow road through a great mountains pass. About this time the food gave out; sickness broke out, many were dying. Then there came the report that Bargherry village was locked; so the army went through first, and the people followed. The day was not long enough for all to go through, and great masses were still in the passage when night fell.

 

Huge mountains walled each side of the valley, and a mighty river rushed by on one side there, it would be impossible to escape. At 2:30 A.M. about forty Kurds, brigands, fired on us. Our men sprang to action and drove them out of the way in double-quick time, but confusion seized the women and children. There was no checking their fear. Many hundreds threw themselves into the river. There was one young woman from Van whom I knew who said, "I'd rather kill myself with fore or in the river than to be taken by the Turks." True to their Christian faith, they plunged into deep water-holes and river rather than be captured and imprisoned in the Turkish harems. So numerous were the suicides that evening that in place the stream was black with the dark-clothed corpses. On the journey there was not a day but numbered its four hundred dead. I myself was ill for weeks after, enervated by the long abstinence from food and the suffering of the multitudes by the way. Not able to continue in the ranks, I left Etchmiadzin, and, by proceeding through Siberia and Japan, returned to the United States.

 

This is not a war. It is the destruction of civilized humanity. To-day, in Turkey, the Armenians are absolutely destroyed, their wealth, their property, and their lives taken. During the defense of Van, April, 1915, before the arrival of the first force, the inhabitants of Van had held out against the Turks for twenty-seven days. How did the struggle start? In the first place, ***** Jauded wanted to massacre the people as he had in order cities, and then followed the execution of Mr. Eshgan, the leading Armenian. The attempt to arrest the high priest and other leaders was made. It failed because the people decided to be massacred rather than to give up their leaders.

 

The Jauded army, numbering thirty thousand, surrounded the city, cutting off all faith and the courage of the Armenians rang to victory. They drove off the Turks and captured the whole district of Van before the arrival of the main Russian reinforcements.

 

My race is now face to face with destruction, and its helplessness cries mightily to humanity for immediate and effectual aid. The situation is unprecedented in history. If it is permitted to continue unchecked, it will cast an eternal cloud over the twentieth century.

 

pic. 192, THE BEAUTIFUL AGHTAMAR VANK, ISLAND CHURCH OF THE TENTH CENTURY, DESTROYED BY THE TURKS IN 1915.

pic. 193, Photograph by Paul Thompson, GENERAL VIEW OF BITLIS, ARMENIA, THE MOST IMPORTANT CITY IN THE LAKE VAN REGION.

pic. 193, Photograph by Paul Thompson, VILLAGE AND FISHING-BOATS ON LAKE VAN, ARMENIA.

pic. 194. VARTAN MAMIGONIAN

pic.194. A photograph by Underwood & Underwood, AN OLD SURVIVOR OF THE GREAT MASSACRE.

pic. 193, Photograph by Paul Thompson, AN AMERICAN MISSIONARY TRAVELING IN ARMENIA. EVEN IN PEACE TIME IT WAS THE CUSTOM OF ALL FOREIGNERS TO FLY THEIR COUNTRY'S FLAG AS A PROTECTION AGAINST MARAUDING MANDS

 

Century Magazine