The treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire Documents presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon (part 3 of 4)

The treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire Documents presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon (part 3 of 4)

The conditions are so bewildering here that it is hard to know how to present a general view of the situation. The deportation is still going on in full force, and yet shows unaccountable stoppages and delays. I suppose that the vis a tergo emptying out the population is so out of proportion to the executive ability to keep the channels of travel open that the result is this great damming back of the current that has filled the cities from Eski Shehr to the Taurus mountains. Beyond that I know very little. Exemptions and delays are granted with no apparent reason, often, however, with the plainest of reasons, viz., the enriching of the police. The amount of extortion practised must extend into thousands of liras.

Dr. E. will tell you of what he has seen on the way here. I will try not to duplicate what he says. The information that I have from P. is reliable. The Protestants of Q. who were there have all returned here, though many difficulties were thrown in their way. There were about 15,000 exiles in P., but there has been a steady stream pouring in that direction and the number must be larger now, except for the number sent on into the mountains from there. How many there are at Bozanti, the terminus of the railway, I have not been able to learn. Whether they are now being sent on to Tarsus and Adana, I cannot learn with certainty. Reports have it that travel beyond Adana is cut off, and so the exiles are not being sent, as before, beyond Aleppo.

In P. the exiles are encamped in the open fields in the neighbourhood of the railway station. No protection is provided for them, and they have none, except such tenting as they can make up for themselves out of carpets, coarse matting, cloaks, gummy sacks, sheets, cotton cloth, tablecloths, or handkerchiefs, all of which I have seen used here in Q. There are no sanitary arrangements for this horde, and every available spot is used for depositing excrement. The stench of the region is described as appalling. Here in Q. I have seen how the adjoining field, entirely open as it was, was so thickly covered with excrement that it seemed impossible to step anywhere, while women and girls, as well as others, were defecating there in the daytime simply because there was absolutely no screen or protection anywhere. When it is considered that diarrhœa and dysentery are rife, you can imagine the results. The region there, as well as here, is exceedingly malarial, and this is the time of year for it. I have no knowledge of how many deaths have taken place.

After a time, large numbers of the exiles at P. were allowed to find shelter in the town, where they rented houses and for a time were better off. But they were not allowed to rest in quiet. Suddenly the order would come from the police that all were to leave for Bozanti, and the whole number who were in the town, perhaps 5,000, would be driven (and I mean literally driven under the lash) into the streets with all their goods and be rushed to the encampment. There perhaps 100 wagons would be ready and 500 people find places and be sent off. The rest were then left to stay in the encampment or bribe their way back to the town again and re-rent their houses, until another alarm and driving forth. Every such onslaught meant several medjids of expense for every family for transporting their goods and bedding to and fro, and this in addition to the bribes paid to the police for the privilege of going back to the town. Such bakshishes had to be paid to the police for every favour asked, from medjids[147] to liras.[148] No one could go to present a petition to the Governor without bribing the police first. In the encampment the police would come along in the morning and order all tents in a certain section to be taken down, saying they were to start for Bozanti, and this order would be enforced instantly with scourge and club. The terror of the people, from the reports they had of that journey “beyond”—of pillage, murder, outrage, stealing of girls and starvation—was such that they were always ready to purchase a few days’ respite if they had any money to do it with. No train or wagon is ready, so when enough money is brought out, the people are graciously allowed to put up their tents again twenty feet away from their former site. The sick, the aged—none were respected. The people have described to me the terror of that constantly recurring order, “Down with the tents!” with the whip behind it.

For those who did have to start, the conditions were still worse. They must hire wagons brought there for them, and the drivers charge four times the ordinary price. It must be paid, or they will be driven out to go on foot, and, of course, in that case, can take no bedding and hardly any food with them. The drivers acknowledge afterwards that the police take one half of the price paid. It is impossible for me to tell you all the means of extortion employed. I know of a family here who had to pay nineteen liras to hire a wagon and hamals and get permission from the police to move from the filthy encampment to a small, horribly crowded hotel near by. The hotel-keepers charge a lira a day for a little room with three or four dirty beds in it, and then share this with the police.

Protestants are supposed to be freed. The story of my contest with the officials here, before the Vali arrived, shows how they had planned to get all sent away before his arrival by concealing the order for exemption.

The Protestants who were already in P. were notified that they were free, yet had to pay fifty liras to the police to get their permit to leave. At the station, where they went to get third-class tickets, they were told that there were no third-class coaches left and that they must take second-class. After purchasing these tickets two-thirds of them were put into third-class coaches after all. It was merely a trick to separate them from more of their money. Of course, they were glad to have third-class coaches, for, coming here first, the exiles were compelled to pay the full fare and then packed forty or fifty together in box-trucks, cattle-trucks, or even open flat trucks. The Railway seems to be as conscienceless in wringing the money out of them as the Government or the Turks.

The whip and club are in constant use by the police, and that upon women and children too. Think what it is for people, many of them cultivated, educated, refined, to be driven about in this way like dogs by brutes. I have seen women black and blue from the beating they have received. A woman with a fractured thigh at the station was being helped by friends intending to bring her to the hospital. A commissary of police came along and ordered her to be dragged back into the carriage. A boy yesterday in the encampment here was struck on the head by a policeman and killed. The pastor of the church at O. was beaten with a whip and his forehead cut open, in a great gash, by a blow from a club, for saying that he was a Protestant and asking for his freedom. He is not freed yet in P. Two of his daughters we took into the hospital as nurses when the family first passed through here.

Dr. E. will tell you of conditions here in Q. The Vali is a good man, but almost powerless. The Ittihad Committee and the Salonika Clique rule all. The Chief of Police seems to be the real head. The Vali came here on the promise that Q. should be spared. Then he was delayed in Constantinople day after day until the deportation here should be accomplished. He was furious when he heard of it on his way here, and he is likely to resign soon. I am telling you what a close friend of his, a travelling companion, told me.

The Armenians of N. sent here were forced to come by wagon. The Circassians of the region knew of it and followed after and robbed them, and shot one girl. Gendarmes were sent out after the Circassians, but only took their turn in completing the stripping of the party.

Another party was sent in the same way and was attacked at night by Circassians, and one of the men was shot through the thigh—a horrible wound. He died here in the hospital a few hours later. We have one boy and one girl here in the hospital who were run over by trains, compelling the amputation of the leg. Three hundred families from Baghtchedjik are in Eski Shehr. About two hundred of the men were in market, nearly a mile from the encampment, when the police came on them and drove them out at once to start on foot for Q., without letting them go back to their families or get money. They are here now, begging me to try to communicate with their families. The mail is closed to all such communications. Telegrams innumerable are given in at the office, the money received and then the telegram never sent—(witness two long telegrams I sent you).

During the last four days the inhabitants of the villages above Baghtchedjik have been poured in here, and are filling the encampment. They come from a cool and well-watered region. They are thrown out here in this burning heat, without shelter and with a water supply so scanty that there is a constant struggle at the fountain to get their jars filled. The sickness that we are seeing among them is heart-rending. Many are simply overcome with the heat. Our dispensary floor is covered all day with sick in all stages. A little girl died here this morning. Others, moribund, will perhaps hardly get back to their tents. We are trying to refresh them with yoghourt and water-melons. They are too sick to take bread.

Hardly anything makes me so hot as the thought of the soldiers’ families. The men—the fathers, brothers, sons and husbands—are serving in the Turkish Army as loyally as any, and their families—their children, wives and sisters—are driven off in this inhuman manner. Soldiers’ families are also said to be exempt from deportation, but in countless cases they are swept away with the rest. The wife must put in a special petition claiming her relationship. This petition has to be paid for, for she cannot write Osmanli. It must be stamped with the regular stamp, the additional stamp, the Hidjaz Railway stamp and the War-Aid stamp. Then, after the usual delays of “Go and come again,” a telegram is written to the Army Post where she says the soldier is, and this she must pay for—thirty to sixty piastres[149]—and all this when she and the children are hungry for bread with no money to buy it. A woman came for treatment yesterday with three children, two almost dying. She happened to mention that she was a soldier’s wife. I asked why she did not get free by that. “They wanted thirty-one piastres for the telegram and I had nothing,” was her reply. Oh! I wish you could see the abominable cruelty of their treatment and the diabolical ingenuity of the ways devised to strip them of all their money before bringing them to their deaths—for that is where it will surely end for all these people, unless some means of stopping it is soon found. Whether the taking of Constantinople will be such a means or not will depend, I suppose, on whether the present Government succeeds in making its escape and continuing its rule in the interior.

An “Exiles’ Commission” has come here from Constantinople. It was announced that their business was to be to settle the exiles in this vilayet and not make them go further. Telegrams from Enver Pasha were received stating this before the Commission came. Now they have come, and it appears that their duty is merely to clear the choked channels and speed up the traffic. They have announced that they have come not to settle the exiles but to drive them on. Since beginning this letter I have learned that the stream has begun to flow again from P. and Bozanti to Adana and on, and it is reported that now the destination is Arabia.

I must add a report from Angora, whence I have received to-night what I have every reason to believe to be an accurate account. Some two or three weeks ago, about two hundred of the chief Armenians at Angora were imprisoned, then taken at night in wagons, thirty or forty at a time, to the banks of the Kizil Irmak, and there killed. Eighteen of the employees of the Railway and the director of the Ottoman Bank were among these. I had this on good authority then, and it is confirmed now. Within this past week all the Armenian men, whether Gregorian, Protestant or Catholic, have been taken, stripped to shirt and drawers, tied together and taken away and heard of no more. The women and girls have been distributed to the Turkish villages, the Turks coming and looking over the girls and choosing what they wanted. I could give you the name of one of the wealthiest men in Angora, whose wife and three daughters were taken away before his eyes, and who went crazy. Three hundred boys were circumcised. The name of the railway official was told me who saw one hundred of these done, and reported it. The region from Angora to Polatlu (on the railway) is said to have been the scene of such outrages as cannot be described. It is reported that this complete extermination applies to the whole of the Angora Vilayet outside the Kaisaria Sandjak, but my accurate information does not cover this.

It is openly stated by officials here that the exemption of Protestants and Catholics is only temporary, and the trend of events seems to me to give colour to this.

The saddest part of all this is our utter impotence to do anything to stay the awful deeds that are being perpetrated.

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Footnote 147:

About 3_s._ 2_d._

Footnote 148:

Slightly less than a pound sterling.

Footnote 149:

Five to ten shillings.

110. Q.: REPORT FROM DR. E., DATED Q., 3rd SEPTEMBER, 1915; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

Although you are already well informed as to the Armenian situation in this region, I am taking the liberty to add a few notes from personal observation on the way here, chiefly from what I saw at Eski Shehr, Alayund and Tchai.

At Eski Shehr there are about 12,000 to 15,000 exiles in the fields about the station, evidently in great need and distress. The majority of them appear to be without shelter, and what shelter they have consists of the flimsiest kind of tent, improvised out of a few sticks covered with rugs or carpets in a few instances, but often only with cotton cloth—absolutely no protection from the heavy autumn rains which will soon be coming. The station-master, whom I have known as a reliable man for several years, told me that the people had been treated with every kind of brutality, the police ostensibly trying to prevent the Turks from molesting them by day, but aiding and abetting them by night. I myself noticed that in several places large groups of young women and girls were being kept separate from the rest and guarded (?) by the police, and was told that in several instances the police had allowed them to be outraged. At the present, instances of actual violence were not so common, but there was no provision made for feeding them and the people were quickly spending what little cash they had to buy provisions at exorbitant rates. Certainly they seemed to have little or nothing in the way of supplies, and many looked pinched and sickly. About thirty to forty deaths were taking place every day. Germans whom I overheard talking while on the way to Eski Shehr, and also the German hotel-proprietress at Eski Shehr, were loud in their condemnation of the whole affair as being conducted in the most brutal and horrible way.

At Alayund there were perhaps 5,000 exiles in about the same condition. They were from Broussa for the most part, and those with whom I was able to converse told the same tales. Within two weeks the Government had made two distributions of bread, neither of them sufficient for more than one day, and had given nothing else. I myself saw police beating the people with whips and sticks when a few of them, in a perfectly orderly way, attempted to talk to some of their fellow-exiles on the train, and they were treated in general as though they were criminals who had no claim to consideration of any kind. What talking I did, I had to do with them rather surreptitiously, of course.

At Tchai I saw perhaps a couple of thousand in the same condition. Here the men and women were together, and the Turks had not succeeded in carrying off more than two girls. By keeping constant guard the Armenians, although unarmed, had been able to frighten the assailants away. They said that all the men there would die rather than give up any of their women, and that, as the Turks were not so numerous, they felt safer, but dreaded what was awaiting them when the order came to move on. A heavy rain had fallen at Tchai and occasioned great suffering, followed by sickness and some deaths, especially among the children. A good many of the people had gone insane.

A conductor on the train told me that, although the order had come for the return of the Protestants and the Catholics, he had seen about 100 to 150 of the latter from Ismid re-deported towards Angora and in this direction, even after they had gone through the form of having been returned to their homes. In their second deportation they were to be scattered—a few to each Turkish village in the region.

At Q. about the same conditions exist, although we are fortunate in having a good Vali. However, he is much handicapped by some powerful men of the Committee,[150] who are opposed to him and accuse him of undue clemency. Even a prominent Armenian of this city warned him not to be too kind lest he be sent away (the above was an Armenian connected with the railway, and therefore not deported). The Protestants here are very grateful to you for securing them exemption from deportation. However, they are in much distress, for the Government has sealed up all their shops and will not let them conduct any business, so that what little cash they have is rapidly being exhausted.

All of the above and much that I might add is as nothing, however, to what the railway employees report as going on at the end of the line, where the people leave the railway and set out on foot, only to be set upon by brigands, who rob, outrage and kill all the way from Bozanti to Adana and beyond. At Angora also there has been great slaughter, according to all reports.

Whether these unfortunate people are sent on towards the east or whether they remain where they are along the road, their future is very dark, and it means annihilation for the whole race unless they can be quickly reinstated in their homes with permission to carry on their business, or else taken out of the country altogether. Even if they are left just as they are, two or three months will probably see the end of most of them. The climate of the interior is very different from that of Constantinople, and the nights are already cold. We shall do the best we can here, but can hardly touch the outer edge of the national wretchedness and misery, which is written so clearly on the despairing faces of the people, especially of the women and girls, that enquiry and investigation are almost unnecessary to confirm the horrible truth. We are using every means we can, however, to see as much as possible ourselves and get reliable information of the rest....

P.S.—I have had to wait several days to find a suitable messenger, and the delay has enabled me to get a pretty comprehensive view of the situation. There are at present in Q. about 5,000 to 10,000 Armenian refugees, mostly from the Broussa, Ismid and Bardezag regions; a few hundreds come from Eski Shehr, Ak Shehr and other places nearer by. The people are, for the most part, encamped in the fields near the railway station, much as they are at the places above described. The protection is, for the most part, very flimsy, and there is a considerable proportion of the people whose things have been stolen from them and who are simply lying out in the open with no protection from the scorching sun by day or from the dew and dampness by night. This state of affairs produces a vast number of cases of malaria and dysentery, and also of heat prostration, and one cannot walk a few paces through the camp without seeing sick lying everywhere, especially children. There are, of course, no sanitary arrangements at all, and last night the stench that came from the camp was overpowering. Conditions are ripe for an epidemic at any time, especially as these people have not, like the soldiers, received any prophylactic treatment. Until very recently the Government had done absolutely nothing for the refugees; during the last few days they have been giving the adults one piastre[151] and the children twenty paras[152] a day, which is, of course, insufficient to feed them adequately. The people have no occupation and stand and lie about listlessly; a steady stream of them passes up and down the main street, begging or peddling their small remaining stock of clothing, rugs, embroidery, &c. At night the people are not molested as much as they were at first, but this is probably due chiefly to the fact that the best of everything has been taken away from them by this time and that a vast assemblage of sickly and half-starved people is naturally comparatively safe from molestation. There are a fair proportion of the Armenians who have managed to keep some money and goods, and who are fairly comfortable for the time being in houses and rooms that they rent. These, however, have troubles of their own, for the police try to get money out of them by frightening them, saying that they are next on the list to be sent off to Bozanti, that their papers are made out wrong, &c. Numbers of anxious parents have been to us, beseeching us to take their daughters as nurses or servants in order to protect them from the Turks. We have employed as many as we dared—not that we are afraid for ourselves, but that we have to think of our own regular nurses and employees, who would be in danger if we overstepped the mark. But it is terrible to refuse asylum to girls whom we know to be in danger. Yesterday an unusually pretty and refined young girl of fifteen was brought to us by her parents; she had been pursued all the way from Broussa by an Army officer, but they had been able to elude him and the police as well. Our hospital is too public to shelter her, and we are still looking for a place for her. Most of the people in town are scared to do anything at all, foreigners included, but we do not propose to show the white feather, and are only waiting for certain official persons to return from P., where they went a few days ago in order to get larger liberties for Red Cross activities. At present our hospital has taken in all the soldiers and refugees that it can, and we are seeing sick refugees in the clinic all day long. To-day I counted 21 women and children in one of our waiting-rooms, mostly lying on the floor from sheer exhaustion, one child moribund, two others nearly so, and half the rest of the group quite likely to die in a few days, if they are allowed to remain where they are in the camp. Many of the villagers are mountaineers, and, lying out on the hot dusty plain by day and exposed to the cold of night, they quickly succumb. To-day I took a little girl into the hospital who had been perfectly well until four days ago, when everything was stolen from the mother and she had no place to lay her except on the ground, so that she quickly got up a dysentery and died a few hours after admission to the ward. The family were respectable Protestant people from Ismid. Hardly had the little girl died and the sheets been changed than another child, this time a boy, was put into the same bed; his leg had been cut off by a railway-truck and apparently there was nobody to take care of him. We found that the mother had been forcibly separated from her children further back on the road. In that same ward lies a young girl who has recently had her leg amputated for the same accident, and who to-day was crying and screaming because some friends had told her that her parents had suddenly been deported to P. without having been given a chance to see her. It is all horrible, horrible—no mere description can adequately portray the awful suffering of these unfortunate people, whose only crime is that they are Armenians.

If a few of the men have had revolutionary ideas, I am convinced that the vast majority of them have had no more idea of rising against the Government than have their helpless wives and children. The suffering we see is utterly unlike anything confronting the Americans in Constantinople. Sad as is the lot of many of the poor soldiers, they at least have the comfort of kindness and sympathy, and the realisation that the enemy is sharing the same lot. But these people are being deliberately done to death at a sufficiently slow pace to allow their oppressors the opportunity of choosing out such of their women and their goods as they care for and getting all their money away from them before they die. Dr. and Mrs. D. went through the massacres of ’94 and ’96, and they and Miss H. and I have been through two revolutions, one massacre and two wars since then, but we all agree that we have never seen anything like this. Another outrageous side of it is that many of the fathers and brothers of these women and children are in the Army, fighting the country’s battles. Such was the case with the dying child that was brought to the clinic this afternoon, and with another who will probably be in the same condition soon.

In addition to the medical work, we have begun distributing bread and fruit at the hospital twice a day, and a few quilts to those who are most needy. But this is very inadequate, and we hope to get the Government’s permission to keep a large number of the sick in the city under our supervision with a couple of Armenian physicians to assist us. Many of the people had heard of the offer of transportation to America some time before I came here, and sigh that it might be realised. Unless political circumstances allow of their speedy restoration to their homes or their bona fide establishment in new places, transportation to America seems their only hope, or else the nation will be annihilated, and that very soon....

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Footnote 150:

Of Union and Progress.

Footnote 151:

Slightly more than twopence.

Footnote 152:

Slightly more than a penny.

111. Q.: LETTER FROM DR. E., DATED 27th OCTOBER, 1915; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

Since my writing to you last the situation has changed considerably, although the general need and suffering remain. The whole encampment near the railway has been cleared out and sent on, with the exception of some tents belonging to families with contagious cases, such as diphtheria, scarlet fever, etc., which are being attended to by the Beledié physician. There remain, however, a very large number of people in the city, some say as many as 20,000, who are still permitted to stay here—probably through bribes to the police, friends in the Government, etc. Although the above number may be an exaggeration, one sees crowds of Armenians everywhere in town, and we have the same crowd of about 500 every day to feed, and more patients coming to the clinic than we have time to see.

Soon after the great deportation that preceded the arrival of the new Vali, Miss H. and I drove out to PP. Han, the first station on the railway towards P., just to follow up the crowd, as a large number had been driven off on foot with the expectation of taking the railway later on. PP. Han is about three hours from here by carriage, and, even so near to Q. as this, we found 100 people sitting and lying about the station in utter destitution. They had been there three days; most of them had eaten up all the provisions they had and looked haggard and emaciated—veritable famine victims such as one sees in pictures of what occurs in India. On leaving Q. they had been promised food along the way, and the gendarmes there left, saying “geledjek,” but the fact was that they had had no provision whatsoever made for them. The train from Q. came along while we were there, and most of the people dragged themselves to the carriages and endeavoured to get on, but were pushed back by the gendarmes, partly because they had no tickets and partly because there was no room; so the poor people turned back bitterly and hopelessly to where they had been sitting or lying about the station. There is a village an hour or two away from the station, and a Turkish baker had driven to the station to sell bread, but as there was no money to buy, the grown-up people looked at it from the distance, while the little gaunt children drew near to stare at it wistfully. I bought enough to give each person there a loaf, and many declared that it was the first food they had had for three days. Some of the people there were intelligent and educated—their sufferings were even greater than those of the villagers, who were more accustomed to hardship. There were two women there desperately sick, with puny babies tugging away at the breast and getting nothing, their pathetic cries mingled with the groans of the mothers in physical and mental anguish. Among the hundred people there were not half-a-dozen tents, and these improvised and of the flimsiest description. All the rest of the people were lying out in the open, day and night, many without even a blanket or quilt. Half-a-mile from the station I found two old women who were crawling about on hands and knees, too weak to walk; they had been carried off on a wagon, ostensibly to go to a village, but, once out of sight of the gendarmes, the driver had dropped them in the field and hurried away. All without exception looked forward to certain death by starvation, nor could we see any other future for them. A few miles further on, we found a little heap of clods that had been apparently piled together and then scattered, and near it a bundle of rags full of a child’s bones. The skull, with the scalp still clinging to it, was lying a yard or two away. Evidently there had been a hasty burial, and the dogs had come and torn the grave to pieces and devoured the body. That same day we found another dead body by the roadside—an old woman wrapped in a torn quilt; also a woman about 40 years old sitting alone by the road, miles away from any city or village, with feet bare and swollen, almost pulseless, and evidently crazed from terror and exposure, muttering something about Turks who were coming to cut her throat, about her people who had left her behind, and so forth. A little further on, lying beside an empty wayside stable, we found an old woman, half-naked, pulseless, muttering in low delirium and with only a few hours to live. We lifted her into the old stable, covered her with an old quilt that we found near her, and drove back to the city, weighed down with the thought of the awful suffering that is going on all over the country, especially to the south-east of us, of which we see such terrible examples at our very doors.

Our new executive is affable and pleasant enough, but is hand and glove with the clique here and impresses me as insincere. After pushing the deportation vigorously for a few days, things have quieted down again, and the Armenians in town are having their hopes revived, although we see nothing to ground them upon. The hunger and want in the city are increasing; to-day we fed over 600. It is blessed work, even if it seems to have no future for the recipients. A lot of the exiles are well qualified to earn a living, but the police will not allow them to work.

Next time you write, I should be interested to know if the case of Vartouhi, whose sisters from Gumuldjina were abducted, was taken up by the Bulgarian Ministry.

A side-light on the rate of extermination of the Armenians is thrown by a glance at mortality statistics in our hospital, which I have been studying lately. In ordinary years the average mortality from all causes is about 4 per cent. This year, among 500 to 600 soldiers we have taken in, it has been about 6 per cent., the increase being doubtless due to the lowered vitality of the soldiers in general. The mortality among Armenians—exiles—who have been admitted to our wards has been over 30 per cent., and this in spite of the fact that we have taken in only the ordinary run of maladies and that there has been no epidemic! The nation is being systematically done to death by a cruel and crafty method, and their extermination is only a question of time.

112. Q.: LETTER, DATED Q., 25th NOVEMBER, 1915, FROM DR. E. TO MR. N. AT CONSTANTINOPLE; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

Profiting by a medical call to Bozanti to see the family of a railway employee, I have at last had a chance which I have been waiting for for some time, namely, to investigate the conditions to the south-east of us. The journey there and back was very tedious and disagreeable; the locomotives burn only wood, and the trains take just about twice the ordinary time to cover the distance. About every three or four hours the train has to stop to load wood on the tender, and when it comes to a steep grade the train has to be divided into two, the locomotive taking up half of it and then returning for the other half. There is still transportation of Armenians going on, but most of the movement is in the other direction, great numbers of raw Arab recruits being brought from Syria and the Hauran and sent on to Eski Shehr and Constantinople. The men are of the wildest type, thinly clad, many of them having neither shoes nor stockings. They suffer greatly from the cold, which is already becoming severe, and are treated with great brutality by their officers, whom I saw beating and stoning and cursing them all along the way.

Leaving on Sunday, the 21st, I spent the next day at P. There were about 2,000 exiles there, of whom about a third had permission from the Government to remain on account of being artizans or, in the cases of women and children, of being members of soldiers’ families. The remainder were more or less under the ban, and were dragging out a wretched existence dodging the police, but preferring such a life to the fate of being sent on into the mountains to starve. The artizans above-mentioned were receiving a loaf of bread a day from the Government and being forced to work for nothing; also the soldiers’ families were receiving rations, but in no case sufficient. I heard many stories of how the Armenians had been refused transportation by train, and had been forced to hire wagons at exorbitant rates, ten liras and more from P. to Tarsus, or else had been driven off on foot, leaving most of their belongings behind them. I saw great piles of baggage heaped up at the station, at least five or six hundred pieces, that had been abandoned, and was told that probably there had been three thousand in all. Most of this property had been confiscated as “metrouk” (abandoned) and had been partitioned among the officials or sold, while a good deal had been stolen by the Turks in the town. About a hundred children had been abandoned on account of sickness or of their being too young to walk. The Turks had taken all but about twenty of these and adopted them as Moslems, and I found the remainder of them in the care of a poor Armenian woman, who with the help of some of the Armenians in the town was trying to look after them. They were all in a dark, wretched room, about nine by twelve feet—miserable specimens of humanity they were. Seven of them in that room actually looked sick, and all of them pinched and pale and insufficiently clothed. The kind-hearted woman in charge was not only nursing a baby of her own but actually trying to make her small supply of milk suffice for two of the littlest refugees as well, who were sick and for whom there was no cow’s milk to be had. Being in such wretched condition they were not much in demand, but from time to time, she told me, the Turks would come round to see if there were any worth taking off, especially girls. The Government was doing absolutely nothing for these children.

Deportation in P. was still in progress, about a hundred wagon-loads of people having been driven off a few days before I arrived. One of the parties, consisting of husband, wife, two boys and one girl, had been set upon near BE. by robbers. Upon some resistance being offered by the man, the whole party was stabbed to death, the little girl of six years having first been foully outraged. This story is authentic, and the Government is now making investigation and promises to punish the “guilty” when they are found.

Near the station I found about two hundred people who had been driven out of the town, and were crowded into a couple of abandoned and tumble-down houses, in filth and misery indescribable. I started to look at the sick, but gave it up as a bad job, as almost all were sick and no medicine would make them well as long as they were obliged to live under such conditions. There were a few tents spread outside on the frozen ground, and the condition of the people in them was about the same as that of those in the houses. In the evening, when I took the train, some of the people were trying to buy tickets, when I saw an officer deliberately pulling them away from the window and beckoning to Turks to take their places and to their friends to crowd about the window, apparently with the intention of delaying the Armenians so that they should miss the train, which now takes passengers only once a week. I managed to crowd in and buy tickets for four of them, the officer meanwhile telling the rest of them that there were no tickets for them that night. Fortunately the train was so late that I think all must have eventually gotten tickets. This in itself is a small incident, but is a sample of the continual nagging and harassing that is going on when there is no opportunity to do something worse. The regular resident Armenians of P. have for the most part been allowed to remain, through the goodwill of the Kaimakam, but are, of course, subjected to constant nagging. They are frequently invited to become Moslems, and even J. Effendi, who is a Protestant, is nagged by one of the Turkish officials, who is trying to get his youngest daughter to marry him. All Armenians there are in great anxiety and fear, and I could see that they were nervous about being seen with me, so that I had some difficulty in seeing and hearing what I wanted. In Q. they seem to take a great deal of comfort in our presence in the city and in being able to apply to us in a way that does not excite suspicion. Also, some of the police are our friends and refrain from making trouble.

Going on to Bozanti, I found only about 250 refugees. These were scattered along the long valley that leads towards Tarsus, and were altogether the most wretched of the exiles that I have yet seen. They are the remnants of the vast encampment that has been there during the past months, and are all too poor to hire any conveyance to Tarsus, eighteen hours away, while their women and children are too feeble to attempt the journey on foot. About two-thirds of the people had wretched tents of some description, and the rest had no shelter at all. They had sold what had not been stolen from them, and many were half-naked. All were famished and wretched, with despair written on their pinched and haggard faces; a large number were sick, and I counted five corpses in half-an-hour. Of the latter, two were still stretched out in the tents, one was being buried, and two had been thrown out by the roadside. There is no available shelter for these people in Bozanti, even if they had permission to use it. The Government sends some bread to them from time to time, but with no regularity. Most of them were villagers, but some from good families. I found a pretty young girl with her mother in one of the tents, whom I recognised as having seen in Q. The girl had been in danger of being abducted by the police while here, so her mother had hurried her on to Bozanti; but there the money gave out, and they had nothing left but some scanty bedding, a few dishes, a little clothing and three medjidias. Beside their tent were two others, whose occupants, like them, were people of some breeding and refinement, but in similar destitution, and with only women and children in all the three tents. In another tent I found a young girl who had been carried off by the gendarmes but rescued by the station employees at Bozanti. I was told that she had been a bright and attractive girl, but when I saw her she was thin and emaciated and had become idiotic. The valley was strewn with graves, and many of them had been torn open by dogs and the bodies eaten. I was told that considerably over a thousand people had died at Bozanti, and about the same number at P.—how many thousands all along the way from Constantinople to Mesopotamia, no one can tell. People coming from that region say that not one person in ten ever reached Zor, and that those people who have gotten there have nothing but starvation before them. From the statements of railway officials and others I should think that not less than 500,000 people must have passed through Bozanti.

At P., in addition to distributing some money, I left 30 liras to be spent for the people by J. Effendi and the Armenian Beledié physician there (a first-rate and very capable fellow), paying especial attention to the waifs above mentioned. At Bozanti I bought a donkey-load of bread and distributed it to the refugees, gave out a considerable amount of cash in small sums, hired several camels and horses that were then available to take some of the people on to Tarsus as soon as possible, and left 20 liras with my host to hire wagons next day and send on more of the people (wagons there can now be hired quite cheaply). If we get word that they reached Tarsus safely, I think we can arrange to send on the rest. Tarsus is at least warmer and better in every way than the bleak mountains among which they are staying now, and we can only hope that things may take a turn for the better before they are driven into the desert. The Vali here is now very friendly, and assures us that at least all Protestants will be allowed to remain here and will not be molested, but that others will be sent off soon to the towns (kazas), though not to the villages. We all breathe easier with the chief of police and his cronies now no longer in Q.

113. KONIA: RESUMÉ OF A LETTER[153] DATED KONIA, 2nd/15th OCTOBER, 1915; APPENDED TO THE MEMORANDUM (DOC. 11), DATED 15th/28th OCTOBER, 1915, FROM A WELL-INFORMED SOURCE AT BUKAREST.

Immediately after the recall of the Vali, Djelal Bey, who had left the exiles’ tents with tears in his eyes, more than 80,000 Armenians—men, women and children—were driven away from their tents and directed towards the south, beaten along with whips and clubs. It was a heart-rending sight. The poor people, who were already in rags, had to abandon what blankets or clothes they possessed and start on foot. Parents had lost their children, women were looking for their husbands, but the wild gendarmerie flogged without mercy all those who cried or entreated. The tents were full of corpses, which dogs were devouring. More than thirty people died daily from hunger and cold. All along the railway line from Konia to Karaman, Eregli and Bozanti (the rail-head), hundreds of thousands of Armenians were herded along by the gendarmes. Tired and hungry, they begged bread from the passengers and the railway officials. The few families that had managed to remain in Konia at the cost of great sacrifices, have also received the order to leave the town. The Government has published a report on alleged crimes committed by the Christians, and especially by the Armenians, against the Moslems. By such means it deliberately exasperates the Turks more and more. On the journey the number of deaths goes on increasing.

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Footnote 153:

Name of writer withheld.

114. BAGHDAD RAILWAY: DIARY OF A FOREIGN RESIDENT[154] IN THE TOWN OF B., ON A SECTION OF THE LINE; EDITED BY WILLIAM WALTER ROCKWELL, ESQ., PH.D., AND PUBLISHED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF (1916).

30th June, 1915.

The skies are dark here, and people have been in and out all day—these of all classes, and every one with the same question: “What of the night?” The news from BV. was not encouraging. A few influential Turks here want to help, but dare not. Some women went by carriage to see an influential man and his family in a vineyard; were well received. Each had her part; —— was assigned that of shedding tears, but I do not think she did so alone. It has been like a funeral here. Several families have been notified to be at the station with all their members and their beds on Monday next, when they would be told their destination. P.’s brother and Q. head the list; the others are poorer people. They are working for a week of grace in which to settle business affairs. Isn’t it awful—and all are asking: “Who next?” Such drawn and tired faces as we have seen all day.

Half the town want to “store” things here, to be ours if they never return; rugs, coppers, etc.—but we may be blown up, who knows?

1st July.

Times here are lively. In B. people get two orders at once, and then ask which one they must obey? Conditions in BV. are hard. The Vali’s brother is against the Armenians. People of all sorts and conditions come from morning until night to ask questions and to weep. The conditions here are far from cheerful.

4th July.

Several families go to-morrow (only one of them a Protestant). The Government says they will go a few at a time. I doubt their sending widows, and, for all their positive assertions, I still feel it in my bones that there will be modifications of the order. People come from morning till night to talk.

I am giving up the room downstairs for a store-room. —— says he has 5,000 liras’ worth of mortgages and farms, etc., which he can’t store. The R.’s have eight times as much out among the ruling race. I suspect that leading families are to go first. Every one trembles.

We had a comfortably full chapel both morning and evening, and two beautiful sermons suitable for the time. Many Greeks and Gregorians present. The Greeks are being sent from Constantinople. —— urged upon the people their going away in a right spirit, remembering the blessings of the past, opportunities as a nation for education, business and church life, to pay their debts to Moslems, to help the poor among them, to go as evangelists in faith and courage. It was comforting and inspiring.

18th July.

Eighty-three men from Kaisaria (without their families), the most influential man in the Protestant community among them, came to-day en route for Aleppo. They say that spies are everywhere now-a-days. What days these are, and when will they end?

20th July.

Last night the city districts across the river were notified to be ready. The Commissaire (chief of police) is registering families all over the city, and says they are to go at least fifty at a time and that vigorous measures will now be taken, etc. These are miserable, anxious days for everybody.

23rd July.

One does not know what to say of the situation here. There seemed to be a holding up yesterday. Some who went to be registered were sent home to wait till called for. In the meantime, Arab women were going through —— Agha’s district (where word had been given the previous evening to pack up and leave), and were buying all sorts of things, rugs, coppers, etc., at one-third or one-fifth their value. Things worth a lira[155] sometimes went for a mejidia[156], etc. There is trouble in every family.

I’ve been out in the market getting cloth so as to give sewing to some poor women, and also to get the news. I met the Armenian priest at S.’s store. He is pretty certain there is no help for the people. However, he is going through his congregation and making out a list of all the lame and halt and deaf and blind and old and soldiers’ families, to lay before the Government as exceptions. He had a hope of gaining their case.

A few wretched people from Zeitoun are in the churchyard. They were left behind somewhere, but are now here, and I hear that one woman was likely to be confined last night.

Streets are full of Moslem women of the common sort, buying freely, talking loudly, and, I fear, getting goods “charged.” Merchants do not seem glad to see them.

Some say that Armenians in BV. have paid £10,000 (Turkish) to buy exemption; others say forty families are to leave soon.

I made several calls and saw many in the streets. It was pitiful to find the gateways blocked by crowds of Moslem women demanding what there was for sale; even pushing into houses after hearing there was nothing for sale. In one house of our congregation is a woman with three little children. The mother had sold her few decent clothes, bought coarse flour and made a pile of the hardest and poorest thin bread I’ve seen for many a day. She needed her clothes badly enough, but, with hungry children, she needed money more. I gave her a medjidia.

T.’s wife was at home selling and packing, quite cheerful, but says T.’s old mother mourns the years of labour given to the vineyard, etc. (naturally). Her neighbours had torn some sheets of corrugated zinc from their roofs to sell. The Government forbade it.

28th July.

Many people actually left on Monday, so that in all over forty families have gone, and many more are to go next Thursday. Our baker went on two hours’ or less notice. He left bread in the oven, and gathered up wheat that was drying. He has a lame wife and three children, and his half-blind mother went also. There seems to be no help. (N.B.—The poor baker died soon on the way.)

A few families have left BV. and several men have left AE., with families to follow. The poverty and distress of the people is heartbreaking. The poor family from BM., which you gave help to and who have seven daughters, are to go next Monday. This intense heat has pulled the eldest daughter down so that she is confined to her bed. I fear it is tuberculosis. Doctor says so. The family will ask delay. There isn’t much chance of their getting it.

—— (the Moslem doctor) examines people and says to the sick, “You can go,” and gives a stimulant. The mother of the R. brothers is to go on Monday. I hope we can keep the boys here.

I’ve bought a cow for which I paid three liras (fifty-four shillings). Others would not have paid so much, but it means food and money for the journey.

Wages in the factory have been cut down, as people are willing to work at any price if they can escape exile.

2nd August.

Over forty more families left this morning. Most of them were very poor, and it was a sad sight to see them going to the station on foot, loaded down with small children, jugs, baskets and bundles. They were not laughing or talking at all; some of the children were crying; better off people went to the train by carriage, but looked no happier. Thus far soldiers’ families seem to be exempt.

Sixty men from AE. were on the train as exiles this morning; more are to follow. The train runs now for military and exile service from AE. I can’t even write letters, my mind is so upset.

4th August.

School is still an open question. The Turks are taking note of stock in shop to-day.

One of the —— boys, about twelve years old, was returning home to the vineyard and was robbed and wounded a little. After the murder of young —— last week, we are thankful this boy was not seriously hurt. The incident shows the spirit of the times.

7th August.

Miss —— has just come from AE. She saw the AE. people being loaded into carts sent by the Government, and carriages hired by themselves, to be deported. Seventy families came as far as B. in the night. ——’s family got a day longer. George was summoned in the night to help them. He went on horseback, and hasn’t returned. Many are to leave here on Monday.

8th August.

Such a full day; people coming, coming, a constant stream, to deposit things, to get eye-medicine, salve for sores, to ask for help, to beg all manner of things, shoes, money, tents and so on. I did something for each asker, but not much. There was a mad rush to the station—one stream of vehicles of all descriptions, carrying goods to the station, families on top in most cases. The regular passenger train pulled out sometime before — o’clock. The live freight was so overfull that many were left until to-morrow—among them ——, who has been ill for weeks. Their goods are at the station, and their house locked and sealed; —— is lying under an empty goods-truck, very weak and miserable.

The people in BW. are now threatened with deportation. There are scarcely half-a-dozen mature men left in the village since the last massacre, but plenty of women and children.

A group of people from Talas have come. The women have been robbed, and some of the girls in their party had suffered terrible things. The party had sons in military service, and others in business in America.

9th August.

Miss —— went to BV. to-day. We saw the people (put by themselves) off for AG. Besides many B. people we know, there were fifty carriages full of AE. people, including Protestants and many big Armenian families. Seventy families came up a few days ago. ——’s shop was shut up and sealed so quickly that they got only three packages out before the Government was on hand to close up. Little —— even left his coat in his haste. Between 800 and 900 liras’ worth of goods were in the store. Their house is new, and newly furnished. They were to have come on last night, but six days more were granted, because of new-born baby and wife’s being too weak.

There has been an uprising of Armenian runaways and Kurds, and a meeting in conflict near Marash. A few soldiers killed. This event has disturbed still more the minds of the Turks. The sea-coast towns are to be emptied in two weeks, they say. Turks will go to the mountains.

11th August.

There seems to be a holding up of deportation to last until after Bairam at least, and we hope longer. There is no hold up for AE.

14th August.

Dr. L. arrived here from AC. He said there was no place as quiet and safe as this region! In AC. a thousand families have been told to leave, and among them are the families of all their teachers. So there was no hope of opening the College unless something very unexpected occurred soon. There have been extensive massacres all through that region, at Malatia, Besné, Adiaman, etc. The Marash region is all afire—runaways stirring up to wrath and revenge being taken by massacre, the Turks wanting an excuse to do their worst. Nothing has been heard from Marash for some time. He knows of special trouble and killing at Fundadjak (five hours from Marash). Ourfa region is all excitement, people being exiled and made away with en route. He mentioned many killed that we knew.

One thousand Zeitoun people have died in exile, they say. The city is full now with exiles from Adapazar and that region. The son of ——- of Talas died in Osmania. The family were exiled, and the hardships of the journey were too much for the professor.

Many Zeitoun people are wandering about the streets of B. They say they were driven from the Konia Vilayet. They reported to the Kaimakam here, who said he had no orders about them and would not meddle, they might do just as they pleased. (Later they were driven on). Dr. L. appealed personally to U. Pasha for permission to do general relief work. He was flatly refused. U. said the Government would attend to its own business. Dr. L. says they will do so, and are doing so in regions to the east, and people are dying in many ways; it’s a part of the policy.

Dr. L. says the Arabs at Der-el-Zor (where Armenians are exiled) are kindly, and treat women well. The climate is hot and dry, and warm river-water is all there is to drink, and he fears cholera and typhoid, as bodies are continually seen floating down the rivers (massacre victims).

16th August.

Crowds of Zeitoun people, sent away from Sultania, went on to-day towards BM. I fear they go to death. Between 600 and 700 have died already of hardship and illness.

I made some Bairam calls on Turks and was well received, but one cannot be at all sure of the heart of any one these days.

Have just returned from the priest’s house. I went to get a girl’s story. The girl was a day-pupil of Miss V.’s[157] at X., about fifteen years old. Officers came to many houses and said they were to be exiled, but school-girls were to be excepted, and they took the girls “back to school;” not to their own school, though, but to a Turkish barracks, where they were on exhibition and chosen as the property of certain officers. This girl was claimed by one; the others, over a hundred, were carried in automobiles to Constantinople. Fifteen of them were this girl’s friends. This girl was brought here with exiles from somewhere. She refused the attentions of the officer claiming her. The priest heard of her and went to investigate. The officer complained that not one smile had she ever given him. The priest said she would never smile on him, and left him to think over-night on the matter. In the morning he said he didn’t want her against her will. The priest secured the girl, and the officer has gone his way on to Aleppo. The priest can’t afford to keep her, and I have written to the BV. school about her. Perhaps we here can raise 10 liras for her and send her to school. She left her mother two months ago. Her family were exiled at once.

W., X.’s sister and her child were here an hour ago, en route from the north (where the Zeitoun people were first sent). She tells dreadful tales. What will be the end of it all? The streets are full of exiles begging for bread. —— and relatives are all here, and Partani’s sister. I am buying ——’s bed to lighten her luggage and fill her purse. She tells of babies left to die on the roadside, as the mothers could carry them no longer. Many tell me this.

A young man from —— was just in. Two hundred and fifty families are en route from there. The city swarms with exiles, and many are at ——.

19th August.

Our —— boys and families are also in the procession. The Nigdé people have begun to move on from here. The Adapazar people are à la franca and some of them very rich. Thirty more carriages from AE. last night.

Robberies are common, and girls carried off, and three Armenians killed at BY.

20th August.

The stream of arrivals continues to flow into B. The poor people on foot simply drop down utterly exhausted, and many are dying of hunger and fatigue. Three quite large children died in the Gregorian churchyard yesterday; another is badly off with smallpox; a middle-aged man there is dying. —— Hodja has been over there this morning to minister to him. A crowd of those ill were carried off to the Turkish hospital yesterday. —— and his family are still here from BV., waiting for the rest of his family—mother and brothers and their families. The advance line has arrived and tell him that his relatives lost almost everything from their homes. Plunderers threw their goods from the windows, and partners carried off rugs, bedding, &c. and some money they had. His brothers had been in prison.

I helped yesterday a blind man (led by his wife) who had been driven from Bor; also an old woman with snowy white hair who was hungry and penniless. I got Y. to make up a dress for a young woman, and Z. made a skirt for another young married woman whose clothes were in tatters. A crowd are in our churchyard. I sent them soap for a wash and bath, and shavings, &c., for fuel.

There has been a pause in the B. deportation, waiting for the present crowd to pass on. AE. people are again on the move. I hear that only five Armenian families will be left in AE. One is the dealer in iron for the Railway, and the others are employed for business dealings with the Government.

People here are dealt with very gently as compared with treatment received in northern districts and to the east.

22nd August.

B. presents a strange sight these days with literally thousands of strangers in our streets. These are from places all the way up to Adapazar, and they are of all types and degrees of civilisation, “some in rags, and some in tags, and some in velvet gowns.” The church was full this morning.

I went by the Gregorian church yesterday and looked into the yard. Such a sight! Such a pandemonium of noises! In that crowd there are deaths every day, from disease, hunger and exhaustion. I sent money to help a few, but any help any of us can give is but a drop in an ocean of misery.

According to a wire from our Ambassador, Catholics and Protestants are excused from exile. It seems to be true. I suppose our people in AG. will be called back now. Now for the red tape to get a full and correct list of the Protestant villages and strangers!

I have written for some relief money. One poor Zeitoun woman is too ill to travel, but her husband has been driven on—forced to leave her here. She is at the church. Some people are in our churchyard, some in hans, and some have rented houses in which to rest for a few days. The Zeitoun people are “free,” but are driven from place to place. They are, as a whole, ragged, dirty and covered with vermin, and hungry, and afraid of the purpose of the Government.

Same Evening.

There is danger of cholera breaking out. Two died in the churchyard who had symptoms of it. The Government is trying to drive away the poorest of the people, chiefly Zeitoun people. They say there is cholera in Aleppo. Was there ever a year like this?

A lot of people from Nigdé were called from our service by the police to start on, this afternoon. The Government is not quite pleased over the new order for exemption of Protestants and Catholics. The Zeitoun people are watched closely, and one must not help them.

26th August[158].

——’s letters do not—cannot—exaggerate it. The state to which things have come is indicated by ——’s very casual remark last night: “Well, to-morrow we’ll first go out and see who has died.”—“I hope that woman in the church has.”—“I wish that child would, but I’m afraid she won’t.”

Yesterday and the day before, most of those in the open—those absolutely too sick to move along being excepted—were driven out with whips. We fear they have but gone to BZ. (outside the town), to suffer still worse. Many have been even deprived of their bedding, or at least separated from it and forbidden to hunt it up. There is never a day but some die.

Those able to hire houses have escaped from being driven on, by keeping out of sight, as the driving is done with much cruelty but no system.

In our church a very à la franca family from —— had an addition the day they arrived. They have been given a few days’ grace.

I’ve been out to BZ., where conditions are still worse than in the city. Saw one old woman by the road, dying. People walked by her, lying out in the blazing sun, with scarcely a look. The sight is too common. Thousands are out there, and no shade or shelter of any kind, except such as the people themselves can manage to put up.

I go out with —— every day, and come back sure I’ve merely had a nightmare.

2nd September.

Streams of Yozgad people have come, and the word is that 10,000 are en route from Constantinople. Some Broussa people are here now—new-comers. Yesterday was a hard day, heart-breaking. I went to the train, a long one, to see over forty B. families off, and others besides. Among the B. people were ——, ——, AB., and his sick wife, taken from bed to go and almost carried aboard the train. ——’s sister and husband, her daughter Akabé and Akabé’s family go on Saturday, and our dear, kind, and just neighbour —— and his family. He looked white with pain at going, and his wife, well, she could talk, though far from happy. Notwithstanding ——’s assurances that —— and —— could remain as boarders, their boys were taken. The Kaimakam evidently had not been notified by the Vali. The Kaimakam seems to have a heart, but is hard pressed, I am told, by the rich and influential Turks in B., who are making life a burden for him.

Another of those wretched old women without money, food, friends, or bed, and ill, has finished her pilgrimage. Three remain in the Gregorian yard, and three men in the same hopeless condition. I do not see how they live. The old women raise a cry for water when I go. I sent —— with iced “iran” yesterday and to-day. The woman with a fever is better. Two girls, without beds, are now ill. I am getting excelsior beds filled for them to-day. The woman with a burnt arm has moved on. The train was to go to CD. From where will they be fed there?

3rd September.

Things get worse and worse. Mr. —— called last night and told me he saw a telegram from U. Pasha, saying: “Let not the Americans and consuls be seen helping the exiles or appearing with them at stations and public places.”

——’s name is down to go to-morrow. We are doing our best to save him. I’ve sent to Mr. AG. for help, and may have to go myself to the Kaimakam.

4th September.

—— went to AE. yesterday with a letter to Mr. AG. about our boys and teachers. I’ve little hope from that quarter, but give him his opportunity. Mr. AH. put ——’s case before the Kaimakam strongly yesterday, as our man. The Kaimakam is well disposed, but is under heavy pressure to send every Armenian without exception. Anyway, I may be able to save his family.

6th September.

Crowds of people went to-day. There was only one passenger carriage, for which people paid. All others were crowded en masse into goods-trucks, and driven with whips like so many cattle. One old man, who had spoken and prayed beautifully in our morning prayer meeting yesterday (a Protestant from Yozgad), turned, when the police called him, to call his townsman. He was struck with a stone and asked if it was his business to call people. He quietly accepted the rebuke.

At BV. the proclamation was given out on Saturday from the housetops all over the city that every Armenian of whatever church would leave BV. without delay.

No notice has been served on the Protestants here as yet. The Kaimakam accepted it that they were to remain. He has assured me that he will do his best to save —— as our teacher. But this morning —— was demanded by the police and taken from our yard to be sent at once. You may believe it, he was fairly wild. Said he couldn’t go at once, hadn’t change of clothes, and he would write and ask for a few days’ time. I signed his petition, and a boy ran to the Government while a policeman led him to the station. George gave him money and collected three blankets for him. The Kaimakam sent me greetings and the message that he would attend to the matter. At the station —— was arrested for coming so late, and thus attempting to be left behind. The train was still there but full, and he was rushed back and put into prison! I suspected that the Kaimakam was taking this way to secure delay, and I still think so. Hence I made no enquiries, intending to do so after the train pulled out. Some time later, —— returned all out of breath, saying he could stay until Wednesday, and he drove up to the vineyard to give his wife details. She knew nothing of the proceedings of the day.

Yesterday, after service, a nice looking middle-aged woman came to me with her arm in a sling and said it pained her, and could I do something for it. I took her upstairs and called Nurse ——, and we found a stab in her shoulder and dressed it. She said she and her son were stabbed by bashi bazouks on the way. To stop the bleeding they had stuffed in earth, and this and the blood had caked well.

I took Nurse —— to see some other patients. The old woman who usually raises herself and asks for water seemed unconscious, and didn’t answer even when I said “cold water” and put a few drops on her head. She was alive but getting cold, and died in the night. This morning the man in the corner was also released. He came only two days ago, and was in a most wretched condition.

The other night I found the woman with short grey hair just able to reach up and call: “Water, water.” An Armenian woman lifted her head and she drank, but fell back at once, and we found her hands icy cold, and saw she was dying. We straightened out her rags, and got an old pillow under her head. She was soon released.

This morning Nurse —— and I started out again for the churchyard. Sitting opposite the gate was the fat police commissioner who is so cruel. He called out to “Madame ——.” I stopped and explained that we were only looking after a woman who had met with an accident on the road. But I was told decidedly that I was not to go into that yard again; that the Government would send food! doctors! medicines! and foreigners were not to help or interfere. So I returned.

So many young women and pretty girls come to me here and in the street, asking with tears what is to become of them.

7th September.

The woman and her son with sword-cuts came this afternoon. No one was around, so the gate-man let them in and I dressed the wounds. Both doing well. I gave new bandages and other needfuls, so that, if they could not come again, or were driven on the road to-morrow, they could care for the wound. They were most grateful. They are Protestants, and intelligent; were robbed of money. I gave them a little for food—shall give more if I see them again. AC. got through; no trouble about keeping boys in the yard now. Little fellows run for all. Massacre near Yozgad; the air heavy with the odour of unburied bodies. Some of our travellers came by them. Dr. BB.[159] and the hospital still in X. when the exiles left, but things in a bad way generally. AD.’s postcard tells of AC. BM. seems quiet at present.

—th September.

The woman I was forbidden to nurse got over here yesterday leaning on a friend and by help of a cane. George was here, and we gave the heel a good dressing but couldn’t get all the broken bone out. The flesh is getting clean. The poor old woman cried and said she was hungry. I fed her and gave her a little money. She hopes to get here again to-morrow, but she suffers excruciating pain when her foot rests on the ground.

There will soon be a lull, I suppose, as the town is getting well emptied, not a Christian butcher left, and only two Moslems.

8th September.

The pot is boiling harder and harder. Another special train takes nearly all left of B. Armenians. —— and his family were all hustled off this morning as “a dangerous man who had tried to help exiles.” Talas people are here now (came last night) and tell sad tales.

10th September.

R. feels helpless and it looks that way now, as things get worse every day. The powers that be have their own plans and listen to no one. On all sides one hears a wail of distress. Every man, woman, and child has come from ——, leaving most of their possessions behind. Even their preacher is here, and is ordered to “move on.” I have “cabbaged” the three little fellows who were our pupils, and am keeping them here, as they were of our last year’s boarders. No one will look them up. Two little orphan boys (new ones) were offered from these, but I couldn’t take them. They too must “move on.”

To what straits all are now reduced! The woman with a broken heel was here this morning and I took two more pieces of crushed bone from it. She bears it well. I think the loose pieces are about all out now. I did it up and made a sort of burlap outer covering as a protection. I gave her some food, for she cried and said she was dying of hunger. Only the helpless (and a few others) are now left here. The —— people are at the station. Crowds of people have been shipped off. AE. people are coming now. Poor —— is still in prison.

11th September.

We are nearly crazy with difficulties. I hardly think AJ. will be sent, but no one knows. AF. is here from BV., and reports that some five days ago a telegram was received from some German “sefer” ordering that every Armenian should stay where he was, whether at home or abroad. In BV. the Government hurried people off all the more, but now the order has leaked out, and probably is known here, as there was a lull to-day, and the Vali passed last evening to —— and saw the Kaimakam en route. —— and —— are to leave on Thursday. Circassians are to take the houses of the common people, and officers those of the wealthier ones.

—— reports that Marash Protestants were called back—almost compelled to come. In Adana it looks as if the deportation were an alternative for a massacre. Exiles are not wanted anywhere.

12th September.

No Christians left in Bor. Zeitoun was burned by the runaways and Fundadjak is in ruins; also Deré Keui and another neighbouring village.

14th September.

BV. is being emptied of every Armenian, and the foreigners fear they also may have to go, if there is an invasion on the coast. I do not think conditions are as bad here.

17th September.

Dr. —— says we must not think of Red Cross work as the Society has not the funds, but must let the Turks run things on their own responsibility. The Turks expect an invasion and are sending their families away.

Some rich Samsoun people here to-day. —— says that the three families among whom she is are to go to Konia.

A stranger priest died here yesterday from exhaustion and heart-break, etc.

19th September.

No exiles to-day; there seems to be a calm for a few hours.

—th October.

Life is getting fuller and fuller of problems here. Affairs here are in a very critical condition.

-----

Footnote 154:

Mother of the “Miss B.” of Sect. I., Doc. 8

Footnote 155:

18s.

Footnote 156:

3s. 2d.

Footnote 157:

The “Miss A.” of Sect. XI.

Footnote 158:

Note by Dr. Rockwell:—This letter, by a man, is inserted here to reflect the situation from a man’s point of view.

Footnote 159:

See Section XI.

115. AE., A TOWN ON THE RAILWAY: SERIES OF REPORTS FROM A FOREIGN RESIDENT AT AE., COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

(=a=) =Undated Report.=

Two days ago an order was received here for the immediate deportation of the entire Armenian population of AE., consisting of about 1,800 souls. Yesterday nearly 300 persons were sent to ——, and to-day many more have been ordered to be ready to leave. In anticipation of their deportation, the Armenians are selling all their non-portable goods for a song. Sewing machines sold for 1½ medjidias, iron bedsteads for a few piastres, and so on. The Government is allowing each person only a few metaliks per day for food, and transports only a little baggage. The present destination of the deported persons is ——. Apart from their actual distress and misery, the terror of these people is indescribable. Stories of the massacre of thousands of Armenians in the interior now reach here. Some of these appear to be well founded, but I presume that you have been fully informed of what has transpired in the regions of ——.

(=b=) =Report dated 11th September, 1915.=

Thousands of additional Armenians from the North have arrived here and been transported to the Aleppo region. Six thousand have been deported from the city of Adana, without the exception supposedly given to Catholics and Protestants. The congestion of people at the various stations en route caused terrible suffering and hardships to the refugees. The authorities no longer appear disposed to grant exceptions in favour of teachers and pupils of American schools, and, despite intervention, St. Paul’s College at Tarsus has been suffering in this respect.

(=c=) =Report dated 22nd September, 1915.=

This report opens with the mention of a fear among the Ottoman authorities at AE, that the Allies were about to make a landing there, and proceeds as follows:—

Naturally one of the first results of the above fear was a general rush to complete the deportation of Armenians from Adana. The number of Armenians sent from that city now totals about 25,000, and this is in addition to the many thousands coming from the North that pass through. The misery, suffering and hardships endured by these people are indescribable. Deaths are innumerable. Hundreds of children are constantly being abandoned by their parents, who cannot bear to see them suffer or who have not the strength to look after them. Many are left by the roadside, and cases of their being thrown from railway-carriage windows are reported. Petty cruelties by police and officials increase the sad plight of these people. Conditions in this vicinity are reported to be moderate in comparison with those between Osmania and Aleppo, where the congested masses and lack of facilities render the problem of feeding and transporting these people an impossible task. Protestant and Catholic Armenians continue to be deported, and the same measures are also applied in towns like Hadjin.

(=d=) =Memorandum dated 27th September, 1915.=

I submit herewith the following general details to supplement my various reports concerning the deportation of Armenians and the circumstances responsible for the sufferings and the deaths of many of these people.

(1) The lack of proper transportation facilities is the most important factor in causing this misery. The long distances not covered by railways, between Tarsus and Bozanti on the north and Osmania and Radjou (near Aleppo) to the south, and the lack of carts and carriages, compel many to go afoot. The carts are of the most primitive kind and are usually loaded with the effects of the travellers, on which they must find places to sit. Only those with ample means can afford the luxury of carriages, which for from two to four days’ journey cost from £6 to £20 sterling. In addition to the payment of their ‘fare,’ the travellers are frequently ‘held up’ for more money by the driver or accompanying gendarme; otherwise they are obliged to descend and walk. While in general the Government furnishes carts, these are far from sufficient, and the railway transportation has in most cases had to be paid for by the people themselves. The local section of the Baghdad Railway was a great convenience, nevertheless, in furthering the march of the exiles, but unfortunately of late its services have been considerably required for military transport purposes, and the Armenians have consequently had to find other means of conveyance or else to walk.

(2) While formerly cases of violence to Armenians were rare in this district, of late there have been flagrant cases of highway robbery, while reports of violations of women and girls are more numerous and apparently well founded. Forced conversions, which were formerly only reported from the interior, are now taking place here. Thus in Adana the many Armenian orphan girls whose parents were killed in the massacres of 1909 were told either to leave or become Moslems. A small number had the courage to leave, and were without any shelter or refuge. I had advised the American missionaries not to take in any too great number of outsiders into their institution, as they would thereby jeopardise their present inmates. Miss K., however, secured the consent of the authorities to place these girls in private homes, which she found for them after much difficulty. The work of the German mission at Harounia on behalf of Armenian girls must also be commended in this connection, and the benevolent attitude of His Excellency the Governor General towards girls’-schools must also be pointed out, with the hope that the same will continue.

(3) No attempt has been made of late to solve adequately the problem of feeding the Armenian exiles. This is true both of the stations along the route of deportation and in the larger cities. Thus at Osmania, where for the past few weeks there have always been from forty to sixty thousand people, the food supply is scarcely enough for one-third of that number, so that all are either on short rations or without any food at all. This is responsible for the illness which prevails and the numerous deaths which are reported. This it is which compels mothers to abandon their children, whom they cannot bear to see suffer or are too weak to carry along.

Apart from the general distress brought upon the persons deported, the effect of the deportation measures is becoming more and more apparent on the economic situation of this province. The great majority of the stores and bazaars are shut, and it is difficult to purchase one’s daily requirements. Most of the merchandise belonging to Armenian merchants is in sealed stores. The creditors of Armenian merchants were in most cases able to secure the value of their outstanding credits through taking goods in payment. As the greater part of the business of this district in most lines was in the hands of Armenians, the consequences of their deportation are only too apparent for the future of the Adana Province.

(=e=) =Report dated 30th October, 1915.=

The stream of deported Armenians from the north continues unabated. Recent arrivals were in a terribly wretched condition, and their sufferings from insufficient food and raiment are indescribable. The police and other officials also prohibit their receiving assistance, which makes it evident that slow death is the ultimate fate of the majority.

Three rabid members of the Union and Progress Committee of Adana were expelled from that city because of the manner in which they were hounding the Armenians out of the city. It is stated that they even planned incendiary measures against Armenian houses and buildings, and among others reported to have been endangered was that of the American Mission. At the request of the missionaries, I directed the attention of the authorities to the matter.

The new law concerning the real estate and personal property of deported persons is being carried out in a manner which, I fear, will leave little if anything for the Armenians. Their houses are being inhabited by mouhadjirs, officials, etc., at ridiculously low rents. The goods of deported merchants are being taken possession of by commissions designated for this purpose, and abuses of all kinds are reported. The President of the Commission, Ali Seidi Bey, was recently removed—some say because he opposed the manner in which these measures were being applied.

Baron Oppenheim, who has been with Djemal Pasha, passed through here recently on his way to Constantinople. German reading-rooms, where all manner of literature in favour of the German cause is displayed and distributed, have been established in AE. and Adana. The Baron is their principal supporter. The German school in Adana was also re-opened recently with great éclat. The personal relations between the American missionaries and their German co-workers in this province are of the most cordial nature.

(=f=) =Report dated 4th November, 1915.=

The stream of deported Armenians from Anatolia to Syria continues. In enumerating the various distressing elements connected with this movement, I perhaps failed to point out the terribly insanitary conditions that prevail in the vicinity of the camps or stations near Tarsus and Osmania. These result in part from their overcrowded state, but largely also from the imperfect burial of the corpses of the victims of starvation and disease. The mortality among the deported is daily increasing in percentage, and, when the rains set in, the toll will be frightful. The feeding problem is completely neglected, and will become worse in the future, as even the regular population is beginning to suffer because of a scarcity of wheat. The crop this year was only one-half the normal yield, and there were enormous shipments to Constantinople for the army....

(=g=) =Report dated 6th November, 1915.=

An order has been received by the authorities to stop further deportations of Armenians. This, however, refers only to the few thousand natives of the towns of AE., B., and Adana, who have hitherto escaped deportation. On the other hand, the many thousands in the camp near B. were ordered to be sent away to make room for others coming from the north. An important Imperial Commissioner has also arrived to investigate the abuses of local officials regarding the taking of the personal property of the deported Armenians.

His Excellency Von der Goltz Pasha arrived at B. to-day en route for Aleppo, where he is to make his headquarters, according to reliable reports.

116. THE TAURUS AND AMANUS PASSES: EXTRACTS FROM A LETTER, DATED ALEPPO, 5th NOVEMBER, 1915, FROM DR. L., A FOREIGN RESIDENT IN TURKEY, TO MR. N. AT CONSTANTINOPLE; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

As I telegraphed to you from Adana, I had an uneventful journey. I felt that I could not give a whole week to Konia; no one met me at the train, and I did not have time to go up to the city. Very large numbers of Armenians on the road, suffering hunger, nakedness and cold. Very many of them very old or very young, or delicate women on foot, carrying burdens, or children, etc., etc. I saw Miss M. and left £100 (Turkish) with her. She can use it for the refugees en route between Osmania and Entilli. Aleppo is the great centre from which to do relief work, and the need is beyond estimate. The 150,000 or more refugees will, I suppose, pass on through here; they are now on the road between Konia and Aleppo. There are large numbers in the city now, and large numbers within reach from here. Trustworthy native friends are able to use considerable sums—in small amounts. The Katholikos is being sent from here to Jerusalem....

There is, unfortunately, no way to reach effectively the many thousands en route—10,000 between Bozanti and Tarsus; 20,000 at Tarsus; 40,000 between Osmania and Islohia (which is now the head of the rail); and 40,000 to 50,000 at Kotmo. I saw Djemal Pasha this morning about our teachers at Aintab. He seems friendly, and told me to ascertain whether any order had been sent from the Ministry of the Interior and the Vali of Aleppo. I will let you know if anything comes of it.

P.S.—Typhus has broken out here.

117. THE AMANUS PASSES: STATEMENTS BY TWO SWISS RESIDENTS IN TURKEY; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

(=a=) =Report by Fräulein M., dated 16th November, 1915.=

I have just returned from a ride on horseback through the Baghtché-Osmania plain, where thousands of exiles are lying out in the fields and on the roads, without any shelter and completely at the mercy of all manner of brigands. Last night, about 12 o’clock, a little camp was suddenly attacked. There were about 50 to 60 persons in it. I found men and women badly wounded—bodies slashed open, broken skulls and terrible knife-wounds. Fortunately I was provided with clothes, so I could change their blood-soaked things and then bring them to the next inn, where they were nursed. Many of them were so much exhausted from the enormous loss of blood that they died, I fear, in the meantime. In another camp we found thirty or forty thousand Armenians. I was able to distribute bread among them. Desperate and half-starved, they fell upon it; several times I was almost pulled down off my horse. A number of corpses were lying about unburied, and it was only by bribing the gendarmes that we could induce them to allow their burial. Mostly, the Armenians are not allowed to perform the last offices of love for their relatives. Dreadful epidemics of typhoid-fever broke out everywhere; there was a victim of it practically in every third tent. Nearly everything had to be transported on foot; men, women and children carried their few belongings on their backs. I often saw them break down under their burden, but the soldiers kept on driving them forward with the butt-ends of their rifles, even sometimes with their bayonets. I have dressed bleeding wounds on the bodies of women that had been caused by these bayonet thrusts. Many children had lost their parents and were now without any support. Three hours’ distance from Osmania two dying men were lying absolutely alone in the fields. They had been here for days without food or even a drop of water, after their companions had continued their march. They had grown as thin as skeletons, and only their heavy breathing showed that there was still life in them. Unburied women and children were lying in the ditches. The Turkish officials in Osmania were very obliging; I succeeded in obtaining many concessions from them, and many hardships were remedied. I obtained carriages to pick up the dying people and bring them in to town.

(=b=) =Report by Fräulein O. on a visit to the exiles’ camp at Mamouret, 26th November, 1915.=

We saw thousands of tiny low tents, made of thin material. An innumerable crowd of people, of all ages and every class of society! They were looking at us partly in surprise, partly with the indifference of desperation. A group of hungry, begging children and women were at our heels: “Hanoum, bread! Hanoum, I am hungry; we have had nothing to eat to-day or yesterday!”

You had only to look at the greedy, pale, suffering faces to know that their words were true. About 1,800 loaves could be procured. Everybody fell greedily upon us; the priests who were charged with the distribution of the bread had almost to fight for their lives; but it was by no means sufficient, and no further bread was to be had. A crowd of hungry people stood imploringly before us. The gendarmerie had to keep them back by force. Suddenly the order for departure was given. If anybody was slow in striking their tent, it was torn down with the bayonet. Three carriages and a number of camels were held in readiness. A few wealthy people quickly hired the carriages, while others less well-to-do loaded a camel with their things. The wailing of the poor, the old and the sick filled the air: “We can’t go any further, let us die here.” But they had to go on. We were at least able to pay for a camel for some of them, and to give small change to others in order to buy bread at the next station; clothes, sewn at the Mission Station in Adana, were also distributed. Soon the immense procession was moving on. Some of the most miserable were left behind (others rested there already in the newly-dug graves). As many as 200—destitute, old or sick—are said to have waited there for help to come. The misery was increased a hundredfold by the severe rain and cold that had set in. Everywhere convoys left dying people in their track—little children and invalids perishing. Besides all this the epidemic was spreading more and more.

(=c=) =Report by Fräulein M. on a visit to the exiles’ camp at Islohia, 1st December, 1915.=

It had rained three days and three nights; even in our houses we were acutely sensible of the cold and damp. As soon as possible, I set out on my way. About 200 families had been left behind at Mamouret. They were unable to proceed through exhaustion or illness. In this rain the soldiers, too, felt no inclination to rouse them up and drive them on, so they were lying about in what might have been a lake. There was not a single dry thread left in their ragged bedding. Many women had their feet frost-bitten; they were quite black and in a state for amputation. The wailing and groaning was horrible. Everywhere there were dying people in their last agonies or dead bodies lying in front of the tents. It was only by “bakshish” that the soldiers could be persuaded to bury them. It seemed a comfort to them when we came with dry clothes; they could change their things and get some bread and small change. Then I drove in a carriage along the whole route to Islohia. Though I had seen much distress before, the objects and the scenes I saw here defy description. A frailly-built woman was sitting by the roadside with her bedding on her back, and a young baby strapped on at the top of it; in her arms she had a two-year-old child—its eyes were dim and it was at its last gasp. The woman had broken down in her distress and was weeping in a heart-breaking way. I took her with me to the next camp, where the child died; then I took care of her and sent her on her way. She was so grateful. The whole carriage was packed with bread. I kept on distributing all the time. We had three or four opportunities of buying fresh supplies. These thousands of loaves were a great help to us. I was also able to hire some hundreds of animals to help the poor people forward. The camp at Islohia itself is the saddest thing I have ever seen. Right at the entrance a heap of dead bodies lay unburied. I counted 35, and in another place 22, in the immediate neighbourhood of the tents of those who were down with virulent dysentery. The filth in and around these tents was something indescribable. On one single day the burial committee buried as many as 580 people. Men were fighting for bread like hungry wolves. One saw hideous scenes. With what timidity and apathy these poor people often stared at me, as though they wondered where this assistance came from! For some weeks now many camps have been provided daily with bread. Of course, everything has to be done as unobtrusively as possible. We are so thankful to God that we may at least do something.

(=d=) =Letter from Fräulein M. to Mr. N., dated 13th December, 1915, on the way to Aleppo.=

I should have written long before this, but during these last weeks I have been more on the road than at home, and the work in the camps was often so urgent that I could not find time for anything else. I suppose you have had, in the meantime, the receipt for the 200 liras you sent me. Many thanks for the quick response. I only wish you could see these poor people yourself; you would get an impression of the absolutely dreadful need and distress that these camps conceal. It is simply indescribable; one has to have seen it oneself. So far I have had no difficulty whatever; on the contrary, the officials here are most obliging, and grateful for everything we are doing for the poor people. You will find some reports enclosed which Miss O. copied for you as well; they will give you an idea of what we are doing here. Up to the present we have worked in four camps, twelve hours distant. We were often able to distribute about 10 to 20 liras’ worth of bread a day; besides this, we gave flour, clothes and nirra to many sick people, to help them on the long journey. Sometimes it happened that in some places we did not have nearly enough bread—in such cases we provided the people with money to buy bread at the next bakery along the route.

Now we are on our way to Aleppo, and Miss O. will stay there some weeks, D.V., to prepare everything for another journey to Der-el-Zor. I intend to come back soon, since there is still much work to do on the Mamouré-Islohia route, and it seems to me that we ought not to give up the work among the distressed so long as any of them are left in this place, for if we did they would absolutely die of starvation. Judging by our recent experience, we shall need about 300 to 400 liras a month. Dr. L. told me to send you word about this, because I should get the money from you. It would be better not to stop the work for lack of money, because the poor people would suffer by it. If, however, you think that less money ought to be spent, or that the whole work should be given up, please send me a telegram in time, so that we may stop doing it. If not, will you please be so kind as to send me the amount. To-day I have asked you by wire to send me 400 liras—200 for Mamouré and 200 for Islohia-Hassan-Beyli.

I hope you are well. We got a message that Dr. L. is down with typhus. I hope that God will soon give him new strength. Fräulein O. and I both send you our best wishes.

118. SMYRNA—ALEPPO—DAMASCUS—ALEPPO—SMYRNA: ITINERARY OF A FOREIGN TRAVELLER IN ASIATIC TURKEY; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

I left here (Smyrna) on the 16th September, 1915, for Aleppo. I first saw the Armenians at Afiun Kara Hissar, where there was a big encampment of people—probably 10,000—who had come down from the Black Sea. They were encamped in tents made of material of all descriptions, and their condition was deplorable.

The next place where I saw them was at Konia, also a large encampment. There I saw the first brutality. I saw a woman with her baby separated from her husband. He was put on our train, while she was forcibly held back and prevented from getting on to the train. At the next place, where there were said to be about 50,000, their condition was terrible. They were camped on both sides of the railway track, extending fully half a mile on either side. Here they had two wells from which they could get water, one of which was a very long way from the encampment, the other at the railway station platform. At daybreak the Armenians came in crowds—women and children and old men—to the well to get water. They fought among themselves for a place at the well, and the gendarmes, to keep them in order, flogged several people. I saw women and children repeatedly struck with the whips and sticks in the hands of the gendarmes. Later, I had occasion to pass through the camp on the way to the town of Osmania, and had an opportunity to see the condition of the people there. They were living in tents, like those above described, and their condition was miserable. The site of the encampment had been used several times over by different convoys of Armenians, and no attempt at sanitation had been made, either by the Turks or by the Armenians themselves, with the result that the ground was in a deplorable condition and the stench in the early morning beyond description. At Osmania they were selling their possessions in order to obtain money to buy food. One old man begged me to buy his silver snuff-box for a piastre, in order that he might be able to buy some bread.

From Osmania I travelled by carriage to Radjou, and passed thousands of Armenians en route to Aleppo. They were travelling in ox-carts, on horseback, on donkey-back and on foot—the majority of them children, women and old men. I spoke to several of these people, some of whom had been educated in the American Mission Schools. They told me that they had travelled for two months. They were without money and food, and several expressed their wish that they might die rather than go on and endure the sufferings that they were undergoing. The people on the road were carrying with them practically all their household possessions, and those who had no carts or animals were carrying their goods on their backs. It was not unusual to see a woman with a big pack wrapped up in a mattress and a little child of a few months old on the top of the pack. They were mostly bare-headed, and their faces were swollen from the sun and exposure. Many had no shoes on, and some had their feet wrapped in old pieces of rag which they had torn from their clothing. At Entilli there was an encampment of about 10,000, and at Kotmo a large encampment of 150,000. At this place, adjacent to their encampment, were Turkish troops, who exacted “bakshish” from them before they would let them go on the road to Aleppo. Many who had no money had had to stay in this camp since their arrival there about two months before. I spoke with several Armenians here, and they told me the same stories of brutal treatment and robbery at the hands of the gendarmes in charge as I had heard all along the road. They had to go at least half-a-mile for water from this encampment, and the condition of the camp was filthy. From Kotmo on to Aleppo I witnessed the worst sights of the whole journey. Here the people began to give out in the intense heat and dearth of water, and I passed several who were prostrate—actually dying of thirst. One woman, whom I assisted, was in a deplorable condition, unconscious from thirst and exhaustion; and further on I saw two young girls who had become so exhausted that they had fallen on the road, and lay with their already swollen faces exposed to the sun. The road for a great distance was being repaired and paved with cracked stone; on one side of the road was a footpath, but many of the Armenians were so dazed from fatigue and exposure that they did not see this footpath, and were walking—and many of them bare-footed—on this cracked stone, with their feet bleeding as a result of it. The destination of all these Armenians is Aleppo. Here they are kept crowded together in all available vacant houses, hans, Armenian churches, courtyards and open plots. Their condition in Aleppo is beyond description. I personally visited several of the places where they were kept and found them starving and dying by the hundred every day. In one vacant house which I visited I saw women, children and men all in the same room, lying on the floor, so close together that it was impossible to walk between them. Here they had been for months, such of them as had survived, and the condition of the floor was filthy. Many were lying in their own excrement!

The British Consulate was filled with these exiles, and from this place the dead were removed almost every hour. Coffin-makers throughout the city were working late into the night making rough boxes for the dead whose relatives or friends could afford to give them decent burial. Most of the dead were simply thrown into two-wheeled carts, which made a daily round to all the places where the Armenians were confined. These carts were open at first, but afterwards covers were made for them. An Armenian physician whom I know, and who is treating hundreds of these suffering Armenians who have become ill through exposure on the journey and through hunger and thirst, told me that there are hundreds dying daily in Aleppo from starvation and as a result of the brutal treatment and exposure that they have undergone on the journey from their native places. Many of these suffering Armenians refuse alms, saying that the little money so obtained will only prolong their sufferings and that they prefer to die. From Aleppo those who are able to pay are sent by train to Damascus; those who have no money are sent by road to the interior, towards Der-el-Zor. In Damascus I found conditions practically the same as in Aleppo, and hundreds are dying every day. From Damascus they are sent still further south into the Hauran, where their fate is unknown. Several Turks whom I interviewed told me that the motive of this exile was to exterminate the race, and in no instance did I see any Moslem giving alms to Armenians, it being considered a criminal offence for anyone to aid them.

I remained in Damascus and Aleppo about a month, leaving for Smyrna on the 26th October. All along the road I met thousands of these unfortunate exiles still coming into Aleppo. The sights I witnessed on this return journey were more pitiful than those I had seen on my outward journey to Aleppo. There seems to be no end to the convoy which moves over the mountain range from Bozanti south. Throughout the day, from sunrise to sunset, the road as far as one can see is crowded with these exiles. Just outside Tarsus I saw a dead woman lying by the roadside, and further on I passed two more dead women, one of whom was being carried from the roadside to be buried by two gendarmes. Her legs and arms were so emaciated that the bones were nearly through her flesh, and her face was swollen and purple from exposure. Further on I saw two gendarmes carrying a dead child between them away from the road to where they had dug a grave. Many of these soldiers and gendarmes who follow the convoy carry spades, and as soon as an Armenian dies they take the corpse away from the roadside and bury it.

The open spaces round the hans en route are used as camping-places for the Armenians, and the ground is littered with refuse and human excrement, the stench from which is unbearable. I saw many people who had been in good circumstances forced to lie in this filth. Their clothes were rags and many had no shoes. The mornings were cold and many were dying from exposure. There are very few young men in these convoys; the majority are women and children, accompanied by a few old men over fifty years of age. At Bairamoglu I talked with a woman who had become demented from the sufferings she had undergone. She told me that her husband and father had both been killed before her eyes and that she had been forced for three days to walk without rest. She had with her two little children, and all had been without bread for a day. I gave her some money, which she told me would probably be taken from her before the day was over.

Turks and Kurds meet these caravans as they pass through the country and sell them food at exorbitant prices. I saw a small boy about seven years old riding on a donkey with his baby brother in his arms. They were all that was left of his family. Many of these people go for days without bread, and they become emaciated beyond description. I saw several fall from starvation, and only at certain places along this road is there any water. Many die of thirst. Some of the Armenians who can afford it hire carriages. These are paid for in advance, and the prices charged are exorbitant. At many places, like Bozanti, for example, where there is an encampment of Turkish soldiers, there is not enough bread for these Armenians, and only two hours from Bozanti I met a woman who was crying for bread. She told me that she had been in Bozanti for two days and was unable to obtain anything to eat except what travellers like myself had given her. Many of the beasts of burden belonging to the Armenians die of starvation. It is not an unusual sight to see an Armenian removing a pack from the dead animal and setting it on his own shoulders. Many Armenians told me that, although they are allowed to rest at night, they get no sleep because of the pangs of hunger and cold. These people march all the day through at a shuffling gait, and for hours do not speak to one another. At one place where I stopped on the road for lunch I was surrounded by a crowd of little children, all crying for bread. Many of these little tots are obliged to walk barefoot along the road, and many of them carry a little pack on their backs. They are all emaciated, their clothes are in rags and their hair in a filthy condition. The filth has bred millions of flies, and I saw several babies’ faces and eyes covered with these insects, their mothers being too exhausted to brush them away. Disease has broken out in several places along the road, and in Aleppo several cases of typhus fever among the Armenians were reported when I left.

Many families have been separated, the men being sent in one direction and the women and children in another. I saw one woman who was with child, lying in the middle of the road crying, and over her stood a gendarme, threatening her if she did not get up and walk. Many children are born on the way, and most of these die, as their mothers have no nourishment for them.

None of these people have any idea where they are going or why they are being exiled. They journey day after day along the road, with the hope that they may somewhere reach a place where they may be allowed to rest, and I saw several old men carrying on their backs the tools of their trade, probably with the hope that they may some day settle down somewhere. The road over the Taurus Mountains is, in places, most difficult, and often the crude conveyances, drawn by buffaloes, oxen and milch cows, are unable to take the grades, and are abandoned and overturned by the gendarmes into the ravine below; the animals are turned loose. I saw several carts, piled high with baggage and with a number of Armenians on the top of that, break down and throw their occupants on to the road. One of the drivers, who was a Turk and who had collected his fare in advance from the people he was driving, considered it a huge joke when one woman broke her leg from such a fall.

There seems to be no cessation of the streams of these Armenians pouring down from the north, from Angora and the region round the Black Sea. Their condition grows worse every day. The sights that I saw on my return journey were worse than those on my outward journey, and now that the cold weather and winter rains are setting in, deaths are more numerous. The roads in some places are almost impassable.

XV. CILICIA (VILAYET OF ADANA AND SANDJAK OF MARASH).

Cilicia occupies the south-eastern corner of Anatolia, overlooking the Gulf of Iskanderoun (Alexandretta), and falls into two sharply contrasted regions—the fertile, malarious coastal plain of Adana, traversed by a section of the Baghdad Railway, and the hill-country inland to the north-east of it, where the lines of Taurus are broken by the upper courses of the Sarus and Pyramus (Sihoun and Djihoun) and spread out fanwise into a maze of high valleys and mountain blocks.

Until the spring of 1915, Cilicia was one of the chief centres of the Armenian race in Turkey, and there was no region, with the possible exception of Van, which they succeeded in making and keeping so thoroughly their own. The Armenian Dispersion in north-eastern Anatolia and the suburban districts round the coasts of Marmora, numerous and wealthy and influential though it was, still constituted no more than an urban class, and even in the towns was usually in a minority. The Cilician highlands, on the other hand, were sown thick with Armenian peasant communities—small but prosperous hill towns and villages, of which the most important were Hadjin and Zeitoun in the north, but which stretched in an unbroken chain from the Taurus to the southern spurs of the Amanus, until, at Dört Yöl, they touched the north-eastern corner of the Mediterranean.

The Cilician Armenians were mainly shepherds and husbandmen, but they were also one of the most civilised and progressive sections of the Armenian race. Schools, both Armenian and American, had been established in the mountains, and the mountaineers were in close contact with Adana, Tarsus, Mersina and the other ports and cities of the Adana plain, where commerce and industry were almost entirely in the hands of the Armenian element—an element constantly reinforced from the reservoir of Armenian population in the highlands.

The Cilician Armenians seemed destined to play an important part in the future development of the Ottoman Empire. Their country was of peculiar strategical and commercial importance, for it was to be traversed by the main artery of the Empire, the Baghdad Railway, in the most vital section of its course, where it has to negotiate two mountain-barriers and approach most nearly to the Mediterranean coast. And meanwhile the Armenian population itself was here steadily increasing in numbers, while in almost every other part of Turkey it had been receding under the continuous repression to which it had been subjected since 1878. This increase was the more remarkable because Cilicia had been especially visited by the last outbreak of massacre, which occurred in 1909.

All this, however, only rendered the Cilician Armenians more obnoxious in the Ottoman Government’s eyes, and the war gave it the opportunity it coveted for rooting them out. A universal deportation of all the Armenians in the Empire may or may not have been contemplated before the breach between the Turks and Armenians at Van, in the middle of April, 1915; but, as far as Cilicia is concerned, there is no doubt whatever that the scheme was devised and put in train before any of the events at Van occurred. Fighting began at Van on the 20th April; the first Armenians had been deported from Zeitoun on the 8th April, twelve days before, and by the 19th a convoy of them had already arrived in Syria (Doc. 138. The Cilician deportations, at any rate, must therefore have been planned at least as early as March, and probably earlier still.

And there is one special feature about the execution of the scheme in Cilicia which makes it evident that it was carried out deliberately and thought out far ahead. Immediately the Armenians were evicted from their villages, their houses were assigned to Moslem refugees. We have occasional evidence of the same practice, during June, in the Vilayets of Erzeroum and Trebizond; but in these cases the Moslem intruders, where we can trace their origin, generally prove to have been Turks or Kurds from the adjoining districts on the east, who had just evacuated their own homes in consequence of the first Russian occupation of Van. Their installation in Armenian houses was apparently extempore and conceivably only provisional. On the other hand, the “mouhadjirs” brought by the Ottoman Government to Zeitoun, Hadjin and the other towns and villages of the Cilician highlands, were all of them Moslem refugees from Europe—from the Roumelian Vilayets ceded by Turkey in 1913, as a result of the Balkan War. They had been on the Government’s hands for over two years, and during all that time they had remained stranded in Thrace or along the Aegean littoral. But now they had been transported from these western fringes of the Empire to the other extremity of the Anatolian Railway, and by the 8th April, 1915, they were in readiness to occupy the homes of the Armenians in Cilicia immediately their rightful owners had started on their road to exile. This is clear proof that, at any rate in Cilicia, the deportation was not only planned systematically, but planned a long time in advance.

Its execution began at Zeitoun in April, and was extended to all the highland villages in the course of May and June. In the cities of the plain and the coast, on the other hand, it did not become drastic till the first week in September—a tacit avowal that the official pleas of Armenian disloyalty and strategical necessity were a pretext hardly intended to be taken seriously even by their authors.

The Zeitounlis were deported in two directions—half of them to Sultania (see Documents 123 and 125) in the Anatolian Desert, and half to the Mesopotamian Sandjak of Der-el-Zor (see Document 145). The exiles at Sultania were subsequently removed to Der-el-Zor to join the rest, and the later convoys seem all to have taken the south-eastward road. The deportation was conducted by the gendarmerie with the same brutality as elsewhere, but the Cilician country is free of nomadic Kurds, so that there was here less wholesale massacre on the way. On the last stages of their journey to Zor the exiles were harassed by the Arab nomads of the steppe, but these are a milder race than their Kurdish neighbours. The chief alleviation of the Cilicians’ fate was their geographical position. The distance they had to traverse was comparatively short, and they only began to die in large numbers after reaching their destination.

119. CILICIA: ADDRESS (WITH ENCLOSURE), DATED 3rd JULY, 1915, FROM THE ARMENIAN COLONY IN EGYPT TO HIS EXCELLENCY LIEUTENANT-GENERAL SIR J.G. MAXWELL, COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF HIS BRITANNIC MAJESTY’S FORCES IN EGYPT.

(=a=) =Address from the Armenian Colony.=

We addressed ourselves recently to your Excellency to obtain your authorisation to send three emissaries to Cilicia, in order to inform ourselves of the true situation in that country.

While we are profoundly grateful to your Excellency for your courtesy in granting this authorisation, we now desire to inform you that trustworthy information, furnished by official persons who have arrived from Syria in the course of the present week, shows that the situation in Cilicia has undergone a complete transformation. On this account the despatch of the emissaries is, for the moment, postponed; the actual state of affairs calls for altogether different measures.

Cavalliere Gauttieri, the Italian Consul at Aleppo, and certain foreign residents at Alexandretta and Adana, as well as others from Bitlis and Harpout, who travelled across Cilicia and all arrived here last Monday on board a neutral vessel, give the following account of what has occurred:—

The town of Zeitoun, which was exclusively inhabited by Armenians and is famous for its heroic struggles against the Turks, took warning by the manifest intention of the Ottoman Government to take advantage of the favourable moment created by the war for effecting the extermination of the Armenian race, and revolted several months ago. Dört Yöl and Hassan Beyli (a large Armenian village half way between Marash and Dört Yöl) were preparing to take the same action. The Turkish Government tried to subdue Zeitoun by military force, but all its efforts remained fruitless; its troops were decimated, and had to beat a retreat several times over. At that stage of affairs the local authorities, by order of the Central Government, employed the following stratagem: they threatened the Katholikos of Cilicia, an old man of 75 years, that if the Zeitounlis refused to capitulate they would have the whole Armenian population massacred, while they assured the Zeitounlis that, in case they laid down their arms, they would be in no way interfered with. On the urgent recommendation of the Katholikos, the Zeitounlis, thinking that they were fulfilling a patriotic duty, laid down their arms to save their compatriots; and the inhabitants of Dört Yöl and Hassan Beyli did the same thing for the same reason. Thereupon the Government treacherously proceeded to deport the inhabitants of Zeitoun and the afore-mentioned places en masse, and to replace them by Moslem emigrants from Macedonia. At the same time they began to persecute the peaceful populations of the plains—those of Marash, Aintab, Sis and Adana, and so on—who are thus threatened now with imminent massacre. It is worth noting that the towns situated on the coast—Mersina, Alexandretta, Selefka and Kessab—continue to enjoy relative tranquillity. Notwithstanding all these persecutions, there are certain localities, scattered over the whole extent of Cilicia, where groups of Armenian fighting-men have entrenched themselves solidly in the mountains and are putting up an indefatigable resistance to the Turkish troops. Whenever they can, they leave their positions to go to the rescue of the defenceless people of the cultivated lands, always hoping that aid will come to them from abroad, and that, thus reinforced, they will be able to drive their historic oppressor from the country. The same hope is cherished by the whole Christian population of these regions, and one may say that the Moslems themselves are convinced that all this country will, before long, be occupied by the Allies.

That is the present situation in Cilicia, as it was unfolded to us by the official persons whom we have mentioned above.

(=b=) =Resumé of Travellers’ Reports, enclosed with the Address.=

My official informants are unanimous in asserting that the object pursued in Cilicia by the Turkish Government is neither more nor less than the complete extermination of the Armenian element. The philanthropic efforts put forward by the Italian and American Consular Bodies, with a view to preventing the execution of this sinister plan, have remained without fruit, since the mandate for destruction and massacre emanated from the Central Government itself. The Turks, with the Government officials at their head, everywhere declare openly that the extermination of the Armenian element in Turkey is for them one of the necessities of national salvation, it being understood that the Allies protect the Armenians, and that they afford a permanent pretext for foreign intervention in the country’s affairs. The Governor of Aleppo, a fair and liberal-minded man, who is personally opposed to this criminal policy, has avowed it to the European Consuls, declaring that the military commanders have only executed faithfully the orders received from the Sublime Porte, and emphasising this in the case of Fakhri Pasha, who is the representative of Djemal Pasha, the supreme commander of the military forces in Syria and Palestine. Among the other official persons responsible for the atrocities that have been committed, they mention the Mutessarif of Marash and the Kaimakam of Zeitoun. Latterly Marash and Zeitoun have been consolidated into an independent Sandjak by order of the Central Government, and so the above-mentioned functionaries are no longer under the control of the Vali of Aleppo.

The German Consul at Aleppo, of whom we shall have more to say below, made an extremely significant declaration to the Consul of a Power which has since joined the Allies:—

“However painful and deplorable the condition may be to which the Armenians find themselves reduced, the Turkish Government could take no other course towards them, in view of the fact that they have everywhere cast in their lot with the enemies of Turkey.”

Zeitoun.—The Turkish troops which marched against Zeitoun and presided, after the capitulation, over the deportation of the Zeitounlis, were commanded by German officers. The Turks have torn from their homes in this way all the inhabitants of Zeitoun, Furnus, Alabash, Geben and the neighbouring districts, and have sent them off in batches to Der-el-Zor, to Djibal Hauran, and towards various unexplored regions of the desert. The women have been sent to Konia, an exclusively Turkish district. In place of the Armenians they had installed at Zeitoun a number of Moslem refugees from Macedonia.

Marash.—This town was relatively tranquil till a short time ago; now it is the scene of all kinds of atrocities and persecutions. Hundreds of Armenian families have been driven out and marched away, no one knows where. These atrocities have been committed in the presence and with the connivance of the German Consul at Aleppo, according to the testimony of a large number of Armenians which has been recorded by the European Consular authorities.

Hassan Beyli.—This unfortunate village, which had been already so cruelly tried during the Cilician massacres of 1909, has this time been destroyed root and branch. The inhabitants have been deported.

Dört Yöl presents the same tragic spectacle. Though there have been no massacres here in the literal sense of the word, the arrests and expulsions en masse continue without abatement. The story is already well-known of the German spy who came to Dört Yöl disguised as a British officer—how he incited them to revolt against the Turkish Government, and the arrests and partial massacre that came of it. The story of this piece of treachery is also confirmed by the Italian Consul from Alexandretta. The village of Dört Yöl, once so prosperous, is now plunged in frightful misery.

At Aintab, Sis and Adana the Armenians have so far been less molested and persecuted than elsewhere. The arrests are less numerous; but sinister rumours are current, which are propagated by the Turks, and the terror of imminent butchery haunts the inhabitants of these towns, who are strong in numbers but absolutely bereft of all means of defence and of all protection against the danger of extermination by which they are menaced.

Ourfa groans under a Governor of the name of Haidar Bey, who, as his own wife avows, has committed atrocities of all kinds wherever he has exercised authority. He is the notorious organiser of the butcheries at Mardin. The Armenian monastery at Ourfa has been confiscated by the authorities and transformed into an asylum for the British and Russian subjects who have been put under arrest in Cilicia.

The Turkish Forces.—The Turks do not dispose of military forces of any importance in Cilicia; the troops they have there are not a permanent garrison, and their number is not constant.

120. CILICIA: LETTER, DATED 20th JUNE, 1915, FROM DR. L., A FOREIGN RESIDENT IN TURKEY; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

The deportation began some six weeks ago with 180 families from Zeitoun, since which time all the inhabitants of that place and its neighbouring villages have been deported, also most of the Christians in Albustan and many from Hadjin, Sis, Kars Pazar, Hassan Beyli and Dört Yöl.

The numbers involved are approximately, to date, 26,500. Of these about 5,000 have been sent to the Konia region, 5,500 are in Aleppo and the surrounding towns and villages, and the remainder are in Der-el-Zor, Rakka and various places in Mesopotamia, even as far as the neighbourhood of Baghdad.

The process is still going on, and there is no telling how far it may be carried. The orders already issued will bring the number in this region up to 32,000, and there have been as yet none exiled from Aintab, and very few from Marash and Ourfa.

The following is the text of the Government order[160] covering the case:—“Art. 2nd.: The commanders of the Army, of independent army corps and of divisions may, in case of military necessity, or in case they suspect espionage or treason, send away, either singly or in mass, the inhabitants of villages or towns and install them in other places.”

The orders of commanders may have been reasonably humane, but the execution of them has been for the most part unnecessarily harsh and in many cases accompanied by horrible brutality to women and children, to the sick and the aged. Whole villages were deported at an hour’s notice, with no opportunity to prepare for the journey—not even, in some cases, to gather together the scattered members of the family, so that little children were left behind. At the mountain village of Geben the women were at the wash-tub, and were compelled to leave their wet clothes in the water and take the road bare-footed and half-clad, just as they were. In some cases they were able to carry part of their scanty household furniture or implements of agriculture, but for the most part they were allowed neither to carry anything nor to sell it, even where there was time to do so.

In Hadjin well-to-do people, who had prepared food and bedding for the road, were obliged to leave it in the street, and afterwards suffered greatly from hunger.

In many cases the men (those of military age were nearly all in the Army) 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. Three different cases came under my knowledge where the woman was delivered on the road and, because her brutal driver hurried her along, she died of hæmorrhage. I also know of one case where the gendarme in charge was a humane man and allowed the poor woman several hours’ rest and then procured a wagon for her to ride in. Some women became so completely worn out and hopeless that they left their infants beside the road. Many women and girls have been outraged. At one place the commander of gendarmerie openly told the men to whom he consigned a large company that they were at liberty to do what they chose with the women and girls.

As to subsistence, there has been a great difference in different places. In some places the Government has fed them; in some places it has permitted the inhabitants to feed them; in some places it has neither fed them nor permitted others to do so. There has been much hunger, thirst and sickness and some real starvation and death.

These people are being scattered in small units, three or four families in a place, among a population of different race and religion and speaking a different language. I speak of them as being composed families, but four-fifths of them are women and children, and what men there are, for the most part, are old or incompetent.

If means are not found to help them through the next few months, until they get established in their new surroundings, two-thirds or three-fourths of them will die of starvation and disease.

121. BM.: LETTER FROM A FOREIGN EYE-WITNESS, DATED 6th JULY, 1915, ON BOARD A STEAMSHIP; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

Central Turkey has reached a crisis in its history. There are grave problems to face. In many parts the accumulated work of years has been washed away in a few weeks by the great and terrible flood of deportation, and we are again on bed-rock. We understand that, between the middle of May and the middle of June, 26,000 people were deported, and that the number is to reach 32,000. When I left BM., on the 14th June, Zeitoun had been practically emptied of Armenians. Only one, or perhaps two families, who were originally not of Zeitoun and who were in the employment of the Government and necessary to it, were left in Zeitoun, and even they were not allowed to live in houses, but were living in a church. The place is now occupied by Macedonian Moslem refugees. They began by cutting down the fruit trees, laden with green fruit, and using them for firewood, and by cutting down the green grain and using it for fodder. One man demanded the mule that had carried him there from the Moslem katerdji, who had been asked by the Government to convey the man to Zeitoun—or Yeni Shehr, as I think it is now to be called. When the katerdji naturally demurred, the man killed the katerdji and took the mule. So lawless are they that the Government seems afraid of them, and so leaves them strictly alone. As far as I know, at that date not an Armenian was left in Albustan and all its region, in Furnus and all its region, in Geben and all its region, or in Gourksoun and all its region (I don’t remember the other places that have been swept clean), and Fundadjak and Deré Keui and all that region expected to move any day. Indeed, the Government says that the plan is that all Cilicia shall be entirely cleared, except for Sis, Adana and BM., where the serving class shall be left. Some officials say that all but about three hundred rich and influential families of BM. shall be left, but no one believes them and all from the highest to the lowest are preparing to leave. The same officials say that Sis and Adana will not be touched, but we know that some from there have been taken already. As you may know, Marash was this year made an independent “Sandjak,” like Ourfa, and this has made this infamous work more easy. The Vali of Aleppo resisted all efforts at deportation in his district, but the day we left Aleppo we were informed by him that he had been removed to Konia, so by this time deportation is very probably in full swing in the Aintab field. When we were in Aleppo I saw some of the first one hundred families to be deported from Hadjin, and the rest of Hadjin were expected the day we left, or within the next few days. The man who has been deporting in Diyarbekir, and, worse, has been killing people by beating or scalding them to death—one person said: “He is killing them alive!”—was transferred about the middle of June to Ourfa, with the evident purpose of letting him continue his work there. To go out into other fields, I might add that a private code telegram from Mardin received about the 24th June said that massacres had begun there.

Why is there this deportation? There are many theories. When the people asked, the answer was: “It is an order from Constantinople.” One official, who is being worked nearly to death by this extra work of deportation, said one day: “It is all right for people in Europe to deport. They simply put people on a train and send them wherever they wish”—and much more along that line, which led us to believe that Germany has a hand in it. Indeed, we know that, when Turkish officials are easing up on these poor people, German officials step in and make things hard.

Where are they going? Some are being scattered, one or two families to a village, among Moslem villages, evidently with the idea of forcing them to become Moslems; others are being taken from their mountain homes and are being driven across the desert towards Baghdad. German officers, who came into Aleppo one night on their way from Baghdad to Constantinople, said that they first met this weary train two days out of Baghdad, and that the road the thousands they had met were marching along was marked or outlined by the bodies of their dead.

Who are these people? Women and children, tottering old men and babes. The men, twenty-one to thirty-five or forty years old, have practically all gone to the war, so these women are at the mercy of those in charge of them. Some soldiers are as kind to them as circumstances permit; others farm the women out for the night to the men of the villages near which they camp, or march in themselves, as a bull might into a herd of cows. This is not guesswork, but well-known fact. Some women kill themselves by jumping into the rivers, to escape, but others, for the sake of their children, endure.

Some of the circumstances that make this deportation especially cruel are these. As a general rule village people get their new clothes in the autumn. Now they are expecting to go up into the mountains with their flocks, and so will wear out the old rags of last year’s clothes and be ready for the new clothes after harvest. So, at best, they are very ill-provided for a journey. Not only this, but the Government takes special pains in many, if not most, instances to prevent their taking what clothes they have. The first to be summoned were some families in Zeitoun. Early one Saturday morning, as usual, the industrious housewives donned their old washing clothes and began their Saturday’s washing. Without warning, all of a sudden, a terrible knocking was heard at many doors. In a minute the soldiers came pouring in, saying that the people in those houses were wanted immediately at the Government House. Not a moment was given to don dress or shoes, but, in night-clothes or washing rags, the mothers and a few fathers snatched sleeping children out of their beds, the women throwing a shawl over their heads as they ran. Of course, many children were left behind, and there are many pathetic stories of little boys and girls, eight or nine years old, stumbling along the road, hardly able from sheer weariness to walk, yet carrying their little baby brother or sister, because, as their mother was being taken away by the soldiers, she had said: “Look after baby and never leave him (or her).”

Geben’s turn came later, so the people had heard of the deportation and gotten ready, although the Government assured them again and again that that district was not to be deported. Time went on, and no order came. The Government said: “Why will you not believe? Why do you sit here waiting for that which is not coming? See, your flocks are suffering for want of pasture. Be sensible, and go to the mountains as usual.” Some brave ones started out, and nothing happened. So, in great joy, the flocks started for the mountains. One morning the women were putting into the tub the clothes that had got dirty during all those weary weeks of waiting, that they might go to their mountain places with clean clothes. Such was the need of washing that they wore the fewest clothes possible, that they might take everything nice and clean. Hardly an hour had passed, or at least a very short time, before some soldiers presented themselves to these women with the command “March!” while others accosted those who had gone to the mountains with the flocks with the command “Leave all and march!” So they were forced to leave all their clothes in the tub and their flocks on the mountains, and march!

In Albustan, when friendly Moslems wished to buy things of the Armenians and so give them ready money for the road, the Government stationed soldiers in all the Armenian streets to prevent this, so all they could sell was what they smuggled out by the back door.

Another factor that adds horror to the situation is the fact that most of the horses, mules and donkeys have been taken by the Government for the use of the Army. So now the people have practically no animals to carry their own loads, and the Government can furnish few. Sometimes they force an Armenian from a distant village, who happens to have kept a poor old lame horse or two, to help transport people. He hears on the way that orders have come for the deportation of his own family. Of course, if he can steal away in the night to go to the help of his own family, he does so. Or the soldiers make a raid on some neighbouring Moslem villages and gather up the few donkeys that are left. Their owners know that, if these donkeys once reach some large centre, they will never see them again. So these poor people, who have been tramping along all day, must keep awake all night to keep the donkeys from being stolen by their owners, who are sneaking round watching their chance. So the mothers are obliged to walk and carry their little children as best they can. Some throw their little ones into the river or leave them under a bush by the road, that they may be able to manage those that are left. One mother threw one child in and jumped in with the other in her arms. The heart-breaking cry is: “Won’t you take my daughter and save her from the horrors of the road? She was educated in your schools; surely you can take her and save her?” Or: “My little one, my darling! Take her, take him! How can I trudge on, day after day, over the rocks or the burning sands of the desert, and carry and feed and keep my darling?”

There is not an Armenian family in BM., I suppose, but has given clothes and money and food, till now they say: “We have nothing left but what we shall need on the road when we are summoned.” They could not stand the bitter cry of the mothers, and many, many have taken children, saying: “If we put a little more water in the soup, it will be enough for all,” and yet they say: “When we are summoned, what is to become of these children? To be sure, they have had a few more days of security and life, but then—what?”...

Still another factor adds to the horror, and that is: a Government that is not able to feed even its soldiers, how is it to obey the beautiful paper instructions and see that the people are well fed and lack for nothing? In BM., for over a month, Christian churches have been giving two meals a day to the three thousand people to whom the Government gives two small stale loaves of bread a day, and I suppose it is safe to say that those fed are never for any two or three days running the same people. Each party stays two or three days, or even a week, but nearly every day some are coming and others going. This, as you may suppose, is a terrible drain on those from whom the Government has used nearly every means to extract the last penny, even hanging a man in the market-place because he did not pay ten pounds when asked for it! Hanging is so common in BM. now that it creates little stir. It is only when someone happens to mention having seen a man hanging in the market yesterday or the day before that we even hear of it. The people are looking into their fast-emptying larders, and asking: “How long will it last?” In Aintab the people are not even allowed to feed the refugees, who are now sent by a long detour round the town to prevent anyone’s seeking to feed them. Some good Aintab people took a lot of water-bottles right out to the cross-roads two hours or more away, to give to the refugees as they started out on their desert journey; but they were not allowed to give them, and had sadly to take them home again.

And how are the people going? As they come into BM., weary and with swollen and bleeding feet, clasping their babes to their breasts, they utter not one murmur or word of complaint; but you see their eyes move and hear the words: “For Jesus’ sake, for Jesus’ sake!”

The Albustan people were brought by a roundabout way which no one knew, because, we think, the soldiers were afraid to follow the direct road past what used to be Zeitoun. So, instead of coming in two days they wandered for eight days in the mountains, many of them having not a morsel to eat for the last two days. After they had been in BM. for nearly twenty-four hours, Badvelli V. came up to see us. Even then he was so weary and his lips were so parched that it seemed a great effort for him to speak. Suddenly he threw up his head and squared his shoulders, and a new tone came into his voice, as he said: “I want to tell you of my great joy. As my people left their houses, their lands, their all, there was not one murmur or complaint, but with joy—yes, with joy—we left all! And I can say that I believe my people to-day to be nearer to Christ than they have ever been before.”

I saw the wife of the Gourksoun preacher. She was so tired that, in spite of herself, perhaps even unknown to herself, her lips quivered as she spoke, and yet there was nothing but a smile or a cheery word to be seen or heard from those lips. Someone asked her how she came, and she said that for a few hours they hired an animal for one pound (I think that was the sum), but that most of the time she walked. I looked at her—a delicate woman, who could hardly be expected to walk three or four miles, to say nothing of all those miles, climbing up over the mountains or tramping among the rocks—and I said: “Walk! How could you?” She turned to me, and a look of almost childlike trust and wonder came into her face, as she answered: “I don’t know. We felt no weariness; the road was not hard. It just seemed as though God put out His arms and carried us.”...

122. ZEITOUN: ANTECEDENTS OF THE DEPORTATION, RECORDED BY THE REV. STEPHEN TROWBRIDGE, SECRETARY OF THE CAIRO COMMITTEE OF THE AMERICAN RED CROSS, FROM AN ORAL STATEMENT BY THE REV. DIKRAN ANDREASIAN, PASTOR OF THE ARMENIAN PROTESTANT CHURCH AT ZEITOUN.[161]

On the 10th August, 1914, the Turkish authorities in Zeitoun made a declaration of “seferbeylik,” which in Turkish military parlance means that every man in the district under 45 years of age should be prepared to leave at short notice for active service in the Army. Every man, Moslem or Christian, was required to secure a “vesiké” or certificate from the Government stating that he had fulfilled the preliminary conditions and was ready for military service.

Hundreds upon hundreds, chiefly Moslem Turks, from the surrounding country came to the Zeitoun Government Building, and while going through the formalities were entertained hospitably by the Armenians of the town. These Armenians were also summoned, and they began seriously to consider whether it would be best to agree to this. (It is only since 1909 that any Christians have been allowed in the Turkish Army, though in ancient times the Janissaries were a very important section of the Ottoman troops.)

Many of the Zeitounlis took to the mountains to escape military service. Among these were about twenty-five thorough-going ruffians who made their living by deeds of violence. This small band, sincerely disliked and dreaded by the peaceable and thrifty people of Zeitoun, came down upon a company of new Turkish (Moslem) recruits, stripped them and enraged them by the insolence of their language. Thereupon Haidar Pasha, the Mutessarif of Marash, came out about the 31st August with 600 soldiers. He brought with him some Christian notables from Marash to “persuade” the Zeitounlis.

<The people of Zeitoun knew of this, and Yeghia Agha Yenidounyaian, one of the notables, advised Nazaret Tchaoush, his cousin, to meet Haidar Pasha with 500-600 armed young men, as he felt that Haidar Pasha’s motives were not good. But Nazaret Tchaoush answered: “No, it may be that his coming means death to me; but I would rather die than see Zeitoun ruined, as I know well that this is not the time for opposition.” All the party leaders were of the same opinion, for they knew that they were not ready for a prolonged struggle, and that the European Powers were not in a position to come to their help. So> no opposition was offered to this force.

The Pasha demanded the surrender of the twenty-five outlaws who had attacked the new recruits. Every one of these was secured and actually handed over to the Turkish Government. This would seem to have answered the Pasha’s utmost demand, but, as a matter of fact, he was not satisfied, and made a proclamation demanding the surrender of all weapons and firearms. On the pretext of making the Armenians own up to the possession of rifles, torture and the bastinado were used with terrible cruelty. Many prominent citizens had their feet beaten into a mangled pulp. Those who had no rifles made desperate efforts to purchase some from their neighbours, in order to be able to deliver them up and escape the torture[162].

There were in all about 200 Martini rifles among the 8,000 people of Zeitoun, and some 150 of these were seized in this fashion by the Turkish officers. A quantity of old-fashioned guns and pistols were collected and confiscated. The Pasha in returning to Marash took away with him a number of the Armenian notables, allowing the soldiers to insult and beat them on the road. Certain classes of the Armenians were also taken to the Marash barracks “for military service,” but after terrible experiences many of them escaped and returned to Zeitoun.

The old troubles began again. On the pretext of finding deserters, houses were searched in the most lawless manner, and relatives and even neighbours were cruelly beaten. The fathers of some “deserters” almost died under the beating, <among them Nazaret Tchaoush himself>. The women and girls in the “deserters’” families were attacked and violated. Again and again young Armenian girls were outraged by the coarse Turkish soldiers. Even the young men who were not deserters were beaten “lest they might desert later.” Of course, trade had long been at a standstill, and now large quantities of private property were being confiscated on these various pretexts. Then, <about the end of February,> some ignorant hotheads met one night and planned to attack the Government Building. This plot was frustrated by the Armenian notables, <among whom was Baba Agha Besilosian, the most influential of them all,> because they felt it would be doomed to failure. The Arashnort (Armenian bishop and head of the community) felt it his duty to notify the Government of this plot.

These are the facts. How can anyone charge the people of Zeitoun with desiring or attempting an insurrection?

About twenty-five of the young men who had been brutally treated by the Turkish officers took to the mountains. These twenty-five attacked and killed nine Turkish mounted police on the way to Marash. The whole Armenian population of Zeitoun was against this, and openly said so. A night attack by this reckless band, <who had taken refuge in the adjacent monastery,> was frustrated by Government troops aided by a great mass of the Armenian people. Yet it became evident that the Government was only watching for pretexts to destroy Zeitoun root and branch.

Gradually 5,000 soldiers were gathered about the town, <and on the 24th March/6th April an Armenian delegation was sent to Zeitoun from Marash. Among these were the Rev. A. Shiradjian, Father Sahag, a Catholic monk, and Herr Blank, who persuaded the Armenians to inform the Government of the whereabouts of the insurgents and follow the instructions of the Government, to ensure their own safety and the safety of the other Armenians in Cilicia. The Armenians unanimously accepted the proposal, and told the Government that the insurgents were in the monastery.

The next day, the 25th March/7th April, the attack on the monastery began. The new Mutessarif of Marash wished to invest the monastery, but Captain Khourshid opposed him, saying that he would be able to get hold of all the insurgents dead or alive “within two hours.”

The fight continued until nightfall, when the Turks decided to burn the monastery. But during the night the insurgents rushed out, killed an officer and many soldiers and escaped to the mountains, leaving only a few of their men behind them. The Turks lost between 200 and 300. On the 26th March/8th April the Turks burned the monastery, thinking that the insurgents were still there.

After this,[163]> fifty prominent families were sent into exile; a few days later, sixty more, then a whole quarter, and another and another. Finally the remainder were all sent at once. By the time the Rev. Dikran Andreasian left, no families whatever remained. Even the Armenian inscriptions over the arches of churches were hacked to pieces by order of Khourshid Bey, the commander of the troops, and the name of Zeitoun was changed to Souleimania (after a Turkish officer who was killed on the Marash road). The Turkish Mufti of Zeitoun, in his report, stated that in the course of all these events, such as the storming of the monastery, 101 Turkish soldiers were killed and 110 wounded. Over against this we may add that 8,000 Armenians who had no evil intention against the Government were outraged and despoiled beyond all endurance, and were at last driven out according to a methodical plan born of the Germans—driven out into hideous misery and suffering in the arid plains of Mesopotamia.

The Zeitounlis were longing for the Allies to carry all before them at Gallipoli. They were hoping for a sweeping defeat of the Turks; but there was no insurrection. The one or two seditious plots were opposed and frustrated chiefly by the Armenians of a saner mind. The evidence is convincing that the destruction of the people of Zeitoun was a deliberate Turco-German plan.

-----

Footnote 160:

See Doc. 83 and Annexe C. to the Historical Summary.

Footnote 161:

The passages included between brackets are taken from the (fuller) Armenian version of Pastor Andreasian’s narrative (Doc. 130, “A Red Cross Flag That Saved Four Thousand.” These passages have been translated for the Editor by Mr. G.H. Paelian.

Footnote 162:

See Docs. 68, 82 and 94.

Footnote 163:

The author of Doc. 123 states (page 483, line 24) that the first batch of Zeitounlis were deported the morning following the night on which the insurgents in the monastery escaped. This would be the 8th April. The author of Doc. 121 on the other hand, states (page 475, line 44) that the first deportation from Zeitoun took place on a Saturday. This would be the 10th April, 1915.—EDITOR.

123. EXILES FROM ZEITOUN: DIARY OF A FOREIGN RESIDENT IN THE TOWN OF B. ON THE CILICIAN PLAIN; COMMUNICATED BY A SWISS GENTLEMAN OF GENEVA.

Sunday, 14th March, 1915.

This morning I had a long conversation with Mr. —— about events at Zeitoun. He has managed to obtain some information regarding the little Armenian town, although all direct communication with it has been interrupted. Turkish troops have left Aleppo for Zeitoun—some say 4,000, some 6,000, others 8,000. With what intention, one wonders? Mr. ——, who has been there himself during last summer and this winter, assures me that the Armenians have no wish to revolt and are prepared to put up with anything the Government may do. Contrary to the old-established custom, a levy was made at Zeitoun at the time of the August mobilisation, and they did not offer the slightest resistance. None the less, the Government has played them false. In October, 1914, their leader, Nazaret Tchaoush, came to Marash with a “safe conduct” to arrange some special points with the officials. In spite of the “safe conduct” they imprisoned him, tortured him, and put him to death. Still the people of Zeitoun remained quiet. Bands of zaptiehs (Turkish gendarmes), quartered in the town, have been molesting the inhabitants, raiding shops, stealing, maltreating the people and dishonouring their women. It is obvious that the Government are trying to get a case against the Zeitounlis, so as to be able to exterminate them at their pleasure and yet justify themselves in the eyes of the world.

—th April, 1915.

Three Armenians from Dört Yöl were hanged last night in the chief squares of Adana. The Government declare that they had been signalling to the British warship or warships stationed in the Gulf of Alexandretta. This is untrue; for I know, though I dare not put the source of my information on paper, that only one Armenian from Dört Yöl has had any communication with the English.

—th April.

Two more Armenians from Dört Yöl have been hanged at Adana.

—th April.

Three Armenians have been hanged at Adana. We were out riding to-day, and the train came into the station just as we reached the railway. Imagine our indignation when we saw a cattle-truck filled with Armenians from Zeitoun. Most of these mountaineers were in rags, but a few were quite well dressed. They had been driven out of their homes and were going to be transplanted, God knows where, to some town in Asia Minor. It seems we have returned to the days of the Assyrians, if whole populations can be exiled in this way, and the sacred liberty of the individual so violated.

—th April (the next day).

We were able to see the unfortunate refugees, who are still here to-day. These are the circumstances of their departure from Zeitoun, or rather this is the tragedy which preceded their exile, though it was not the cause of it.

The Turkish gendarmes outraged several girls in the town, and were attacked in consequence by about twenty of the more hot-headed young men. Several gendarmes were killed, though all the while the population as a whole was opposed to bloodshed and desired most earnestly to avoid the least pretext for reprisals. The twenty rebels were driven out of the town and took refuge in a monastery about three-quarters of an hour’s distance from the town. At this point the troops from Aleppo arrived. The Zeitounlis gave them lodging, and it seemed that all was going excellently between the populace and the 8,000 soldiers under their German officers.

The Turks surrounded the monastery and attacked it for a whole day; but the insurgents defended themselves, and, at the cost of one man slightly wounded, they killed 300 of the regular troops. During the night, moreover, they managed to escape.

Their escape was as yet unknown to the town when, about nine o’clock on the following morning, the Turkish Commandant summoned about 300 of the principal inhabitants to present themselves immediately at the military headquarters. They obeyed the summons without the least suspicion, believing themselves to be on excellent terms with the authorities. Some of them took a little money, others some clothing or wraps, but the majority came in their working clothes and brought nothing with them. Some of them had even left their flocks on the mountains in the charge of children. When they reached the Turkish camp, they were ordered to leave the town at once without returning to their homes. They were completely stupefied. Leave? But for where? They did not know.

They had been unable even yet to learn their destination, but it is probable that they are being sent to the Vilayet of Konia. Some of them have come in carriages and some on foot.

—th April.

I heard to-day that the whole population of Dört Yöl has been taken away to work on the roads. They continue to hang Armenians at Adana. It is a point worth remembering that Zeitoun and Dört Yöl are the two Armenian towns which held their own during the Adana massacres of 1909.

—th May.

A new batch of Zeitounlis has just arrived. I saw them marching along the road, an interminable file under the Turkish whips. It is really the most miserable and pitiable thing in the world. Weak and scarcely clothed, they rather drag themselves along than walk. Old women fall down, and struggle to their feet again when the zaptieh approaches with lifted stick. Others are driven along like donkeys. I saw one young woman drop down exhausted. The Turk gave her two or three blows with his stick and she raised herself painfully. Her husband was walking in front with a baby two or three days old in his arms.

Further on an old woman had stumbled, and slipped down into the mud. The gendarme touched her two or three times with his whip, but she did not stir; then he gave her several kicks with his foot; still she did not move; then he kicked her harder, and she rolled over into the ditch; I hope that she was already dead.

These people have now arrived in the town. They have had nothing to eat for two days. The Turks forbade them to bring anything with them from Zeitoun, except, in some cases, a few blankets, a donkey, a mule, or a goat. But even these things they are selling here for practically nothing—a goat for one medjidia (3s. 2d.), a mule for half a lira (nine shillings). This is because the Turks steal them on the road. One young woman who had only been a mother eight days, had her donkey stolen the first night of the journey. What a way of starting out! The German and Turkish officers made the Armenians leave all their property behind, so that the mouhadjirs (refugees) from Thrace might enter into possession. There are five families in ——’s house! The town and the surrounding villages (about 25,000 inhabitants) are entirely destroyed.

Between fifteen and sixteen thousand exiles have been sent towards Aleppo, but they are going to be taken further. Perhaps into Arabia? Can the real object be to starve them to death? Those who have passed through our town were going to the Vilayet of Konia; there, too, there are deserts.

—th May.

Letters have come which confirm my fears. It is not to Aleppo that the Zeitounlis are being sent, but to Der-el-Zor, in Arabia, between Aleppo and Babylonia. And those we saw the other day are going to Kara-Pounar, between Konia and Eregli, in the most arid part of Asia Minor.

Certain ladies here have given blankets and shoes to some of the poorest. The local Christians, too, have shown themselves wonderfully self-sacrificing. But what can one do? It is a little drop of charity in the ocean of their suffering.

—th May.

News has come from Konia. Ninety Armenians have been taken to Kara-Pounar. The Zeitounlis have arrived at Konia. Their sufferings have been increased by their having had to wait—some of them 8, some 15, some 20 days—at Bozanti (the terminus of the Anatolian Railway in the Taurus, 2,400 feet above sea level). This delay was caused by the enormous masses of troops passing continually through the Cilician Gates; it is the army of Syria which is being recalled for the defence of the Dardanelles.

When the exiles reached Konia, they had eaten nothing, according to our news, for three days. The Greeks and Armenians at once collected money and food for their relief, but the Vali of Konia would not allow anything of any kind to be given to the exiles. They therefore remained another three days without food, at the end of which time the Vali removed his prohibition and allowed food to be served out to them under the supervision of the zaptiehs.

My informant tells me that, after the departure of the Armenians from Konia for Kara-Pounar, he saw an Armenian woman throw her new-born baby into a well; another is said to have thrown hers out of the window of the train.

—th May.

A letter has come from Kara-Pounar. I know the writer of it, and can have no doubt of his truthfulness. He says that the 6,000 or 8,000 Armenians from Zeitoun are dying there from starvation at the rate of 150 to 200 a day. So from 15,000 to 19,000 Zeitounlis must have been sent into Arabia, the total population of the town and the outlying villages having been about 25,000.

—th May.

The whole garrison of —— and of Adana have left for the Dardanelles. There are no troops left to defend the district if it should be attacked from outside.

—th May (the next day).

New troops have arrived, but they are untrained.

—th May.

The last batch of Zeitounlis passed through our town to-day, and I was able to speak to some of them in the han where they had been put. I saw one poor little girl who had been walking, barefoot, for more than a week; her only clothing was a torn pinafore; she was shivering with cold and hunger, and her bones were literally pushing through her skin.

About a dozen children had to be left on the road because they could not walk any further. Have they died of hunger? Probably, but no one will ever know for certain. I also saw two poor old women without any hair left, or with hardly any. When the Turks drove them out of Zeitoun they had been rich, but they could not take anything with them beyond the clothes they were wearing. They managed somehow to hide five or six gold pieces in their hair, but, unfortunately for them, the sun glinted on the metal as they marched along and the glitter attracted the notice of a zaptieh. He did not waste any time in picking out the pieces of gold, but found it much quicker to tear the hair out by the roots.

I came across another very characteristic case. A citizen of Zeitoun, formerly a rich man, was leading two donkeys, the last remnants of his fortune. A gendarme came along and seized their bridles; the Armenian implored him to leave them, saying that he was already on the verge of starvation. The only answer he received from the Turk was a shower of blows, repeated till he rolled over in the dust; even then the Turk continued beating him, till the dust was turned into a blood-soaked mud; then he gave a final kick and went off with the donkeys. Several Turks stood by watching; they did not appear to be at all surprised, nor did any of them attempt to intervene.

—th May.

The authorities have sent a number of people from Dört Yöl to be hanged in the various towns of Adana Vilayet.

—th May.

There is a rumour of a partial exodus from Marash. It is going to be our town next.

Dört Yöl has also been evacuated and the inhabitants sent into Arabia. Hadjin is threatened with the same fate. There has been a partial clearing out of Adana; Tarsus and Mersina are threatened too, and also Aintab.

124. EXILES FROM ZEITOUN: FURTHER STATEMENT BY THE AUTHOR OF THE PRECEDING DOCUMENT; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

About the middle of April, about 150 Armenian families belonging to Zeitoun came to B. This is what they told us about the circumstances under which they had to leave their village.

After a battle that took place one day before their departure, between the Ottoman troops and 25 young men of Zeitoun, who had rebelled when they were asked to join the Army (a battle in which 300 soldiers perished, but in which the population of Zeitoun took no part), these families were called to the Government Building without any previous explanation and without any other information. Most of them were rich and went to the Government without misgivings. There they were informed that they had to leave their village instantly. They were then all obliged to abandon all that they had in their houses, their cattle and even part of their families (for, not knowing why they had been called away, many of them had left their children at home). This is what I heard from one of the Armenian exiles in the first convoy from Zeitoun. They came to B., but when some of them went to the American Mission in this town, they did not yet know where they were to be planted. Most of them were in the greatest anxiety on account of the children whom they had left tending the cattle and whom they had not been able to take with them.

The first group was not in a very bad state, because it was composed of the first families of the city, and they could in large part provide for their immediate needs (carriages and food). But, a few days later, new bands appeared in a most deplorable condition; their number was nearly two thousand people.

Many, in fact, most of them, went on foot, getting food every two or three days, and in general lacking the most necessary clothes. The Christian population of B. tried to help them, but, whatever their efforts, what they could do was like a drop of water in the ocean. Also, they were not all allowed to enter the city; they had to sleep out of doors in no matter what weather, and the soldiers that guarded them put all sorts of difficulties in the way of the population of B., who wanted to help the refugees. We saw some of them on the road. They went slowly, most of them fainting from want of food. We saw a father walking with a one-day-old baby in his arms, and behind him the mother walking as well as possible, pushed along by the stick of the Turkish guard. It was not uncommon to see a woman fall down and then rise again under the stick. Some of them had a goat, a donkey, or a mare; when they reached B., they were obliged to sell them for five, ten, or fifteen piastres,[164] because the Turkish soldiers took them away from them. I saw one who sold his goat to a Turk for six piastres. I saw an Armenian pushing two goats; a policeman (zabit) came and carried away the animals and, because the poor man protested, beat him mercilessly, until he fell in the dust senseless. Many Turks were present; no one stirred.

A young woman, whose husband had been imprisoned, was carried away with her fifteen-days-old baby, with one donkey for all her baggage. After one day and a half on the road, a soldier stole her donkey and she had to go on foot, her baby in her arms, from Zeitoun to Aleppo.

A reporter, Mr. Y., told us that, while the refugees were on the way to Bozanti, his carriage was stopped all the time by refugees asking for bread.

The third and last band numbered 200 people. It reached B. on the 13th May, about seven o’clock. They were put in a han, where I went to visit them. They had all come on foot from Zeitoun to B., and had had nothing to eat for two days—days when it rained abundantly. Accompanied by one of my pupils, I made one or two translations from the Armenian, because we were under the surveillance of a policeman.

As soon as the Armenian refugees left their houses, mouhadjirs (Moslem refugees) from Thrace took possession of them. The Armenians had been forbidden to take anything with them, and they themselves saw all their goods pass into other hands. There must be about 20,000 to 25,000 Turks in Zeitoun now, and the name of the town seems to have been changed into that of Yeni Shehr.

I saw a girl three and a half years old, wearing only a shirt in rags. She had come on foot from Zeitoun to B. She was terribly spare and was shivering from cold, as were also all the innumerable children I saw on that day (Monday, the 14th May[165]).

An Armenian told me that he had abandoned two children on the way because they could not walk, and that he did not know whether they had died of cold and hunger, whether a charitable soul had taken care of them, or whether they had become the prey of wild beasts. I learned later that this was far from being a unique case. Many children seem to have been thus abandoned. One seems to have been thrown into a well.

As I passed through Konia, I went to see Dr. AB.[166], and this is what he told me: When the first refugees from Zeitoun came to Konia, the Christian population bought food and clothes for them; but the Vali refused to allow them any communication with the refugees, pretending that they had all that they wanted. A few days later, however, they could get the help they needed. The fact is that the Government gave them only very bad bread, and that only every two or three days. Dr. AB. told me that a woman threw her dying baby from the window of the train.

The refugees from Zeitoun have been directed to Kara-Pounar, one of the most unhealthy places in the Vilayet of Konia, situated between Konia and Eregli, but nearer the latter. Many of them have died, and the mortality is increasing every day. The malaria makes ravages among them, because of the complete lack of food and shelter. How cruelly ironic to think that the Government pretends to be sending them there to found a colony; and they have no ploughs, no seeds to sow, no bread, no abode; in fact, they are sent with empty hands.

Only part of the Zeitounlis seem to be at Kara-Pounar; the others seem to have been sent to Der-el-Zor, on the Euphrates; there their condition is still worse, and they ask as a favour to be sent to Kara-Pounar.

The Armenians of Adana received orders to leave the town, without being told where they were to go. Many of them came to B., others went to Osmania. But they were all recalled to Adana. Is it intended to send them somewhere else, or are they to remain in Adana? I could not find this out for certain before leaving B.

A great panic reigns among the Armenian population in B., because it was said that they also were to be exiled. But nothing has happened there yet.

From Konia, again, more than 200 Armenians have been sent to Kara-Pounar. Among them is Mr. AC. On Thursday, 90 people were notified to be ready to leave on Saturday, the 26th May.[167] The Armenians dare not leave their houses.

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Footnote 164:

1 piastre=2d.

Footnote 165:

The 14th May, 1915, was a Friday.—EDITOR.

Footnote 166:

Author of Doc. 125

Footnote 167:

The 26th May, 1915, was a Wednesday.—EDITOR.

125. EXILES FROM ZEITOUN: LETTER, DATED KONIA, 17th JULY, 1915, FROM A FOREIGN RESIDENT AT KONIA TO MR. N. AT CONSTANTINOPLE; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

In hope of having opportunity to send by Miss FF., I can write freely. Have you any means by which you can send me as much as fifty liras for relief of the Zeitounlis in Sultania? The Government has now left them to starve. At first, rations of bread were given; then 150 drams of flour to each per day (children under five not being counted at all); then their amount was reduced to 100 drams. It is now four weeks that this has been cut off entirely. The people are not allowed to scatter over the country in search of work. They can only search the fields for roots and herbs, and there have been several cases of poisoning from this food. The exiles from Konia, numbering 107 (men who have money and supplies sent to them from their homes) took up a subscription among themselves and subscribed 1,400 piastres a week towards supplying bread for the starving. I have sent personal gifts from ourselves and our friends of five or six liras a week; but these sources are becoming exhausted. Later Mr. GG., whom Dr. EE. knows, has been “pardoned” by the Vali and has returned here. He has been the leader among the exiles in trying to secure food for the Zeitounlis. I called on him this evening to get accurate information of their state. It is worse even than I knew. The number is over 7,000, 2,200 having been sent without coming through Konia, so that I had no account of them. The facts about the cutting off of all food for them are as I have stated. A bin-bashi, an Arnaout,[168] who went there on military service, was greatly moved by what he saw, and sent a strong telegram demanding rations to be given to the families of the men (about 300) who were drafted into the Labour Regiment after being sent to Sultania. This he could do in his military capacity, and it was accepted by the War Department. This provided for about 1,600, leaving, however, nearly 6,000 with nothing. The number of deaths up to last week was 305. Dr. Stepanian, of Baghtchedjik, has distinguished himself by self-sacrificing work for the poor. He testifies to seeing deaths from starvation already.

The refugees are “housed” principally in great camel stables and such like. It is a great camel region, the Government having requisitioned 4,000 of these animals from there. The cattle and animals of the Zeitounlis were mostly requisitioned by the Government en route. What they managed to conceal and bring with them has been put under requisition, but not taken. Meanwhile, the owners are forbidden to sell, are unable to use, and are compelled to feed these animals, because the Government holds them responsible to deliver them when called for. I have before heard of refinements of devilry, but I have seen instances this year that have burned into my soul. The manifest purpose to destroy these people by starvation cannot be denied.

I find that it is the exiles from Ak Shehr and Baghtchedjik, who are also at Sultania, who have been more generous than those of Konia in giving of their own means. The Kaimakam has been very good, giving out of his scanty purse to help and favouring the efforts of others, in spite of the official attitude in Konia. Dr. Stepanian, of Baghtchedjik, whom you perhaps know, is one of the “Commission” there for distributing all assistance that may be sent. Can you in any way get money to put at my disposal, so that I can send ten liras a week? With this we may be able to get enough from others here to provide ten paras per person. Of course, this is nothing, but may we not do something?

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Footnote 168:

Albanian.

126. AF.: STATEMENT, DATED 16th DECEMBER, 1915, BY A FOREIGN RESIDENT AT AF.; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

The events connected with the banishment of the Armenians of the AF. region by the Turkish Government began on the 14th May. On that day the Alai Bey, or Justice of the Court Martial, arrived in AF. from Aleppo, the seat of the Court Martial. The three days following his arrival were spent in seclusion, very probably in consulting with secret agents. On the 18th, 19th and 20th May he had conferences with the elders of the city. He demanded in a very courteous manner that the city should deliver up all arms, and all deserters from the army and other outlaws. He desired that they should comply with his request within the next three days. He took an oath on his honour that, if his demands were obeyed, all would be well for the people of AF. and in no way should harm come to them. In case of disobedience, however, he said that he had at his call three thousand soldiers, who would enforce his demands.

Towards the last of the conferences, however, the Alai Bey’s attitude grew threatening, and the people were filled with alarm. The elders and spiritual heads of the communities were at a loss what counsel to give. If they delivered up their arms and were betrayed, they might all be massacred; if they retained them, it would mean open opposition to the Government. A number of the leaders came to consult with Miss B. and me, and we supported the party which stood for full compliance with the requests. It was finally almost unanimously decided that this should be done, and a general response seemed to follow.

By Sunday, the 23rd May, all but three or four of the deserters had delivered themselves up and about seventy Martinis had been surrendered. C. Bey seemed pleased with the results, and the people were beginning to grow more tranquil. At three o’clock in the afternoon, about two thousand soldiers, cavalry and infantry, entered the city. The local centurion had prepared for their coming by taking forcible possession of the Gregorian Boys’ School, the Monastery (which was used for orphanage purposes, the orphans being sent out as the soldiers entered), and the Protestant Boys’ Academy. Miss B. immediately put in a protest at the Government House against occupying the last-named building. The cavalry was sent to another building belonging to a certain philanthropic society, for whose properties Miss B. was responsible. As the buildings were empty and not in use, it seemed best to allow this without a protest. The following morning we called upon the cavalry officer, D. Bey, were very courteously received, and were given assurances that the property should be well cared for, which assurances were kept. The Boys’ Academy building was not freed of soldiers, but only a very few were stationed there, and all rooms we desired we kept locked. Guards of soldiers were placed in all conspicuous parts of the city, a squad being on duty night and day at the head of the private road which leads to the American Board Compound.

Towards evening on Monday, the 24th, the ammunition and load-animals of the troops came in. The soldiers with these were sent to a building belonging to another institution in the city. This building, though unoccupied because of the absence of the missionaries, was filled with property. Word was sent to Miss B., but before she could get there the attendant had been forced to open the door. She protested to the police in charge, and, finding it useless, sought audience with the justice of court martial. He promised to empty it the following day, and this was carried out.

On the 25th May, Miss B. again called on the Alai Bey to present several personal requests, such as permission to take flour to the mill without molestation, to have our road and premises free from the trespass of soldiers, etc. All was readily and courteously granted. She also reported the gun in our possession, which had been registered in the name of our steward. He smiled graciously and asked whether we did not want a few more; he had plenty, he said, to give us. In the days that followed there was repeated pressure, always more drastic, for ammunition of all kinds and the delivery of deserters. C. Bey gave repeated assurances that, if the deserters were delivered up, no one would be exiled. On the 27th May a large number of the leading men were imprisoned, and, after that, every day added to their numbers.

The strain upon the people was now so great that the majority could neither eat nor sleep. We were in the same case, and were up from very early until late in the evening to meet the many who came to consult with us. On the morning of the 28th, a party of women from the city besought our aid. The husbands of nearly all of them had been thrown into prison, and they and their children were left defenceless in their homes, with no suggestion of what the future held in store. At their request, then, Miss B. and I interviewed both C. Bey and E. Bey, the military commander. We besought them to distinguish between the innocent and the guilty, and asked mercy for the women and children. We were again received with entire courtesy, but had no satisfaction. The Alai Bey took pains to explain to us that, as we had come from a land of freedom, where people lived in a more enlightened way, we could not fully understand the necessary actions of the Turkish Government; that there existed a Committee among the Armenian people which was harmful to the Government, but that our hearts and minds were pure and the people easily deceived us.

The last of the deserters was delivered up on the 30th May, and the total number of guns was one Mauser and ninety Martinis. The Alai Bey, however, insisted that there were yet many more guns hidden by the people, either in the city or on the mountains. The soldiers were accordingly set at work to dig into walls and refuse heaps and search all the houses for guns. With the exception of some powder, the results were insignificant. The people of the city charged the soldiers with themselves hiding guns and ammunition in and about the walls of dwellings, for the purpose of securing convictions.

Meanwhile, the atmosphere grew worse and worse, and on the 3rd June it became known that the deportation was about to begin. In response to the desire of the people we, together with Miss F., a German lady, made a last plea before the officers. The only result was that we received permission to send telegrams. We sent messages to Mr. N. and the Ambassador, but afterwards learned that no such messages were ever transmitted. The men to be exiled the following morning were released from prison in the afternoon. Miss B. and I, together with the Protestant pastor, called upon all the families who were going. In the morning we asked permission for the school-girls of the exiled families to remain with us, and were refused on the ground that only the Vali could give such permission. We immediately telegraphed to the Vali, but, as usual, received no answer. The Alai Bey, however, personally gave us permission to keep three girls, as well as the privilege of receiving gifts from our friends who were going away.

Thirty leading Protestant and Gregorian families were marched away in the first batch. Gendarmes were placed to prevent relatives and friends from accompanying those sent out, but Miss B. and I always passed freely among them, giving aid wherever we could. Four days later G. Effendi, our steward and chief servant, received notice to go. Miss B. again interviewed the Alai Bey with respect to the case of G. Effendi. She said that we were greatly dependent upon him, and asked that he might be left among the last to be sent. The Alai Bey granted one day’s delay, but his decision was not carried out in fact. The following morning he was the first to be driven from his house by the soldiers.

By the 10th June, about 150 households had been deported, and new papers were being distributed every day. Some of the men had now been imprisoned fifteen days. They were usually released the day before leaving, and had no chance of making preparations for the journey. The Alai Bey left the same day, delegating the work of further deportation to the military commander and the Kaimakam of AF. The soldiers left some two weeks later. The deportation of the people of AF. continued throughout the summer, until, by the 1st October, only a very few men and their families and about 250 widows and soldiers’ families remained.

It was the intention of the Government to provide animals for those sent into exile, as the people of AF. had very few animals of their own and were obliged to journey over rough mountain roads. Horses, mules, camels and donkeys were levied upon all the surrounding villages, whether Christian or Turk. The owners were obliged to go with the animals. It can readily be seen that many of them bore the travellers no good will, and vented whatever cruelty they pleased upon them. Gendarmes were also sent along with the convoys, presumably for protection, but very often they themselves became the greatest menace, and almost never succeeded in preventing the raids made upon the defenceless exiles by marauding bands. Towards the latter part of the summer the supply of animals was so diminished, so many having died upon the road, that Circassian carts were used for transporting the people. The exiles from AF. were sent first to AG., and from there by slow degrees to Aleppo. There is a well-travelled caravan road to AG. by way of AH., which can also be used by the rude mountain cars. This, however, the exiles were not permitted to use, but were forced to travel over a stony and very difficult road leading over a high mountain pass. The entire village of Shar and the Armenian population of Roumlou were deported soon after the deportations began in AF. Being agricultural villages, they came for the most part with their own carts. When they reached the pass, they begged to be allowed to go by way of AH., so that they might have the benefit of their cars; but this was denied them. All the carts had to be abandoned at the river, and, throwing most of their possessions into the stream, they took what little they could carry, and started up the stony way on foot.

At the beginning of September a very large percentage of the remaining population of AF. was deported, consisting for the most part of the very poor, and including many widows. As very few animals and carts came in response to the call of the Government, a large number of men, women and children started on the long journey on foot, carrying on their backs or strapping to their persons the very few articles deemed most necessary.

Miss B. and I found our position in the face of such terrible events a most difficult one. We felt obliged to help the Armenian people in every way possible, and at the same time felt we could not have a break with the Government, nor give up our cordial relations with the Moslem families. We felt responsible for the American property situated in and about AF., and also had Armenian orphan teachers and girls in the compound, for whose protection our lives were not too costly. One of the great problems was in connection with the property of the exiled families. They had been told by the Alai Bey that they could place the property left behind wherever they pleased. Naturally everyone wished to put it under our care. We could have filled our whole compound full of all imaginable household articles and treasures, to say nothing of horses, cows, goats, etc. As we had no American gentleman to advise us, and, moreover, wished always to deal in such a way as not to involve the Consul or the Embassy, we decided in general against the taking of property. That which we did accept we paid for, and the purchasing was always to help those in such desperate need. The Government came to understand this, and respected us accordingly.

From the time when the first people left, in early June, until October, we were very fortunate in having the opportunity to render some financial help. Miss B. passed through the line of gendarmes guarding the villages of Shar and Roumlou, and was enabled to leave some pounds with the head men of the villages for the aid of the very poor. To the outgoing people of AF. we gave freely, according to our limited means, and even occasionally could help exiles from other villages passing through from the Kaisaria country. We succeeded also, with the aid of a Greek and a Turk, in sending some relief to the villagers of AJ. and AK. before they left. We felt confident that the authorities knew something of the extent to which we were helping the people, but we encountered no open opposition.

Our servants were nearly all sent away early in the deportation, so that extra and unaccustomed work was imposed upon us. Miss B., for example, always had to take the post in person to the Government Building. Providing for the food supply, and dealing with our shepherd and the villagers who came to sell things, often fell to us personally. A large part of the time we had no cook. Another tax upon our strength and time was the battle with the swarms of locusts which visited Syria and Cilicia. They first appeared in early June and ravaged the country till September. They destroyed our vineyards, and we had to fight day after day to keep them out of the compound. When we destroyed those hatched on our premises, their places were quickly filled by armies coming down the mountain side. When I left, many of the villages were suffering from the lack of food due to the locust scourge.

Another problem was how to relieve, in some small measure at least, the suffering in the city caused by lack of food. A great many widows and orphans and soldiers’ families were left with no means of support, after the more well-to-do families had been deported. Moreover, the industrial work, which employed a considerable number of widows, was closed with the coming of the court martial officer. The two Bible Women, up to the time when they also were deported, worked heroically, with the little means that we could spare them each week, to meet and provide for the cases of greatest need. We bought large quantities of cheap wheat to help towards this end. The only shop left open was that of the druggist, so there was no way of obtaining any supplies. The lack of soap and salt was very keenly felt. As our own supply was limited, we could not give freely as we wished, but finally Miss B., in spite of all the demands upon her strength and time, made considerable quantities of soap, so that at least the women might wash their clothes occasionally. All who received it were most grateful, and the supply was never sufficient.

Miss B. and I personally never suffered any discourtesy from either the official or village Turk. Our situation was often delicate, and, in such a case as the affair connected with the Government Industrial, the Kaimakam ignored our rights and courteously took everything into his own hands; but, on the whole, we were well treated. When we asked Mr. H. to come to our aid from Marash and the Government prevented him from coming, the Kaimakam sent the chief of police to explain the case to us, and assured us that we need not fear, that we were the guests of the Government, and that not a hair of our heads should be injured. When I left AF., although I had the escort of Miss J., the Consul’s kavass and their gendarme, the captain in AF. sent with me as a personal escort his best horseman. The postal official showed himself very friendly, and did us many personal favours. When money was sent us through the post office, he tried always to pay in gold or silver, and in such a way that we might get it quickly into the hands of the people. He knew we used it to help those condemned to be exiled. When the first convoys of exiles were driven out of AF. his mother was unable to leave her bed for two weeks, she was so depressed by what she saw and heard. She spoke with great vigour against the terrible events that were happening.

Our head teacher, Miss K., and her mother were with us in the compound. They have Moslem relatives, two of whom were officers’ families in AF. These were especially friendly to us, and visited us frequently. They were all outspoken against the horrors. One time U. Effendi had failed to visit us, as was his custom, and, when we asked the reason, he said he was ashamed to come because he could bring us no good news. We saw Moslem women loudly wailing with the Christians when the first families were sent out. When the Alai Bey first came, he called the Mufti and asked his approval of what he was about to do; but the Mufti refused to sanction it, and said he could see no good in it. This same Mufti was a strong personal friend of one of the leading Protestant Armenians (our special friend and adviser), and he tried in every way to save him from exile, but in vain. When M. Agha left, the Mufti took possession of his house and all his properties for him. He also said he would stand as protector of the Americans and the American compound after M. Agha was gone.

Some of the village aghas also expressed themselves freely to us, both on the matter of the war and on the calamity which had befallen the Armenians. They said that such cruelty would not go unavenged, and that their day of reckoning would come. They complained bitterly that there were now no artisans or shopkeepers left to supply their wants, and that in a short time they themselves would be in desperate want. Our watchman at the summer residence showed us his foot half-naked, because he could not find a shoemaker in all AF. to mend it. All the surrounding Turkish, Kurdish and Circassian villages were in the same need.

A Kurdish Sheikh, N. Effendi, from a village not far from AF., visited the city twice only during the summer. The first time he only remained about an hour, and, with the tears streaming down his cheeks, he said he would return to his village at once; that he could not endure such sights. The second time he came to bid farewell to O. Effendi, his Armenian friend. He kissed each of his children, pressing them to his heart, and left again in tears. A Kurd also brought us the secret information that the new Shar church building had been partially destroyed by dynamite.

The Moslems of AK. and A J. were very much opposed to the exiling of the Armenians from those villages. They said they were not guilty of anything, possessed no weapons, lived peacefully and were friends with them, and were, besides, their artisans and tradesmen. Through their efforts they put off the deportation about three months; but, in the end, even they were unable to save them. The Turks of AK. ought to have special mention for their honourable attitude throughout the whole affair. Miss K.’s uncle, an officer in AK., broke a water jar over the head of a young Moslem who had entered into a room to molest an Armenian soldier’s wife. He said he was obliged to defend the unprotected who dwelt under the shadow of his house. Once when Miss B. was passing through the streets of AF., she was appealed to by two gendarmes who had been ordered to expel from their home for deportation an aged man and his wife and their bed-ridden son. The gendarmes said: “How shall we do this thing?” and begged Miss B. to beseech the authorities for mercy. These are samples of faint gleams of light in the midst of four months of horrible darkness. Pages and pages might be written on the barbaric and relentless cruelty of the many.

Throughout the summer Miss B. and I were confronted with the question whether we had come to Turkey only to work for the Christians, or whether we would also be willing, now that the Armenians were gone, to take Moslem children into our school. These inquiries finally resulted in expressions on the part of several officers’ families of a desire to place their daughters in our school. Every week there were inquiries as to when a decision would be made as to the opening of our school. One Moslem woman even went so far as to inquire about the clothing necessary to prepare for her daughter. Whether they were sincere or not, of course, we cannot tell; but the desire seemed to be a general one.

There is yet one more phase in connection with the summer’s events. Shortly after the deportation of the Armenian families of AF. took place, about thirty families of Mouhadjirs were sent in by the Government to take their place. These unfortunate people were refugees from Roumelia since the time of the Balkan War. For two years they had been wandering, always sent on by the Turkish Government from place to place, and finally placed in the houses just vacated by those who were likewise to face months of wandering and homelessness. Four families came to live close to our end of the city. We at once decided to show them friendliness. They responded in a touching way, came frequently to call, and poured out their over-burdened hearts. When they first came, the men were too weak to work; all were subject to chills and fever, and, of the whole village from which these people had come, only two children were living. One of the women spoke with horror at having to live in a house with such associations, saying that only they knew what such suffering meant. The morning when I left and bade them good-bye, one of these Mouhadjir women threw her arms about me and begged me not to go.

Miss Vaughan and I saw the departure of hundreds of Armenians into a hopeless exile. It was heart-breaking and too awful even to imagine in detail; yet we praise the God of all mankind, whether Moslem or Christian, that we were permitted to see the spirit of Christian faith and humility manifested by so many in the darkest period of Armenian history. There may have been examples of hard-heartedness and cursing against God and an utter losing of faith, but we did not personally come in contact with them. How often did we pray together with those about to go and, with the tears streaming down our faces, beseech God to keep our faith sure! How often did men and women clasp our hands at parting, saying: “Let God’s will be done. We have no other hope!” P. Effendi, the Protestant preacher, came to our compound the morning of his leaving and asked that, with the girls and teachers, we might all have worship together. His young wife, who was about to become a mother, was left to our care. Whether they were ever reunited I do not know. With entire calm he read from God’s word, and prayed God’s protection for all of us who were left behind. At the close he asked that the girls should sing “He leadeth me.”

“Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.”

127. AF.: RECORD OF INDIVIDUAL CASES, DRAWN UP BY THE AUTHOR OF THE PRECEDING STATEMENT, AND DATED 17th DECEMBER, 1915.

1. Q. was a young man who had graduated from the law school at Constantinople, and in the winter and early spring of 1915 had served in the Mounted Imperial Guard. Not being well, he returned to his home in AF. a few weeks before the deportation began. Upon the arrival of the court-martial and army officers, he was at once chosen to serve them as a military attendant, and was dressed in full uniform. He was in constant attendance upon them till the evening of the 3rd June, when he was roughly stripped of his uniform and told to be ready for exile in the morning. We saw him go off with the convoy on foot, not even an animal having been granted him.

2. R. was for years a Government officer at AF. At the time when the officers and army entered AF., he was away in the villages on Government business. Two days before the day set for deportation, his wife was notified. She and the four small children were left alone to prepare for the journey. The husband returned from the villages a few hours before the time when the families were deported, having had no information whatever of what was taking place.

3. S.’s husband had been in Syracuse, N.Y., for two years, and she was left alone in AF. with two small children. He intended to send for her as soon as conditions were favourable. Her parents were deported early in the season, and, at the time, she asked permission of the Alai Bey to go with them, as otherwise she was left friendless. She even begged to go. He refused and said: “Have no fear, my daughter, you will not be sent off. Remain quietly in your place.” Early in September, she was deported in company with a great many other defenceless women.

4. When the soldiers were digging for ammunition and guns in the walls and refuse heaps of AF., they found in a wall close to a house an iron ball wrapped in a piece of cloth. The woman of the house, a young bride, happened to be standing before the door, and the soldiers noticed that the cloth of her apron was the same as that in which the ball was wrapped. The woman was seized, sent to Adana and thrown into prison. This was on the last day of May, and in October she was still in prison. The Bible Woman in Adana discovered her there, and said her condition was horrible. She is confined in a small room with three or four Turkish women of desperate character, living in terrible filth and mostly without food.

5. The pastor of Tchomakly, a village near Everek, passed through AF. en route for the desert. He is a Marsovan graduate and a pastor in the Kaisaria district. He had been assured by the Everek Kaimakam that nothing should happen to him, and that, even if the village were deported, he would not be included, as he was not a native of the place. At three o’clock in the morning soldiers entered the village, roused all the inhabitants and told them to be ready to depart in two hours. When they came to the pastor’s door, they said: “You also must go. You went to Talas to talk with the Americans a few days ago.” His wife, not having suitable shoes, had her feet bound up in skins.

6. Lydia was the wife of a soldier who, at the time when the court-martial officer came to AF., was a deserter and in hiding. However, he surrendered to the authorities, was pardoned, and was sent to the coast with the labour gang. She was assured by the court-martial officer (and, after his departure, by many of the local officers) that she should never be deported, in consideration of her being a soldier’s wife. Throughout the summer, however, they played with her. Again and again she was given notice to leave, and then, upon entering a personal petition at the Government House and stating her case, she would be assured upon their word of honour that she would never be deported. The chief of police gave us the same assurance. Finally, early one morning, gendarmes came to her door and roughly told her to be ready to go in a few hours. She again took her three small children and went to the Government House. All in vain. She was given two camels for herself, the loads and the children. A fourth child was born under the burning sun of AG., and when she arrived in Aleppo with the child dead, she was only able to reach the hospital.

7. T. was for four years in charge of the Government Industrial in AF. This was closed when deportation began. He did his work so well that this Industrial was the best business in AF. He was living quietly in the building, guarding the property and stock of the Industrial. In the middle of September, when almost all the rest of AF. were exiled, he also received notification to go. Gendarmes came in the evening after dark and drove him, his invalid wife, and four children to the Government Building. There they were to wait for animals or a cart to take them on their journey. In company with hundreds of others, they sat down on the bare ground in front of the Government Building, gathering their few possessions close to them lest they should be stolen. He and his family remained there two days and three nights before being sent on, and were exposed during one of these nights to a terrible rainstorm. They were within ten minutes of their home, but were not permitted to go there for shelter. His wife secretly made her way to our compound to ask for a little bread, as their supply for the journey was already gone.

128. ADANA: STATEMENT, DATED 3rd DECEMBER, 1915, BY A FOREIGN RESIDENT AT ADANA; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

When Turkey became a belligerent in the November of last year (1914), there were Armenians and other Christians serving in the Army under arms. Many of these came under fire both at the Dardanelles and in the expedition against Egypt. Later, the arms were taken away from the Armenians, and those in the Army were converted into “Labour Regiments,” to which were attached the very considerable number of Armenians drafted into the Army later. These men were employed in road building, transport, trenching, etc., and rendered extensive and very important service. When the arms were taken from them, a feeling of anxiety took possession of the Armenians, in the thought that this action of the authorities might portend something. However, much was done in the Adana Province to reassure the people that Governmental action would be discriminating and severity exercised only against blameworthy or suspected people. In pursuance of this policy a number of men whose names had been listed during and after the massacre period of 1909 were put under arrest or surveillance.

In the early winter, the British and French war-vessels in the Eastern Mediterranean bombarded some points on the Gulf of Alexandretta, notably the town of Alexandretta and the branch line of the Baghdad Railway that runs to Alexandretta. The town of Dört Yöl—almost entirely Armenian—lies quite near the head of the Gulf on the plain of Issus about 20 miles from Alexandretta, and is a station on the line. That branch line of the railway was put out of commission. The Government officials made charge that the Dört Yöl people had communication with the hostile ships, affording them valuable information. A number of them were brought before the court-martial and imprisoned, of whom some were executed by hanging. Men were arrested and imprisoned in other places, notably Hadjin, and brought before the court-martial. These and other acts of the Government officials increased the anxiety, but in April the exiles from Zeitoun on their way to Konia (Iconium) passed through the city of Adana. They had suffered terribly, but they had considerable property with them, and also cattle and sheep. It was announced that these people would be settled on lands in the Konia district. This was somewhat reassuring, and there was hope that wholesale deportation or massacre was not in contemplation.

However, this assurance was converted into consternation. At midnight, in the latter part of April, gendarmes went through the city rapping at certain doors, searching the houses for arms and informing the inmates that in three days they were to be deported. In the third week in May, 70 families (three to four hundred people—men, women and children) were sent off in the direction of Konia. They had not reached the Cilician Gates Pass in the Taurus Mountains when they were turned back with the announcement that they had been pardoned and were to return to their homes. The joy of their return was almost equal to the consternation caused by the order for deportation. However, exiles from north of the Taurus (Marsovan, Kaisaria, etc.) in considerable numbers were passing through Adana to the Aleppo district. The explanation given was that that was being done because of revolutionary agitation in those districts. As nothing of overt import had been done on the part of the Armenians in Cilicia, the people of the district were reassured. There was an influential element among the Moslems—including influential officials—who opposed oppressive measures. The Governor was, to all appearances, strongly opposed. Insistent orders from Constantinople forced the deportation of groups of Armenians. Early in the movement towards Aleppo, men were left free to take their families or leave them. No massacring was done, though there was an uneasy feeling that it might occur. In this way various batches were deported, from whom word was received of their safe arrival in the Aleppo district. However, the suffering of deportation—abandonment of home and property and friends, the exposure and hunger on the road, the insanitary state of the concentration camps, and the rough treatment by gendarmes, and in many cases outrage and pillage—all this, though heart-breaking in itself, was not as bad as, or rather was much less horrible than, the torture of the crowds that suffered in the north and east.

Later in the year there was a distinct effort to save many of the Armenians. This effort synchronised with the order to exempt Catholics and Protestants. It seemed a success, and everybody was greatly encouraged. But an emissary from the Committee of Union and Progress at Constantinople arrived at that time, and was able to overturn the arrangement and secure an order for the immediate deportation of all. Exception was later made of some widows, of the wives and children of men serving in the labour regiments, and of men working in mills under Government contract and in the Baghdad Railway construction.

The great drive took place in the first week of September, when two-thirds of the Armenian population of Adana City were deported. Hadjin and Dört Yöl were treated very much more harshly, both in the process of eviction and on the road. The people were allowed to dispose of some of their properties, which they did at a great sacrifice; still, they had to abandon the great mass of their properties, which was later confiscated. I would call attention to the fact that the appalling nature of the deportation is none the less appalling because there was comparatively less torture and outrage. It is only fair to state that one Moslem was scourged to death for participation in the robbery of some Christians that were being deported.

It is not merely the suffering of the outlawed and deported people that is appalling, but the effect of it all on the country. Two-thirds of the business of Adana City was dependent on Armenians, and the markets seemed deserted after they were driven out. The disaster to the whole province from the material standpoint is beyond calculation. However, it would appear that the whole scheme was intended to be a relentless effort on the part of the central authorities either to exterminate the Armenian nation or to reduce them to a condition like that of the people of Moab, as described by Isaiah in the last clause of the 16th chapter: “A remnant very small and of no account.” The enormity is not so much in the torture, massacring, outrage, etc., as in the intention and effort to exterminate a nation. The Armenians have endured massacre and outrage and persecution and oppression; this, however, shatters all hope of life and a future.

The Armenian Protestant communities are all deported with the pastors and leaders, but the men deported are a tower of strength to the suffering people in their exile. Let me quote from W. Effendi, from a letter he wrote a day before his deportation with his young wife and infant child, and with the whole congregation: “We now understand that it is a great miracle that our nation has lived so many years amongst such a nation as this. From this we realise that God can and has shut the mouths of lions for many years. May God restrain them! I am afraid they mean to kill some of us, cast some of us into most cruel starvation and send the rest out of this country; so I have very little hope of seeing you again in this world. But be sure that, by God’s special help, I will do my best to encourage others to die manly. I will also look for God’s help for myself to die as a Christian. May this country see that, if we cannot live here as men, we can die as men. May many die as men of God. May God forgive this nation all their sin which they do without knowing. May the Armenians teach Jesus’ life by their death, which they could not teach by their life or have failed in showing forth. It is my great desire to see a Reverend Ali, or Osman, or Mohammed. May Jesus soon see many Turkish Christians as the fruit of his blood.

“May the war soon end, in order to save the Moslems from their cruelty (for they increase in that from day to day), and from their ingrained habit of torturing others. Therefore we are waiting on God, for the sake of the Moslems as well as of the Armenians. May He appear soon.”

129. ADANA: STATEMENT, DATED 9th MAY, 1916, BY MISS Y., A FOREIGN RESIDENT AT ADANA, RECORDING HER EXPERIENCES THERE FROM SEPTEMBER, 1914, TO SEPTEMBER, 1915.

From the time Turkey began to mobilise in the autumn of 1914, before entering into the war, fear and questioning naturally took hold of the Armenians. First there was the unreasonable and irregular way in which the men were drafted into the Army or Labour Regiments; and then there was the news concerning the harsh and cruel treatment of the male population of Dört Yöl, where all from the ages of about 16 to 70 years were suddenly sent away en masse to work on the roads in the Hassan Beyli district—this, on the mere rumour that fruit and food had been conveyed from Dört Yöl to one of the Allies’ warships.

This was followed by a few selected men from Dört Yöl being hanged at intervals in the streets of Adana. One night in the winter (1914-15) the Government sent officers round the city into all Armenian houses, knocking the families up and demanding that all weapons should be given up, or actually searching for them. Think of the fright of many of them, thus rudely awakened; this action was the death-knell to many hearts. Soon after this, Armenians whose names had been registered as having escaped or defended themselves during the massacres of 1909, or who were found in possession of arms, or were under some other accusation, were collected and imprisoned. I am not sure what happened to these.

Then came the news of Zeitoun being deported. These hardy mountaineers were destined for Sultania, a low malarial district on the plain beyond Konia. Most of these villagers passed through Tarsus en route, save those who had died on the way. A Tarsus graduate from Zeitoun who had hoped to become a teacher, voluntarily followed his mother, a widow, to Sultania, for the reason that she had no one to take care of her, neither she nor his sister with her four children, as the latter’s husband was imprisoned in Marash.

“Why imprisoned?” I asked. “I do not know any reason,” the boy replied. This boy recounted to me how the people had to live in this sultry region. Some one hundred souls, regardless of any distinction, among them a College Professor and a few leading people from Konia, were for a time crowded into the largest house in the place. They could not sleep, many were sick, children and babies crying, the heat great. Other houses were occupied likewise; probably many people camped around. These poor people were not allowed to do anything to earn money or to go beyond a certain distance. Those who still had money for food helped the more needy as far as they could. This same student told me that while he was in Sultania 750 had died. Then the remainder were all despatched back to Tarsus to be forwarded to the Arabian desert.

I may say here that thousands and thousands of Armenians passed from the north over the Cilician plain, telling heart-rending stories of massacre or brutal treatment on the journey. Some mothers had given all the money in their possession to save their daughters from being violated. One said she had given 22 liras for a certain distance only. Poor women had to leave their babies and young children by the roadside; they were too exhausted to carry them any longer. The suffering of some in childbirth cannot be dwelt upon. One such, not of the poorest class, was thrust out of her house in —— when deportation began, and cruelly forced along the road. She died after two hours.

As long as I live I can never forget the camp I saw twice near Geulik station, not far from Tarsus. Here there were 10,000 to 15,000 Armenians awaiting further deportation towards the desert. They were in the broiling sun, with no shade or shelter save the rudest arrangements—anything that came to hand thrown over poles or sticks. There were all kinds of people and families of all ages, crowded together within a certain radius, beyond which they might not go. They looked scorched by the sun, their clothes were fast wearing out, and there were poor little children, boys and girls, taken from school, with simply nothing to do but await their fate, which mercifully they could not realise as the adults could. There was a stream of water a little distance off, and if only it had been clean it would have been a boon. It was used for rinsing clothes as well as drinking. There were no sanitary arrangements whatever, and the air was impregnated with foul odours. We witnessed all this from the train, which drew up at the station alongside the camp. The Government would not allow any help in money, food, or medicine to be given; if they knew of anyone so doing, they stopped it. In Tarsus, Mrs. X., who was working among the refugees all the time, trying to show sympathy and give help in any little way possible, was stopped at last. But I must go back to Adana.

As the Armenian men of Adana were drafted into the Army or Labour Battalions, and the Armenian shops were robbed at pleasure without payment, great numbers of families did not know where to look for food, and even the wealthier business men were beginning to see destitution looming ahead.

I think it was at the end of April (or May) that some thirty picked families (few of them particularly wealthy) were ordered to leave their homes for an unknown destination. This looked like the beginning of deportation; but owing, as we had reason to believe, to pressure being put on the Government at that time by the American Ambassador, who did his utmost to save Adana, Tarsus and Mersina from deportation, all these families save a few young men were allowed to return to their homes within three weeks. No one could understand this strange transaction, but fresh hope awoke in people’s hearts. It was short lived.

Circumstantial stories of all kinds of oppression and cruelty in one place or another kept arriving day after day, but no one even then could foretell what exactly was coming or what special fate was in store for themselves. Gradually the people became hopeless. All hearts were sorely tested, but those that knew their God proved their strength and peace in Him. Some were enabled to go farther—to cast themselves upon God’s will and accept this cup of suffering (so imminent) as from the Father’s hand. Oh, those were terrible days of suspense and heart-strain. In my house, in a Greek quarter, I was able to give room to a family I had long known. The wife had been a Bible Woman in the city for twelve years; the son was a graduate of the college, and there were two daughters—one a teacher and the other just graduated from the American school. The husband had care of the Protestant church buildings, and he used to bring back the news daily from the market. Many were the prayers which went up to God from this dear woman and others who sought to comfort the people. Never before had so many meetings been held in the poor city homes among the women, who crowded outside the doors if there was no room inside. Fifty, sixty or eighty were quite usual numbers. The church services also were unusually crowded, and God granted new life to many hearts, especially among the young men remaining.

Then the orders for the deportation of Adana came. The people, of course, did not know what to do with their things, while those who lived from hand to mouth had not the wherewithal to get food even to start with, let alone other necessities. What could be sold was sold, but the things went for a mere nothing, except in a few cases, where goods were bought to befriend and help the sellers. The Missionaries had not money to spare to buy, with all the numbers beseeching help. Those who could sell nothing had to leave all their belongings and stores save what they could carry with them. One Armenian preacher who was constantly appealed to at this time, from morning until night, by the distracted multitude—asking whether their names were called yet, what was to be done, and so on—expressed the situation thus: “It is as if the people were drowning in a sea of trouble and each one were trying to catch at a straw to save himself.”

To give an example of the stony-hearted attitude of the Government official in charge of this work of deportation, I may cite the case of a young man of good mental ability, who for many years had been teaching and helping the blind in many ways. Through spinal disease he had become very badly deformed and could not walk. He was taken down to the Sarai in a bath-chair, hoping to elicit pity and not be cast adrift with his deaf mother, whom he supported. The only answer he received was: “Get out with you and be gone; the sooner the better.” Some money was given to this crippled young man, but long before reaching Aleppo he had spent all on conveyances.

Another instance of the inhumanity of man towards his fellows in suffering, of which we have since heard and read over and over again until our hearts can bear no more, was the treatment accorded to, and pity withheld from, the Armenian people from all regions who were being transported by railway during the great heat. They were packed like cattle, and as train after train passed through Adana station, the people cried out for water and thrust out their hands beseechingly, but to no avail, although water was actually at hand. No one must show them any mercy. This we heard from witnesses living near the station, who said that they could not endure the sight, and did not know how to remain where they were. When some of our special friends were starting, at the station, one of our party, Dr. Z., tried to give a basket of grapes to a family, but was not permitted. What happened to the crowds after they reached Aleppo we did not then know. From our deported Adana people there came piteous messages for money, as the little in hand was soon exhausted. Some short letters came through from the Aleppo centre. One wrote: “Better drown your girls than let them come here.” Another, well known to me, wrote to his sisters, who were at the American school: “Be thankful you have such a place to be in as the place where you are, and that you are not here.”

It is computed that 20,000 were deported from Adana alone. We can testify to the mercy which permitted our Cilician people to go en masse, i.e., in families, save for those members already taken by the Government, ostensibly for the Army or the Labour Regiments. As far as we heard, those who were able to obtain means of transit and continued their journey from Osmania (whither they went by rail) to Aleppo, were not attacked or massacred on the way. How many were left behind sick or died in Osmania cannot be said.

Circumstances obliged me and some other members of the Missionary Circle to be away from the heat of the plain for part of July and August, and it was during these weeks that the great deportation en masse of the Armenian population took place from Adana. Though absent, one was straining for news all the time. When we were in the hills above Tarsus, details of the refugees and their plight were constantly being sent by Mrs. X. to her daughter and son-in-law, in whose company I was. One could only write “farewells” before the word to start was actually given, feeling sure that the order to depart would be extended to all our friends without exception. Our American friends said, in their kindness: “We are glad you were not here; it was too heart-breaking to bear.” And, indeed, on our return the whole atmosphere of the place, the empty houses and streets of the city with scarcely an Armenian to be seen, spoke more of death than the burnt, empty city after the massacres of 1909.

I conclude with quotations from a letter written by a fellow-worker of many years standing. He and his wife and other members of his family left with the crowd of Protestants in August, 1915. The letter was given me about two weeks later by a relative. It reads thus:—

“God can shut again the mouths of lions. Do you know that God has shut the mouths of many lions for many years? We now understand that it is a great miracle that our nation (the Armenians) has lived so many years among such a nation (the Moslems). Oh, how can men become such devils in so short a time? May God restrain them. I am afraid they mean to kill some of us, cast some of us into most cruel starvation, and send the rest into the desert; so I have very little hope of seeing you again in this world. But be sure that, by God’s special help, I will do my best to encourage others to die manfully. I will also await God’s help for myself, to die as a Christian.

“May this country see that, if we cannot live here as men, we can die as men. May many die as men of God. May God forgive this nation (the Moslems) all their sin which they do without knowing.... May Jesus soon see many Mohammedan Christians as the fruit of His blood.

“May the war soon end, in order to save the Moslems from their cruelty and savagery, for they increase in devilry from day to day, and from their ingrained habit of torturing their fellow men. Therefore we are waiting on God, for the sake of the Moslems as well as the Armenians. May He soon appear.”

XVI. JIBAL MOUSA.

The villages on the southern and eastern slopes of Jibal Mousa are included administratively in the Vilayet of Aleppo, and, like other Armenian settlements in that province, were only given notice of deportation at a comparatively late date—in their case, the 13th July. Geographically and historically, however, they are intimately connected with the Cilician highlanders. Jibal Mousa is a direct southern continuation of Amanus, and Yoghan Oulouk and the other Jibal Mousa villages are kindred communities to Dört Yöl and Zeitoun. They are the southernmost outpost of the Armenian race towards the Arabic world.

By the time the summons was served on them, the Jibal Mousa villagers had been watching for four months the deportation of their Cilician kinsmen, and had realised to the full what this deportation meant. They resolved to resist, and retired into the fastnesses of their mountain, which rises north-west of the villages and on its further flank falls steeply into the sea. The documents in this section record their successful defence and dramatic rescue by a French squadron—the single happy incident in the national tragedy of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.

130. JIBAL MOUSA: THE DEFENCE OF THE MOUNTAIN AND THE RESCUE OF ITS DEFENDERS BY THE FRENCH FLEET; NARRATIVE OF AN EYE-WITNESS, THE REV. DIKRAN ANDREASIAN, PASTOR OF THE ARMENIAN PROTESTANT CHURCH AT ZEITOUN.

This narrative was written down after the arrival of the refugees in Egypt, translated into English by the Rev. Stephen Trowbridge, Secretary of the American Red Cross at Cairo, communicated by the translator to the Editor of the Armenian journal “Ararat,” of London, and published by him in his issue of November, 1915.

From the day that Turkey entered the war there had been much anxiety among the people of Zeitoun as to whether the Turks would treat the Armenians of those mountain districts with some new form of cruelty and oppression. Zeitoun is—we must now say was—a city of seven thousand inhabitants, entirely Armenian, and surrounded by many villages also Christian, in the heart of the Taurus Mountains.

I have been serving for one year as the pastor of the Armenian Protestant Church in Zeitoun, and the narrative which follows is one of personal experience.

Early in the spring of this year (1915) the Government began to assume a threatening attitude towards Zeitoun, summoning the elders and notables of the city and commencing an inquisition with the punishment of the bastinado. Absurd and impossible charges were made against the Armenians for the purpose of extorting money. Meanwhile some 6,000 regular troops were quartered in the barracks above the city. An attempt to take the Armenian monastery by storm cost the Turks some casualties and failed of its object. The young men who were within stoutly defended themselves, and not until attacked by field artillery was the monastery taken.

Fifty of the leading men in Zeitoun were therefore summoned to the barracks “for a conference with the commander.” They were at once imprisoned and their families were sent for. Everyone waited anxiously for these people to return, but after a while it was learned that they had been sent away to an unknown destination. A few days later another and larger group of families were ordered to the barracks, and were forthwith driven off with threats and curses to a distant banishment. In this way three or four hundred families at a time were sent off on foot, with no proper supply of food, by devious routes through the mountains, some north-west towards Konia, some south-east towards the hot and unhealthy plains of Mesopotamia.

Day by day we saw the various quarters of the city stripped of their inhabitants, until at last only a single neighbourhood remained. In addition to my duties as pastor I happened to be in charge of the Mission Orphanage. The commanding officer sent for me one morning and told me to make ready at once for departure. “Your wife is also to go,” he said, “and the children in the Orphanage.” We made our preparations hurriedly, for we were allowed to take but little with us. As we were leaving I looked back with an aching heart and saw our beloved church empty and lonely. The last company of our seven thousand people was streaming down the valley into banishment! We had seen massacres, but we had never seen this before! A massacre at least ends quickly, but this prolonged anguish of soul is almost beyond endurance.

The first day’s march exhausted all of us. In the dark, as we lay down upon the open ground, Turkish muleteers came and robbed us of the few donkeys and mules that we had. Next day, in forlorn condition, the children with swollen and blistered feet, we reached Marash. Through the earnest request of the American missionaries, an order was secured from the governor for my wife and myself to return to my home town of Yoghanolouk, near the sea, twelve miles west of Antioch. The governor granted this permit on the ground that my wife and I were not natives of Zeitoun. My heart was torn between the desire to share banishment with some fragment of my congregation and the desire to take my wife to a place of comparative safety in my father’s home. But the order having once been issued, I had no alternative but to obey.

At Aintab we found the large Armenian community in the utmost anxiety, but at that time the order to leave had not arrived. Rumours reached us that the villages by the sea were being threatened, but we thought best to continue southward, difficult though the journey was at such a time.

The last part of our way lay through a historic valley, the fertile plain of Antioch. It was here that Chrysostom preached in the fervour of his early ministry before he was called to Byzantium. And it was to a secluded chapel on our own mountain side that he used to withdraw for prayer and communion with God. As a boy I had often looked with wonder and reverence at the massive stones of the ruins of St. Chrysostom’s Chapel. It was in this very Antioch that Barnabas and Paul laboured with such spiritual energy. And here they set forth upon their momentous task of spreading the Christian faith. The Roman road by which they walked from Antioch to Seleucia can still be traced in the valley below my native town, and the stone piers from which Roman ships set sail at Seleucia are not entirely demolished by the storms and earthquakes of the centuries.

The city of Antioch, once so gallantly defended by the Crusaders, has long been under the rule of the Turks, and the minarets of Islam are ten times more numerous than the church belfries. In April, 1909, the Protestant and Gregorian congregations suffered one of the most cruel persecutions in history.

The people of my own home town, Yoghanolouk, are simple, industrious folk. For years past their chief occupation has been the sawing and polishing by hand of combs from hard wood and bone. Many of our men are also expert wood-carvers. In the neighbouring villages the chief occupations are the culture of silk worms for producing raw silk, and the weaving of silk by hand looms into handkerchiefs and scarves. Our people are very fond of their churches, and since the opening of schools by the American missionaries most of our children have learned to read. Every home is surrounded by mulberry trees, and many beautiful orchards cover the terraced slopes towards the south and west. Travellers who have been to Southern Italy tell us that the villages near Naples very much resemble ours. The broad, rough back of Mousa Dagh (i.e., Mount Moses), known in Arabic as Jibal-al-Ahmar, rises up eastward behind us. Every gorge and crag of our beloved mountain is known to our boys and men.

I mention these facts about my village home so that you may feel something of the quiet happy life which was so rudely and so completely broken up by this last attempt of the Turks to exterminate our race.

Twelve days after I had reached home an official order from the Turkish Government at Antioch was served upon the six villages of Mousa Dagh to prepare for banishment within eight days. You can scarcely imagine the consternation and the indignation which this order caused. We sat up all night debating what it would be best to do. To resist the forces of the Turkish Government seemed almost hopeless, and yet the scattering of families into a distant wilderness, raided by fanatical and lawless Arab tribes, seemed such an appalling prospect that the inclination of both men and women was to refuse the summons and withstand the anger of the Government. All, however, were not of this mind. The Rev. Haroutune Nokhoudian, the pastor of the Protestant Church in Beitias, for example, came to the conviction that it would be folly to resist, and that the severity of banishment might possibly be modified in some way. He was in favour of yielding. Sixty families from his own village and a considerable number from the next village, agreeing with him, separated themselves from us and went down to Antioch under Turkish guards. They were shortly expelled in the direction of the lower Euphrates. (We have lost all track of them now and may never hear of them again.)

Our firm friends, the American missionaries, were cut off from us 120 miles to the north at Aintab. Communications with the outside world being practically severed, we were thrown upon our own resources, and we realised that our one hope was in the mercy of God. Fervently we prayed that He would strengthen us to do our duty.

Knowing that it would be impossible to defend our villages in the foot-hills, it was resolved to withdraw to the heights of Mousa Dagh, taking with us as large a supply of food and implements as it was possible to carry. All the flocks of sheep and goats were also driven up the mountain side, and every available weapon of defence was brought out and furbished up. We found that we had a hundred and twenty modern rifles and shot-guns, with perhaps three times that number of old flint-locks and horse-pistols. That still left more than half our men without weapons.

It was very hard to leave our homes. My mother wept as if her heart would break. But we had hopes that possibly, while we were fighting off the Turks, the Dardanelles might be forced and deliverance come to the country.

By nightfall of the first day we had reached the upper crags of the mountain. As we were preparing to camp and to cook the evening meal, a pouring rain set in and continued all night. For this we were ill prepared. There had not been time to make huts of branches, nor had we any tents or waterproof clothing. Men, women and children, somewhat over five thousand in all, were soaked to the skin, and much of the bread we had brought with us was turned into a pulpy mass. We were especially solicitous to keep our powder and rifles dry. This the men managed to do very well.

At dawn next morning all hands went to work digging trenches at the most strategic points in the ascent of the mountain. Where there was no earth for trench-digging, rocks were rolled together, making strong barricades behind which groups of our sharp-shooters were stationed. The sun came out gloriously, and we were hard at it all day strengthening our position against the attack which we knew was certain to come.

Towards evening we held a mass meeting for the election of a Committee of Defence which should have supreme authority for our six communities. Some favoured an election by show of hands, but others argued that, as this was a matter of such vital importance, the regular Congregational method of choice by secret ballot should be followed, and they offered to get together enough bits of paper to carry out the ballot! Our people have become very much attached to these democratic methods taught by the missionaries. Without much delay scraps of paper, more or less torn and wet, were gathered and the ballot was cast. A governing council thus being established, plans were at once made for defending each pass in the mountain and each approach to the camp. Scouts, messengers, and a central reserve group of sharp-shooters were chosen and were assigned their duties.

The summons from the Government had been served on the 13th July. The eight days’ grace had now almost elapsed, and we were aware that the Turks must have discovered our movements. The whole Antioch plain is peopled with Turks and Arabs, and there is always a strong military garrison in the Antioch barracks.

On the 21st July the attack began. The advance guard was two hundred regulars, and their captain insolently boasted that he would clear the mountain in one day. But the Turks suffered several casualties and were driven back to the base. When they advanced for a more general attack, they dragged up a field gun which, after some experimentation, secured the range and wrought havoc in our camp. One of our sharp-shooters, a lion-hearted young fellow, crept down through the brushwood and among the rocks until he was in very close range of the field gun, which was mounted on a flat rock. Having made himself an ambush of branches, he watched for a good opportunity. He was so near that he could hear the Turks talking to one another as they loaded the gun. Then as one gunner stepped out into view, the young man picked him off with the first shot. With five bullets he killed four gunners! The captain thereupon threw up his hands in dismay, and, not being able to discern our sharp-shooter, ordered the gun to be dragged to a place of shelter. Thus were we saved from a disastrous gun-fire for that day and several days to come.

But the Turks were gathering forces for a massed attack. They had sent word through many Moslem villages, calling the people to arms. Army rifles and plentiful ammunition were handed out from the Antioch arsenal, until the mob of four thousand Moslems thirsting for massacre became a formidable foe. But the chief strength of the Turks was in the three thousand regular troops accustomed to discipline and inured to hardship.

Suddenly one morning our scouts brought word to headquarters that the enemy was appearing at every pass in the mountain. Here and there the Turks had already gained the cliffs and shoulders of the crest. Our reserve body of defenders was—very unwisely, as we afterwards realised—sent in small groups to these various points. No sooner had our forces been thus divided than a massed attack in great force commenced through one ravine. All the other advances had been feints and were not followed up. By the time our men discovered the situation and rallied from distant points, the Turks had shot down our scouts and had poured through an important pass. To our dismay we saw them already in full occupation of high ground, threatening our camp. Reinforcements kept pushing up the mountain, and as the afternoon drew on we saw that we were completely outnumbered. We saw also that the range of the Turks’ rifles was far superior to that of our old-fashioned firearms. By sundown the enemy had advanced three companies through the dense underbush and forest to within four hundred yards of our huts. A deep damp ravine lay between, and the Turks decided to bivouac rather than to push on in the darkness.

Our leaders hurriedly took counsel together, whispering very quietly and not allowing any fight in camp. Everyone knew that a crisis had been reached. Finally a venturesome plan was adopted: to creep round the Turkish positions in the dead of night and thus carry out an enveloping movement, closing in very suddenly with a fusillade and ending with a hand to hand encounter. If this plan should fail, we knew that everything was lost. Through the dark wet woods our men crept with extraordinary skill. It was here that our familiarity with those crags and thickets made it possible to do what invaders could not attempt. The circle was practically completed when, with a flash and a crash on all sides, our men delivered their attack, rushing forward with desperate courage.

In a very few moments it was evident that bewilderment and alarm had thrown the Turkish camp into the utmost confusion. Troops were rushing hither and thither in the black night, stumbling over rocks and logs, officers shouting contradictory commands and struggling vainly to rally their men. Evidently the impression was given of a very substantial Armenian attack, because in less than half-an-hour the Turkish colonel gave the order to retreat, and before dawn the woods were practically clear of the troops. More than two hundred Turks had been killed and some booty taken—seven Mauser rifles, 2,500 rounds of ammunition and one mule. There was no sign of any renewal of fighting. But we knew that our foes were not defeated; they were only driven off.

During the next few days they roused the whole Mohammedan population for many miles around—a horde of perhaps 15,000. With this larger number they were able to surround and lay siege to Mousa Dagh on the landward side. Their plan was to starve us out. On the seaward side there was no harbour nor any communication with a seaport; the mountain sloped directly into the sea. We were fully occupied in the care of our wounded and the reparation of the damage done in camp. Special meetings were held to thank God for deliverance thus far, and to intercede with him for our families and little ones. Gregorians and Protestants were fused into one faith and fellowship by this baptism of suffering. It was at this time that my wife was confined and gave birth to her first child, a son. She suffered much in the flight down the seaward trail some days later, but I carried her and helped her as much as possible. Thank God, she is in good health now and so is our little son.

When we discovered that our mountain was in a state of siege, we began to estimate our food resources. During the first week on the heights we had exhausted the bread, olives and cheese that we had brought from home. Very few had been able to bring flour or other cereals, so for a month past we had been living on our flocks, using the goats’ milk for the little children and the sick, and slaughtering a number of sheep and goats every day. This constant meat diet was not good for us, but on the other hand we were profoundly thankful that we were spared the suffering of starvation. We made a careful count of the flocks, and found that even with a reduced ration of meat our supply would last not more than two weeks longer. Under the pressure of this anxiety we began to think of plans for escape by sea.

Before the siege had entirely closed in, we had sent a runner to make the dangerous journey of eighty-five miles through Turkish villages to Aleppo, the capital of the province, with an appeal to the American Consul, Mr. Jackson, to send us help by sea if possible. But it is not at all likely that our runner ever reached Aleppo. It occurred to us that possibly a battleship of the Allies might be in Alexandretta harbour, thirty-five miles to the north. So one of our young men who was a strong swimmer volunteered to creep through the Turkish lines and take a message in English strapped inside his belt. He succeeded in reaching the hills overlooking the harbour, but saw that there was no battleship and returned. His plan had been to swim out to sea, circling round to reach the battleship, thus avoiding the Turkish sentries on the roads leading in to Alexandretta.

We then prepared triplicate copies of the following appeal and appointed three swimmers to be constantly on the watch for any passing ship, to strike through the surf and swim out at an angle so as to meet the vessel:—

“To any English, American, French, Italian or Russian admiral, captain or authority whom this petition may find; we appeal in the name of God and human brotherhood.

“We, the people of six Armenian villages, about 5,000 souls in all, have withdrawn to that part of Mousa Dagh called Damladjik, which is three hours journey north-west from Souedia along the sea-coast.

“We have taken refuge here from Turkish barbarism and torture, and most of all from the outraging of the honour of our women.

“Sir, you must have heard about the policy of annihilation which the Turks are applying to our nation. Under cover of dispersing the Armenians as if to avoid rebellion, our people are expelled from their houses and deprived of their gardens, their vineyards, and all their possessions.

“This brutal programme has already been applied to the city of Zeitoun and its thirty-two villages, to Albustan, Göksoun, Yarpouz, Gurin, Diyarbekir, Adana, Tarsus, Mersina, Dört Yöl, Hadjin, etc. And the same policy is being extended to all the one-and-a-half million Armenians in different parts of Turkey.

“The present writer was the Protestant pastor in Zeitoun a few months ago and was an eye-witness of many unspeakable cruelties. I saw families of eight or ten members driven along the highway, barefooted children six and seven years old by the side of aged grandparents, hungry and thirsty, their feet swollen from the toilsome journey. Along the road one heard sobs and curses and prayers. Under the pressure of great fear, some mothers gave birth to children in the bushes by the side of the road. Immediately afterward they were compelled by the Turkish guards to continue their journey till kind death arrived to give an end to their torture.

“The remainder of the people who were strong enough to bear the hardships of the march were driven on under the whips of gendarmes to the plains of the south. Some died of hunger. Others were robbed along the way. Others were stricken by malaria and had to be left by the roadside. And, as a last act of this dark and foul tragedy, the Arabs and Turks massacred all the males and distributed the widows and girls among their tribes.

“The Government some forty days ago informed us that our six villages must go into exile. Rather than submit to this we withdrew to this mountain. We have now little food left, and the troops are besieging us. We have had five fierce battles. God has given us the victory, but the next time we shall have to withstand a much larger force.

“Sir, we appeal to you in the name of Christ!

“Transport us, we pray you, to Cyprus or any other free land. Our people are not indolent; we will earn our own bread if we are employed.

“If this is too much to grant, transport at least our women, old people and children, equip us with sufficient arms, ammunition and food, and we will work with you with all our might against the Turkish forces. Please, Sir, do not wait until it is too late!

“Respectfully your servant, for all the Christians here,

Dikran Andreasian.”

September 2.

But days passed and not even a sail was seen. The war had reduced the coastwise shipping to a minimum. Meanwhile, at my suggestion, our women had been making two immense flags, on one of which I printed in large, clear English, “CHRISTIANS IN DISTRESS: RESCUE.” This was a white flag with black lettering. The other was also white with a large red cross at the centre. We fastened these flags to tall saplings and set a watch at the foot to scan the horizon from dawn to dark. Some days we had rain and on others heavy mists and fogs, which are rather prevalent along our bit of coast.

The Turks again attacked us by several approaches, and we had some severe fighting, but never at such close quarters as during the first general engagement. From one point of vantage we were able to roll boulders down the precipitous mountain side with disastrous effects to the enemy. Our powder and cartridges were running low, and the Turks evidently had some idea of the straits we were in, for they began shouting insolent summons to surrender. Those were anxious days and long nights!

One Sunday morning, the fifty-third day of our defence, while I was occupied in preparing a brief sermon to encourage and strengthen our people, I was startled by hearing a man shouting at the top of his voice. He came racing through our encampment straight for my hut. “Pastor, pastor,” he exclaimed, “a battleship is coming and has answered our waving!—Thank God!—Our prayers are heard. When we wave the Red Cross flag the battleship answers by waving signal flags. They see us and are coming in nearer shore!”

This proved to be the French Guichen, a four-funnel ship. While one of its boats was being lowered, some of our young men raced down to the shore and were soon swimming out to the stately vessel which seemed to have been sent to us from God! With beating hearts we hurried down to the beach, and soon an invitation came from the Captain for a delegation to come on board and explain the situation. He sent a wireless to the Admiral of the fleet, and before very long the flag-ship Ste. Jeanne d’Arc appeared on the horizon followed by other French battleships. The Admiral spoke words of comfort and cheer to us, and gave an order that every soul of our community should be taken on board the ships. The embarkation took some time, of course, and an English cruiser was invited to take part in the transportation to Port Said, Egypt. We were taken on board four French cruisers and one English, and were very kindly cared for. In two days we arrived at Port Said, and are now settled in a permanent camp which has been provided for us by the British authorities.

We are especially grateful to Mr. William C. Hornblower for the excellent organisation of this camp, and to Col. and Mrs. P.G. Elgood and Miss Russell for their untiring efforts on our behalf.

The Armenian Red Cross Society of Cairo, recently organised, of which the Gregorian Bishop is Honorary Chairman, Mr. Fermanian of the Kodak Company, Director, and Prof. Kayayan, Secretary, has sent us a staff of three doctors and three nurses.

An accurate census has been taken which shows that the survivors number:—

427 babies and children under four years of age,

508 girls from 4 to 14,

628 boys from 4 to 14,

1,441 women above 14 years of age,

1,054 men above 14.

——

4,058 total number of souls rescued.

——

After the Turks’ first challenge, on the 13th July, we had eight days’ parley and preparation; for fifty-three days we defended ourselves on Mousa Dagh; and a two days’ voyage brought us to Port Said on the 14th September.

We do not forget that our Saviour was brought in His infancy to Egypt for safety and shelter. And the brethren of Joseph could not have been more grateful than we are for the corn and wheat provided.

131. JIBAL MOUSA: REPORT, DATED EGYPT, 28th SEPTEMBER, 1915, ON THE ARMENIAN REFUGEES RESCUED AND TRANSPORTED TO PORT SAID BY THE CRUISERS OF THE FRENCH FLEET; DRAWN UP BY MGR. THORGOM, BISHOP OF THE GREGORIAN COMMUNITY IN EGYPT.

(1.) Number of the Refugees.

Approximately accurate statistics have been made out here, which show that the refugees number 4,200, including:—

915 Men 1,408 Women 702 Boys 539 Girls 636 Infants —— 4,200 ——

(2.) Origin of the Refugees.

They all come from the villages of Selefka (Kaza of Leffia, Sandjak of Antakia, Vilayet of Aleppo), including:—

80 families from the village of Makof 10 ” ” ” Keboussia 160 ” ” ” Kheder Bey 228 ” ” ” Yoghanolouk 220 ” ” ” Hadji-Habibli 170 ” ” ” Beitias ——— 868 ———

But these families do not represent the total number of families inhabiting each village, for

240 families in the village of Keboussia 2 ” ” ” Yoghanolouk 80 ” ” ” Hadji-Habibli 10 ” ” ” Beitias —- 332 —-

that is, 332 families in all, remained at home and were subsequently deported by the Turkish Government.

(3.) Circumstances of the Insurrection and Exodus.

The Turkish Government, in pursuance of its policy of clearing Armenia of the Armenians, had ordered, after the fall of Van, the deportation of all Armenian families. This order reached Selefka on the 30th July;[169] a week’s grace was given for its execution. The villagers met together and, in spite of the advice of several of their leading members and of their priests, decided to revolt and die like brave men, rather than undergo the fate of the people of Zeitoun, Hadjin and Dört-Yöl.

These 868 families retired on to the mountain called Mousa Dagh, taking with them their cattle and supplies for several months.

Before leaving their villages, the insurgents invited the people of Kessab to join them. Kessab is separated from Selefka by a little stream, which was guarded by Turkish gendarmes. They were, therefore, unable to enter into direct communication with them, but they received a letter (we have seen this letter, and we have reason to believe that it was a fabrication of the Turkish Government’s) in which the people of Kessab, who have a special reputation for bravery, purport to advise their neighbours of Selefka to submit to the Turkish authorities.

The period of grace expired on the 8th August, but they had already withdrawn into the mountains in the first days of August. On the 8th, the first collision took place between the Armenians and 200 regular troops; it lasted six hours.

The Armenians had barely 600 fighting men, armed with 150 Martini rifles and 450 shot guns. Four fighting men directed operations, eight guarded the non-combatants, and forty picketed the paths. The non-combatants dug out shelter trenches for the people and children, or made munitions, while the women looked after the food.

On one occasion a woman was bringing up water to the firing line; her jar was riddled by an enemy bullet, upon which the woman coolly put down the jar, plugged the hole and went to get fresh water, all under the enemy’s fire. I cite this incident because I have been told that the rest took courage from the coolness of this woman to resist courageously to the end.

The insurgents had not forgotten to bring with them the sacred vessels from their churches, so that the five priests who were with them celebrated mass, and a pastor preached every evening.

On the 12th August, the second collision occurred with the Turks, who had 2,000 troops with two guns; it lasted twelve hours. On the 16th and 17th there were two violent encounters with regular troops, reinforced by Kurdish and Arab bashibazouks, 4,800 troops in all; during this encounter the Armenians captured from the enemy seven Mausers and 15,000 cartridges, as well as other munitions and equipment.

There followed an interval of twenty days; on the twenty-first, a serious battle with 7,000 soldiers, including 4,000 regulars.

From the very first days of the insurrection, the Armenians had sent down to the seashore a party of twenty people, who were relieved every 24 hours. They had with them a letter addressed to the Allied Powers, in which they prayed for help. They had hoisted a big flag—a red cross on a white ground—to attract the attention of the Allied fleet.

The Allied fleet was blockading the Turkish Mediterranean ports, and a French flotilla was on duty there. The armoured cruiser Guichen saw the flag, and the commander, Captain Joseph Brisson, put out a boat. A brave old Armenian threw himself into the water, and clambered on board the cruiser. The commander, moved by the heroism of this old man and by the details which he communicated to him, sent a wireless message to the commander of the cruiser Jeanne d’Arc, at Port Said. The Jeanne d’Arc arrived within 24 hours. The same day, the Guichen bombarded the neighbourhood of the church at Keboussia, which the Turks were attacking in order to massacre the Armenians who had taken refuge in the building. Meanwhile, a further wireless message from the Admiral on board the Jeanne d’Arc brought the armoured cruiser Desaix to the spot within another 24 hours, with an Armenian dragoman on board. The Jeanne d’Arc went off to Cyprus, and despatched three other armoured cruisers from there. The united squadron began to bombard the Turkish positions, to enable the 4,200 Armenians to come down to the water’s edge, where they were embarked on board the cruisers. The embarkation took a day and a half.

The fighting had begun on the 8th August and ended on the 10th September. The Armenians had 20 killed and 16 wounded; the enemy had about 300 killed and more than 600 wounded.

We had already learnt these facts while the insurgents were still on their voyage, but we did not know where it was intended to land them. Cyprus, Algeria and Tunis were all suggested; then we heard that the French and British Governments were in consultation on the subject. On the 14th September they arrived at Port Said. Sir Henry MacMahon, the High Commissioner, and General Maxwell gave immediate attention to the refugees. His Majesty the Sultan of Egypt sent a donation of £250.

The French Fleet entertained the refugees three days, and since then the British Government has taken charge of them. The first to be embarked on board the four cruisers were the old men, the women and the children; the fighting men remained two days longer on land. They asked for munitions to keep up the struggle, but the Admiral, acting on instructions received from his Government, refused their request, and so they arrived in Egypt two days later.

(4.) The Situation of the Refugees at Port Said.

They are installed in the Lazaretto, consisting of five or six stone buildings, and in 500 tents pitched round it. Everything has been organised by the military authorities. The tents are pitched in ranks divided into groups; each tent has its tent-commander, with a pennant and a number, and each group of tents has its group-commander, with a flag.

They have built them a large kitchen, conduits and baths. Two of the stone buildings are being used for office work, and the rest have been turned into hospitals.

The general state of health is good; there are about 80 sick, including the wounded.

The refugees have all the looks of a fighting race. They speak a dialect, but they are all orthodox members of the Armenian Church, except for an inconsiderable number of Catholics and Protestants.

At present the Government does not allow them to go outside the zone assigned to them.

The distribution of rations is punctually and methodically carried out.

(5.) Maintenance of the Refugees.

The Government has undertaken their maintenance, and it is believed that this arrangement will continue.

(a) Hospital.—Kept up by the Armenian Red Cross of Cairo. The Government, however, has also provided a head doctor and three assistants, two of them women. The Red Cross has contributed £120 for medical stores.

(b) Clothes.—The Armenian Red Cross of Cairo and Alexandria has made itself responsible for them.

(c) Education.—There are 1,000 children. The Government has placed a large tent at their disposal for use as a school. The General Armenian Union of Benevolence has undertaken the expense of their education.

(d) Workshops.—To give the refugees employment, work has been found for those who know how to make combs, wooden spoons, etc. The men will have money advanced to them as capital, and the women wool to knit stockings and socks, to give them an opportunity of setting to work and earning a living.

The approach of winter causes some anxiety, but we hope that the Government and the Armenian community in Egypt will take the necessary steps for securing them against the cold.

-----

Footnote 169:

The dates given in this report do not tally with those in Mr. Andreasian’s narrative, except that both accounts put the arrival of the refugees at Port Said on the 14th September. Mr. Andreasian puts the intervention of the Guichen on Sunday, the 12th September; but as he also states that the voyage took two days, while the present report makes the embarkation take a day and a half, the date given here for the appearance of the Guichen upon the scene, namely, the 10th September, is probably correct. On the other hand, Mr. Andreasian speaks from first-hand knowledge when he places the official summons to deportation on the 13th July (instead of the 30th July), the first fighting on the 21st July (instead of the 8th August) and the total length of the siege at 53 days; so that his statements on these points are likely to be more accurate.—EDITOR.

132. JIBAL MOUSA: ANOTHER REPORT ON THE REFUGEES AT PORT SAID, DRAWN UP BY MR. TOVMAS K. MUGGERDICHIAN, FORMERLY DRAGOMAN OF THE BRITISH CONSULATE AT DIYARBEKIR.

You must certainly have heard that, on the 14/27th September (1915), five armoured cruisers (four French and one English) brought to Port Said 4,200 Armenians from the six villages of the Selefka district, who have been given shelter in the Lazaretto, on the banks of the Suez Canal. I am happy to be able to tell you that the Anglo-Egyptian Government has kindly undertaken to house and feed these refugees until such time as they may be able to return to their country.

A little band of heroes from Selefka, hardly five to six hundred combatants, held out for fifty-five whole days against Captain Rifaat Bey and the force under his command—3,000 Nizam troops and more than 4,000 bashibazouks (Arabs and Turks), until the cruiser Guichen saw the flag in the form of a cross which these heroes had hoisted on the Mousa Mountain. This warship, with four others, went to their assistance and rescued them. These fine fellows had not more than 120 Gras rifles and about 400 flintlocks and shot guns. Sixty of them were good shots, and they picked off the Turkish artillerymen one by one, thus reducing their guns to silence—so much so that Rifaat Bey cried out: “These good Giaours sight through the needle’s eye,” and took to his heels. The Armenian fighting men of Selefka have had seventeen killed and twelve wounded, but they have killed fifty times as many of the enemy.

There are hardly 1,000 grown men among the refugees; the rest are women, girls, children and infants. The boys and girls less than fourteen years of age, who are by way of going to school, number about 800; there are also three men teachers and three women, five priests and the Pastor of Zeitoun, the Reverend Dikran Andreasian. Babies have been born on the Jibal Mousa, on board the warships and at Port Said. All these refugees are in need of clothes, for they have been able to rescue nothing, except their wives and children and their arms.

The “Armenian Red Cross,” recently formed at Cairo, set itself to look after the wounded and the sick as early as the third day after the arrival of the refugees at Port Said. By General Maxwell’s orders, the Director of the Intelligence Office gave the Armenian Red Cross official authorisation to work at Port Said in the Refugees’ Camp. At present we have about seventy sick; all the wounded are on the road to recovery. The whole Armenian colony in Egypt has shown an exemplary diligence in collecting clothes, shoes, soap, combs, etc., in the name of the Armenian Red Cross, and in forwarding them to the refugees.

I have interviewed His Excellency Yakoub Artin Pasha to urge that the Armenian General Union should undertake to supply clothes to the refugees, and should occupy itself especially with the question of their education, which constitutes one of their most urgent requirements. His Excellency promised me to make all the necessary arrangements.

I am glad to be able to tell you that the refugees are happy to be at Port Said. At the same time, it is said that about 400 good fighting men proposed, and even begged, that they should be sent back to Turkey to bring aid to their compatriots who have taken refuge in the mountains.

It is regrettable that in such Armenian centres as Zeitoun, Hadjin and Kessab[170] the Armenians surrendered to the tyrannical Turkish Government by the urgent orders of His Grace the Katholikos of Sis. All these Armenians have been deported into the desert situated between Aleppo, Der-el-Zor and Mosul. These deported people have endured unheard of tortures and sufferings in the course of their journey; the women and girls have suffered savage outrages. It is said that the road is covered with unburied corpses of men, women and children; in fact, the refugees who have arrived at Port Said have seen these corpses with their own eyes, and it was the cumulative effect of all this that made the inhabitants of the six villages of Selefka decide to retire into the mountains and defend themselves.

Since the month of May, I have had no direct news from Harpout or Diyarbekir, but the news which I have gathered from other quarters is very disquieting.

The first news received from Marash, Aintab and Killis was good, but the last news, which comes from a trustworthy source, is equally disquieting. It is said that there have been massacres at Marash, and that the survivors, together with the Armenian inhabitants of Aintab and Killis, have been deported bodily to the deserts to the south of the province of Aleppo. We hear likewise that the Armenian population of Mersina and Adana and the neighbouring villages has been deported.

-----

Footnote 170:

See Doc. 143 page 559.

XVII. THE TOWNS OF OURFA AND AC.

The Armenian colony in Ourfa is the southernmost outpost of Armenia east of the Euphrates, as the Jibal Mousa villages are of Armenian Cilicia. Here, too, for many months, the Armenians had before their eyes the fate of their compatriots from the north, for Ourfa is the half-way house on the road from Diyarbekir to Aleppo, and the remnants of many convoys from Mamouret-ul-Aziz, Erzeroum and beyond passed this way on their journey to the Arabian desert. Thus, when the order for deportation came in due course to Ourfa, towards the end of September, 1915, they took the same action that the villagers of Jibal Mousa had taken two months before. They fortified themselves in their quarter of the town and resisted the order by force, for they knew that it was simply the first stage in their methodical extermination.

Unhappily, the result of the struggle here was not the same as at Jibal Mousa, and, indeed, the Armenians at Ourfa were in a hopeless position from the first. They were far away from the sea, and even in the town itself they were only a minority of the population. A fully equipped expeditionary force of Turkish regulars was immediately sent against them, and they succumbed, after resisting desperately for a month.

The town of AC. was another important Armenian outpost on the south-eastern fringe, which cannot be mentioned by its real name without compromising the persons referred to in the documents relating to it. The Armenians at AC. did not resist, and the process of deportation here followed its normal course.

133. OURFA: LETTER DATED OURFA, 14th JUNE, 1915, FROM MR. K.; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

I wish to inform you of conditions here. They are very bad, and daily getting worse. I suppose the U.’s told you of the horrible things taking place in Diyarbekir. Just such a reign of terror has begun in this city also. Daily the police are searching the houses of the Armenians for weapons, and, not finding any, they are taking the best and most honourable men and imprisoning them; some of them they are exiling, and others they are torturing with red-hot irons to make them reveal the supposedly concealed weapons. Four weeks ago they exiled fifteen men and their families, sending them to the desert city of Rakka, three days’ journey south of here.

The Gendarmerie Department seems to have full control of affairs, and the Mutessarif upholds them. They are now holding about a hundred of the best citizens of the city in prison, and to-day the gendarmerie chief called the Armenian Bishop and told him that unless the Armenians deliver up their arms and denounce the revolutionists among them he has orders to exile the entire Armenian population of Ourfa, as they did the people of Zeitoun. We know how the latter were treated, for hundreds of them have been dragged through Ourfa on their way to the desert whither they have been exiled. These poor exiles were mostly women, children and old men, and they were clubbed and beaten and lashed along as though they had been wild animals. Their women and girls were daily criminally outraged, both by their guards and by the ruffians of every village through which they passed, as the former allowed the latter to enter the camp of the exiles at night, and even distributed the girls among the villagers for the night.

These poor victims of their oppressors’ lust and hate might better have died by the bullet in their mountain home than be dragged about the country in this way. About two thousand of them have passed through Ourfa, all more dead than alive; many hundreds had died already from starvation and abuse along the roadside, and indeed nearly all are dying of starvation or thirst, or through being kidnapped by the Anaza Arabs in the desert where they have been taken. We know how they are being treated, because our Ourfa exiles are in the same place, and one young Armenian doctor, who was there making medical examinations of soldiers for the Government, has returned and told us[171].

Now this is the fate which is in store for the Ourfa Armenians also, unless someone delivers them. Having seen how the Zeitoun exiles have been treated, the Ourfa Armenians have said they will never submit to exile but will die in their homes instead, and who can blame them? We greatly fear that the cruel persecuting attitude of the gendarmerie in seizing, beating, and torturing the people will drive some of them to such desperation that they will resist, and that will surely provoke a general massacre. Up to date the Armenian Bishop and Protestant pastors have been most earnest and successful in keeping the young men, especially, under restraint, and this has prevented any outburst thus far, but as the Government is daily taking the wisest and best leaders of the people and imprisoning them, there are few left to restrain the others. The officers of the Government told the Armenian Bishop plainly that unless they delivered up their arms the Armenians here would be destroyed, but the people fear to deliver up their arms, for they remember that in 1895 the Government made all the Christians deliver up their arms and, as soon as they had done so, the Moslems fell upon the Christians and killed six thousand of them in two days. Now, if the Government would make the Moslems give up their weapons also, the Christians would cheerfully deliver up theirs, but the Government is not taking weapons from the Moslems. Ourfa is not a revolutionary centre and never has been. The people here have always been loyal to the Government and have never resisted, not even when they were butchered like sheep. Why the local Government persists in persecuting a population that has always had a good record for loyalty is very strange. There is no revolutionary organisation here; there may be thirty or forty men of revolutionary beliefs, but there has been no propaganda and no organisation.

134. OURFA: EXTRACT FROM A LETTER[172] BY MR. TOVMAS K. MUGGERDICHIAN; PUBLISHED IN THE ARMENIAN JOURNAL “GOTCHNAG,” OF NEW YORK, 1st APRIL, 1916.

I had an interview with Mr. B. and Miss A. about the events in Turkey which they had witnessed before they escaped to Cairo.

Miss A. (an Englishwoman) was the principal of the orphanage at AC. for 18 years, and is acquainted with the Turkish language. She and Mr. B. passed through Aleppo, BF. and BJ., and have collected their information from trustworthy sources in these centres.

Two Armenians returned to Aleppo from Ourfa and reported that a Persian prince had arrived in Ourfa from Constantinople with the Ottoman deputy for Baghdad (probably Babanzadé Ismail Hakki Bey) and that they were the guests of Herr Jacob Künzler, a German-Swiss. Herr Künzler went with them to Severeg and on his return told some friends, among whom were the two Armenians aforementioned, that there was no more deliverance for the Armenians. The deputy for Baghdad had said to him: “It was decided in the Ottoman Parliament that we should massacre all the Armenians. We will not leave a single Armenian alive, and thus we will correct the old Sultan’s mistake.” At the same time he regretted that Herr Eckhard had betrayed the Armenians and excited the Turks against them. Herr Eckhard—the ex-president of the German Orphanage at Ourfa, and now the head of the shop and rug factory—is a German artillery captain, who came to Ourfa after the massacres of 1895-1896 as a missionary and a spy. In the autumn of 1915 he encouraged the Turkish, Kurdish and Arab mobs to attack the Armenians, and was responsible for a three-fold repetition of the massacres. The first massacre took place on the 19th August, 1915, in which 250 Armenians were killed; the second took place on the 23rd September, and lasted for a week, in which about 300 persons were killed and the city looted; the third took place about the 1st October. First, all the Armenians were ordered to get ready to go to Der-el-Zor. When they objected, saying that they had lost everything and had nothing left to take with them, Fakhri Pasha ordered them to be massacred. The massacre lasted 10 days. The German artillerymen destroyed the Armenian quarters, the church and everything, thus putting an end to the Armenian population of Ourfa.

It was then that the Rev. Apelian, the druggist Apraham Attarian, Solomon Effendi Knadjian, A. Abouhayatian and Hagopian were imprisoned on the demand of Herr Eckhard. The Rev. Apelian, Attarian and Hagopian were hanged, and Knadjian and Abouhayatian were shot.

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Footnote 171:

See Doc. 144

Footnote 172:

Date unspecified; the place of writing was apparently Cairo.

135. OURFA: INTERVIEW WITH MRS. J. VANCE YOUNG, AN EYE-WITNESS OF THE EVENTS AT OURFA; PUBLISHED IN THE “EGYPTIAN GAZETTE,” 28th SEPTEMBER/11th OCTOBER, AND REPRODUCED IN THE ARMENIAN JOURNAL “HOUSSAPER” OF CAIRO, 30th SEPTEMBER/13th OCTOBER, 1915.

Mrs. J. Vance Young is the wife of an English doctor at Beirout[173], and arrived in Egypt on board the American cruiser “Chester.” She was among the last arrivals in this country from Alexandretta, and brought with her terrible details regarding the martyrdom of the Armenians at Ourfa. She was an eye-witness of the occurrences in this ill-famed town, which has been drenched so many times in Armenian blood.

An interview with Mrs. Young was published in the “Egyptian Gazette” of the 28th September, and we reproduce the following lines, which present the ghastly picture of the massacre:—

“On the 19th August the fusillade began, about five o’clock in the evening. We heard it during supper-time, and it lasted far into the night.

“Next morning Dr. J. Vance Young ventured to make his way into the town to see if he could be of any service. He saw all the streets littered with corpses. He got the impression that there was not a single Armenian left in Ourfa.

“It appeared that the massacres had been organised in advance, for a systematic domiciliary visit was made to every Armenian house; the men were shot or otherwise assassinated, while the women were driven from their houses with their children, to be marched away to the desert and perish there of hunger.

“All along the road from Ourfa to the coast Mrs. Young saw hundreds of putrified corpses, and also a few miserable survivors. The latter looked more like wild beasts than human creatures. She described this spectacle as being literally sufficient to unhinge one’s reason.

“Almost all the business men at Ourfa were Armenians. Now they have all been massacred, including the sole chemist capable of mixing drugs.”

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Footnote 173:

One of the four hundred foreigners of Entente nationality in the Syrian provinces who were interned at Ourfa after the outbreak of war.

136. OURFA: POSTSCRIPT TO A MEMORANDUM (DOC. 141) BY A FOREIGN WITNESS FROM ALEPPO; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

Towards the end of September, the Armenians in Ourfa were ordered to leave the town and to be exiled as the Armenians in all the towns of this region have been. They refused to leave, however, and finally orders were given to expel them forcibly, and, if they offered any resistance, to take the necessary measures. They entrenched themselves strongly in their quarter, built barricades, made subterranean passages from one part of the quarter to another, and generally took every measure possible to defend themselves against attack. A force of about 6,000 soldiers, including artillery, under the command of Fakhri Pasha, commenced operations against them, and their quarter was bombarded during the first weeks of October. The Armenians were all supplied with rifles and ammunition, and had even managed to obtain mitrailleuses. They had apparently sufficient food to withstand a siege of some duration. We heard about the middle of October that seven officers and about 400 men had been killed on the Turkish side. By some means or other the Armenians managed to obtain possession of Mr. K. and seven belligerents who had been interned in Ourfa. These eight men were retained by them in their quarter as hostages. Mr. Jackson reported the detention of Mr. K. to the Embassy, which, of course, took the necessary steps in the matter, and about the 20th October a telegram was received in Aleppo from Mr. K. reporting that he was out of the Armenian quarter and safe. What happened to the seven belligerents could not be ascertained.

The position of the belligerents who are interned in Ourfa is naturally somewhat critical. It has caused considerable anxiety to the foreign consular officials in Aleppo, and they desire more urgently than ever that these belligerents should be removed to some place where they would be in greater safety.

137. AC.: STATEMENT BY MISS A., A FOREIGN RESIDENT AT AC., WRITTEN SUBSEQUENTLY TO HER DEPARTURE FROM TURKEY IN SEPTEMBER, 1915; COMMUNICATED BY THE REV. I.N. CAMP, OF CAIRO.

It was in March, 1915, that the first refugees began to pass through AC. After they had once begun to come, there was scarcely a day when one or more parties did not pass through. Some were large, and some consisted of only five or six hundred. With the exception of one party, they all had to stay out in an open field without any protection from the cold and rain, or later, when summer came, from the burning sun. The exception was a party from BM., who had paid £400 (Turkish) for the privilege of resting under some trees where there was water. This place was only five minutes’ walk from the field where other parties were obliged to camp.

I myself one day saw an old woman beaten because, when opportunity came, she rushed off to get some water for a sick child. I do not want to give the impression that no one was allowed to get water, but I suppose the privilege was given according to the “bakshish” that had been paid. There were also some gendarmes who seemed to be thoroughly ashamed of their work, and who, so far as they dared, were merciful.

Each party had its own tale of horror. With few exceptions, they had been robbed; young wives and girls had been carried off; many had been dishonoured; many people had been brutally treated and had died on the road. One large party that had been on the march for four weeks were put into houses at Albustan, the occupants of which had been previously deported. They thought then that their journey was over, and held a praise-meeting after being comfortably settled. But they were at the mercy of the Turks, and all their young women and girls were carried off. Then they were sent on the march again; some of the girls were returned by the Turks, but most of them were kept.

The hard part for them was that they never got to the end of their journey. Just as soon as they thought they were at their destination and began to settle down and get a little work to do, they would at once be sent away from that place to another. We heard also that if money was given them they were obliged to move on. Any effort to give relief was looked upon as a defiance of the Government.

One Sunday afternoon a large party of refugees came to AC. just at sunset. We heard they were faint with hunger, but no one was allowed to give them any relief. We knew that there might be an opportunity to give some relief after dark, if any one ventured to go then. Feeling that I must do something, I took our matron and went to see what we could do. As we drew near the camp, we met some Armenians who were on the watch for a chance to give out some bread, and who told us that it would evidently be impossible for us to give any food that night, but that perhaps we could give some in the morning. The next morning, before dawn, we went again and found about four hundred Armenians of AC. along the road. As they saw us passing, some called out: “It is no use for you to go; no one is allowed near.” However, we passed on, and when we got to where the gendarme was, he very crossly ordered us away. It was light by this time. Our matron appealed to him for a long time without avail. Finally, however, he said: “Well, give what you have quickly; but this (pointing to me) must not go any further than here.” While we were distributing the food, the gendarme got angry and ordered me away. Then three horsemen appeared on the scene. They scolded the man in charge because he had not already got the refugees started on their march, and told him he was too lenient with them. One of them leaped from his horse, and with a whip in each hand went towards the AC. Armenians, who at once fled. He came to me and gave me a lash or two with the whip. I asked him what harm I was doing. He came again and shook me, saying: “You are from BN.” (I had to dress as an Armenian in order to get to the refugees at all.) One of the two other officers came deliberately towards me with the intention of riding me down, but the horse turned his head after only bruising my arm. The matron, an Armenian woman, on seeing it, said: “She has done nothing wrong. She is no BN-li. Your horse is more merciful than you.” We turned to go, and to my surprise the horsemen began speaking German with one another. So far as I was able to tell, they were not Turks but German officers. When we got on to higher ground, we saw these three men ride on in the direction of BM. The refugees were sent in the opposite direction, and all the time they were preparing to start they were being beaten. Other gendarmes arrived, and from every direction came the screams of the people as the whips touched them.

One evening, Dr. E. and Mr. F. went for a walk just at dusk. They saw along the road what they at first took to be a bundle of rags, about which scavenger dogs were circling, but on going nearer they found it to be a dying woman. After she had been refreshed by some warm milk which Dr. E. brought, she said: “Would that you had not brought me this, for I had longed to die.” She soon did die. She was a rather young woman, and it was found out soon after her death that she was from a very good family.

Occasionally Dr. E. could get permission for a sick woman to stay until she was better; she would then be sent on with a later party. The first woman he helped in this way went on after a few weeks’ rest with her new-born baby, but the second woman died[174]. On another occasion, the head Armenian nurse at the hospital had been sent down with some necessaries to help a party. When she first got to the place, the gendarme refused to let her pass. She begged him, as he hoped for mercy from Allah himself, to allow her to go to the woman in particular need. Finally, he gave permission, but, having already given the order for the party to move on, he said that little time was left. When they were ready to depart, the gendarme began to beat the father of the baby, and even gave the mother of a few hours a lash with his whip. The nurse protested, and said that, if the poor woman must go on, an animal must be given her; so the gendarme went forward a few steps, knocked an old man off his donkey, and told the husband of the woman to put her on. We heard later that the woman died before she got to the opposite end of the city.

Every party would bring with them either old people who had been left on the road or children whose mothers had died and who had been left behind. Whenever we went to see refugees, the piteous appeals we heard to save young women and girls from the Turks were heart-rending. And we were powerless to help them! Again and again we were threatened with what would be done to anyone who dared to help any of the refugees. But in spite of these threats several of the AC. people took babies who were left without any relatives. It was beautiful to see the love shown to these babies, many of whom were not at all attractive. The sad part of it was that, when the turn of the people of AC. came to go, some were too poor to take these adopted children along with them; but all did so who possibly could. One good man had adopted a sick baby and a lame girl. When he and his large family were deported, he came to ask me whether I could take or support his own three-months-old baby, in return for which he offered me two rings, all that he could spare.

As the refugees were driven from their mountain homes, the blind, lame, and invalids were at first left in BM. But after a time even they were driven forth. They left AC. one hot afternoon, about three hundred in number, under the care of a brave young widow, who had had charge of them all the time. There were only fourteen donkeys for the whole party.

When people left their homes, it was natural that they should want to take as much as possible along with them—mats, food, clothing, &c. Villagers who owned animals, especially muleteers, were the best off, because when others wanted animals the Turks asked such exorbitant prices that the poor people did not know what to do, especially if they had old people or young children in their families. So the owners of animals, not having to hire any of the Turks, were better off. The load-animal question became more and more difficult as the refugees got farther away from their homes, till some in desperation would leave their few possessions by the wayside. The gendarmes generally told them that their goods would be forwarded to them. But in the case of some goods that one party had left nine hours from AC., we know that a gendarme brought them on to the city and sold them by public auction.

Dr. L. asked whether he might go to the places where needy refugees were, and give them some help, if he could get any money from the United States. This request was most emphatically refused. He said: “Why, they will die.” The answer of the Turkish official was: “What do you suppose they are sent there for?”

When the first parties came, the Government sometimes issued bread, but this policy did not last long. Sometimes the people of the city would be allowed to give bread, but this was rare. There were always people waiting for a chance to get near and give aid to the refugees. We were on the opposite side of the city, but our colleagues were nearer to the refugees. So the head of the institution gave permission for the food to be cooked there. Then it would be taken secretly by the students to the refugees. Usually only one guard was on duty at night, so the food was usually sent down at three or four in the morning, the best being given to the guard in order that he might allow it to pass in. Later on, the women of the city formed a committee and collected food from anyone able to give it. There was also a relief committee of four, who did a great deal towards alleviating the distress by giving bread and by furnishing native shoes to those who had none. Later, one of the lay members of this committee, the one who had been most active in the relief work, was the first among the people of AC., after the exemption of the Protestants, to be deported. When he asked why he had to go, he was told that it was because he had fed the enemies of the Government.

If I remember correctly, it was either on the 30th or the 31st July that the first people from AC. were deported. First the richest families of the Gregorians, and, later, the richest Protestants, were sent away. Just as the Protestants were leaving, we heard a rumour that they would not have to go, but they were hurried straight through to Hama, and other places, without the long delays on the road that others had had. We thought it was done purposely. The first party that went were attacked before they got to their first night’s stopping-place, and had to protect their wives and daughters all night long. We heard later from Dr. L., who was then in Aleppo, that he had seen many of them and been told their story: how they had to be on the alert all night long; how one or two were killed and some wounded, and how one had gone mad. Before we got this news, the brother of one of our teachers, who had been sent into the city by the officer whose servant he was, told us that while nearing the city the previous evening he had seen the Mutessarif’s son and four or five companions, all well armed, riding quickly out of the city in the direction in which the refugees had gone. We all thought that he had perhaps been sent to recall them, and were quite expecting to see them all come back again. Later, we understood that it was this party who had attacked and robbed them.

Soon after the first party of Protestants were sent away, Dr. E. received telegrams from the U.S. Ambassador, from the Consul in Aleppo, and from Mr. N. of Constantinople, saying that there would be no deportation of Protestants. Dr. E. took the three telegrams to the Mutessarif, who was not pleased and said that he had received no such news. Still, for a short time all was quiet, and it being time for College to open, the matter was talked over. Before any decision was reached, a student, a Turk, went to Dr. E. and asked when it would open, as if he were anxious to be back. Dr. E. took this as a sign that the Turks were not only willing but anxious for the College to begin; so, after conferring with the faculty, he told the enquiring Turk that they would open the following week. This, I think, was on Friday, and on Saturday all but two of the professors and teachers had notice that they must leave the city the following Monday morning. Dr. E. pleaded for time, but the Mutessarif was angry and asked him whether he did not know that he had power to send him away too if he wished to do so.

The professors were sent away the following Monday morning. A German lady, Mrs. C., formerly Miss D., who was the matron of the hospital at AC., was ordered to go along with her husband, an Armenian professor, into exile. When Dr. E. went to the Mutessarif about it, he answered: “Is she not his property, and is he not an Armenian?” The German Consul was not able to get permission for her to leave the country when her husband was anxious for her to get away. We heard later from Mrs. C. that they had only got just outside the city when a gendarme came round to each of them and said that, if they wanted to be guarded, they must give money. This they did. When they reached a little wayside station, they found many thousands of refugees waiting in an open field. On the fourth day of waiting, Mrs. C. saw some German officers on a train, and obtained from them a pass which enabled her to board the train for Aleppo. On the fifth day, she and her husband and baby were allowed to go by train to Aleppo, but his family had to wait and go on with the rest of the refugees. They, after many weeks of travel and after paying exorbitant sums of money, were sent to a fellahin village. Prof. C., according to the latest report, was teaching for nothing in a Moslem school in Aleppo.

Three of the pastors at AC. were imprisoned for months in dirty, dingy cells of the common prison. Three of the College professors had the same experience. Finally, permission was given for the gendarmes to take the pastors out long enough to preach, for it was feared they would otherwise go mad. The sermons they preached were said to be wonderful. These pastors were later released, but all the professors in the College were exiled except one, and another who had previously succeeded in getting away to Constantinople.

Soon after the crowds started, all kinds of sickness began and spread among the people, and later one of the two doctors left in AC. was sent to look after them. Sometimes they would wait for weeks, expecting to be taken by train to whatever place they were to be sent to. Then they would be told that each must hire an animal for himself. The hire would be put up so high that all their baggage would have to be left behind. The gendarmes told them that it would be forwarded to them, but a little later it was placed in a house from which some of the people had been deported, and sold at auction.

When the people were told that they must go, they at once tried to sell some of their goods, so that they might have a little money in hand. But it cannot be said that they really sold them, for one heard of good wool mattresses selling for one piastre; the highest I heard of was for twenty piastres, while in ordinary times they would sell for a hundred. Large copper pans and basins were sold for a mere song, until one day two Jews appeared on the scene and began paying much better prices. But in three days these men were imprisoned, so that the Turks could once more get things for as little as they pleased. Even goods that were being given to the poor by those having to leave were confiscated by the Government. Some antiquities and books that were being taken to the College shared the same fate. Anyone walking with a parcel was liable to be held up, searched, and robbed.

After the professors had been sent away, the pastors of the Protestant churches and the two remaining professors who had not been deported were put into prison. First, their homes were searched and all papers and any written matter were taken to the Sarai. The secretaries of the Christian societies were enquired about, and when it was found that some of them had been deported it was thought that they might be brought back; but they had not been brought back at the time of my leaving. While waiting in BJ., I heard that those who had been imprisoned had been released.

About the time deportations began in AC., all the non-Moslem schools were taken possession of by the Government, except those belonging to the American Board. At the same time, the large Armenian church and one of the Protestant churches were seized, but before I left AC. they were restored to their owners.

After the professors had been taken away, it was reported that no more Protestants, except those found at fault, would be sent away. But every day they kept sending a family or two away on the slightest pretexts. One of the relief committee workers was the first to be sent away. A letter said to have been sent to them, but which they never saw, was actually the alleged cause of deportation. The censor said that no mention of high prices, poverty, sickness, need of money, or slackness of work must be mentioned in letters. So we prayed that any letters that might be sent to us should make no mention of relief money or of any other forbidden subject.

As soon as it was officially announced that the Protestants would not be deported, they held a thanksgiving service, at which the one in charge said: “Now that we are permitted to stay in our city, we must be very careful to give no occasion of complaint to the Government. If they ask for our sons as soldiers, we must give them up without murmuring; if for money, or goods, or clothing for the soldiers, let us give as if we appreciated the privilege of staying in our homes. Let us show them that we are loyal to the country. Let no one take into his home a child or anyone else who has been told to go, whether they be of those passing through the city as refugees or from among our own friends and relatives in the town. Let us show the Government that we will do all that is asked of us.”

The goods in the drapers’ shops all belonged to the Armenians; but during the deportations the Turks took whatever they wanted and paid nothing, so the owners in some cases sold their goods for almost nothing, or gave them away, or closed their shops. Soon after deportation, it was impossible to buy a button, though some native material could be secured in native houses where they had looms.

When the first lot of people from AC. were sent away, they were told that they were only going for a short time, and that they need not trouble about their homes and belongings, for the Government would carefully seal them and take care of their property. They had not been out of the city long when soldiers were quartered in the larger houses, some of which were rented for a trifle, the rent being paid to the Government. The poorer houses were given to the poorer Turks. Every evening all the possible exits from the city were carefully guarded; if we went from one building to another, we were held up and asked where we were going and for what. If our servant was found outside, he would always be searched and sometimes struck at, and told not to be out so late again. In the early days we were not allowed out after sunset, and later we were told the same, even if the sun were shining. This was said not only to me, the subject of a belligerent country, but also to neutrals as well.

An old college student, whose home was at E., managed, through the kindness of a friendly Turk, to escape to AC. He told us that the men of his town were all killed. We had previously heard that the men of that town and of the next village had been taken for military service, and set to making a road to BL. As soon as the road was finished, the men were taken to the side of the road they had made and were killed—chiefly by the knife, for the officer in command had told the soldiers he commanded not to waste powder on the Armenians.

An Englishman who had been given permission to leave the country (we wondered whether he ever got out) told one of our ladies of the sights he had seen while waiting for the train. He had seen feet swollen all out of shape lifted up and beaten with the heavy end of a gendarme’s gun, just because people had said they could not walk any faster.

The steward of the College at AC. was sent away because his brother-in-law had sent his dentist’s instruments to him with a letter, asking him to sell them and send the money on to him later, when he could tell him—the steward—where they were being deported to. But neither the instruments nor the letter ever reached the steward. He was merely told that they had been sent and that, because of it, he and his family of small children must go into exile. This was after the Protestants were told that they might stay.

Whenever the Turks thought that they had won any victory, they were almost unbearable, as, for instance, when word came that they had taken the Suez Canal. They then rejoiced both by day and by night, and were most insolent to Christians. An English flag was dragged through the filth of the streets, spat and trampled upon, &c. The noise continued all night long. At these times of supposed victories, they showed what they would do if ever they were really victorious.

It was beautiful to see the faith of some of the villagers. One evening a large party came in and very soon began singing hymns and holding a prayer-meeting. The following morning, when asked about it, they said that their pastor had been taken from them and killed, and that his last word to them was: “Keep up the prayer-meeting.” And with kindling eyes they said: “We have never once missed it, though we have been seven weeks on the march.”

Another party told how they had prayed that, if it were God’s will, they might be spared the horrors of deportation, and said: “There must be some good in it for our nation, or God would not permit it. The only thing that troubles us is: Will our husbands ever be able to find us?” They little knew, poor women, that their husbands had already been killed, as we were told by others.

Just before the deportation began at AC., a high official, T. Pasha, came and called together the leading people, both Moslem and Christian. In a very kindly manner, he asked the Christians whether they were being kindly treated by the Moslems, &c., &c. He said that he had heard certain things, and that, if there was any truth in the statement that Armenians were being ill-treated, he himself would hang the Turk, were it his own brother, who should dare to treat a Christian unkindly; and he begged the Armenians to speak out without fear. He then went straight from AC. to BN., where he arranged for the deportation of all the BN. and BM. districts. Such plans were evidently intended to throw the Armenians off their guard.

In T. Pasha’s party there were three German officers, but I could not say that German officers were supervising the deportations. The German Consul went through AC. to BM. and BN. before the deportation began. Though some people blamed him for it, we did not think he had so much power.

A great many of the Armenian doctors were taken for the Army. When there was any sickness among the service corps, one of the three Armenian doctors left in AC. was sure to be sent to attend the sick. In this way we lost a dear friend, who in the early days had been an assistant to Dr. L. He was sent to a camp where the soldiers, nearly all of them Armenians, were working on a section of a branch of the Baghdad Railway; typhus had broken out among them. Very soon a telegram came, saying that the old doctor was ill. Though he was the oldest doctor in AC. and had more Moslem patients than any other doctor in the city, no mercy was shown to him. Did he not belong to the accursed Armenian race? And was not his death of typhus, in the camp to which he had been obliged to go, a fate good enough for any such as he?

Early in March, 1915, the BM. Government took possession of Miss S.’s Orphanage and put Turks in charge of the girls and young women. Miss O., a Swiss lady in charge of a German Orphanage at BM., after all her charges[175] had been turned loose for deportation, as were the inmates of all the German orphanages early in the war, took under her care some of the old girls who were married and living in the districts in which the first deportations had taken place. After she had kept them for a short time, she was told by the German Consul that she must give them up. She thought that if she could get to someone in authority she could present the situation in its true light, so she went to Constantinople, but returned disappointed.

Early in the autumn we heard of a reign of terror at Ourfa, so that the very mention of the place seemed to alarm people. We heard that three men, one of them being H. Effendi, Miss J.’s faithful helper in charge of industrial work employing more than 2,000 persons, had been banished. Later, they were brought back to the city and tortured. Later still, in writing to his wife, Mr. K. said that H. Effendi’s children were in the same case as some other children, whom we knew to be orphans; so we inferred that he had certainly been killed[176]. Still later, a driver told how he had been engaged to take three men to Diyarbekir for court-martial. They had gone but a short distance from Ourfa when the men were told to get out of the wagon. They were taken down a gully a short distance, and soon the driver heard shots. The four gendarmes came galloping up to the wagon and told the driver to drive on. One of them looked into the wagon and asked where the prisoners were. When the driver asked if they had not called them out of the wagon, he was told that he had allowed them to escape and that he himself must go before the court. So he had to drive back to Ourfa to the Sarai, where he was told to leave the things that belonged to the men he had started out with. Then he was allowed to go away free.

Q., Miss J.’s servant, had been killed, we heard, in a brutal way while he was going to Garmoush with some relief for a poor family. We also heard that there were two massacres at Ourfa, in the first of which only the men found in the streets were killed. The second time, homes were entered.

M., one of my orphan boys, had gone with Dr. P., and was working for him when he was told to leave the country. He was tortured to make him tell something incriminating about Dr. P. Later, when Dr. L. tried to get some news about the boy from the Diyarbekir refugees at Aleppo, their answer was: “Do not ask us about any male over twelve years old, for, as far as we know, they were every one of them killed.”

The general impression was that Mr. K. was poisoned. We heard that he was in danger of a mental breakdown; but, on the evening previous to my leaving AC., Dr. E. was told by a Moslem muleteer who had come from Ourfa that Mr. K. had either died or been killed. I was told that I must acquaint the Consul with what Dr. E. had heard as soon as I reached Aleppo. On my telling the Consul, he showed me a telegram he had recently received from Mr. K. himself, which read: “Am safe and well in Government House.” Later, in BJ., when we heard that he had poisoned himself, someone remarked that it would be easy for Mr. K. to be obliged to write and say that there was danger of a nervous breakdown, and then the way would be prepared for the news: “Poisoned himself.” Someone else added: “Yes, just as was done when the prisoners were obliged to sign a letter, stating that they were all well, while at the very time there was an epidemic in their camp.”

When we travelled ourselves from AC. to Aleppo, we saw a large camp of refugees, some distance from the road which we were on, but close to the small station of Kotmo, which connects with the Baghdad Railway. We had heard before leaving AC. that 37,000 were waiting for a train to take them on, but, judging from what we could see, there could not have been more than seven or eight thousand of them.

As we got near to Aleppo we passed a very long convoy of ox-wagons, mules, donkeys, and a few horses, carrying women, children, and some old men. Our driver got down and talked with a few. He was told that they were being sent from Adana and Mersina. They looked so much better off in every way than any refugees we had seen that they hardly seemed like refugees at all. There were many more men than usual among them.

Later, when we reached Aleppo, we were told that there were 20,000 refugees there, and that on some days the death-rate was as high as 400. A native doctor and his wife, wishing to give all their time to helping these poor people, had left their home and gone to the hotel in which we were staying. From them we got reports twice a day.

We heard of one party, who, when they left Harpout, numbered 5,000. Of this number, only 213 reached Aleppo. When they started, they were of all ages and both sexes. They went towards Aleppo down the Euphrates. When they came to cross 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. Naked they waded through streams, slept in the chilly nights, and bore the heat of the sun. They were brought into Aleppo the last few miles in third-class railway carriages, herded together like so many animals. When the doors of the carriages were opened, they were jeered at by the populace for their nakedness. On their journey, they had come on a hot day in August to the banks of a river. There was a general rush to get water, but the gendarmes who were with them drew their revolvers and told them that anyone who got any water must pay a medjidia (about 3_s._ 2_d._) for it. Some were able to give it, but the majority were not. After waiting there for some time, they were told that they must strip and get through the water as best they could. They had the right to the animals that carried their possessions, for they had paid for them for two days longer. They clasped hands and waded across, but waited in vain for the gendarmes to come across with their animals and provisions.[177] In this party were refined girls and young women from the best Armenian homes, who had been educated in the American colleges.

While waiting in BJ., the President of the College got a telegram from the U.S. Consul in Aleppo, asking him to send some doctors, as the death-rate was very high—as high as 400 a day, we heard. The President thought it best to ask Djemal Pasha before doing anything. When he did ask him, the answer came: “No, you must not send anyone. Let your Consul mind his own business!”

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Footnote 174:

“Outside AC., a woman gave birth to a child in the refugee camp. She was taken to the College and put into a small room there. In spite of the best of care, she died in a few days and the child a little later. In her most delicate condition, she had been driven, cursed and beaten along the road from BM., some sixty miles away.”—Earlier and less detailed statement by the same witness.

Footnote 175:

“More than a thousand.”—Earlier statement.

Footnote 176:

“The Protestant pastor and a doctor were also killed.”—Earlier statement.

Footnote 177:

“Later, another convoy of exiles came up, and took this party of forty women on with them.”—Earlier statement.

138. AC.: LETTERS FROM AN ARMENIAN INHABITANT[178], DESCRIBING THE DEPORTATION OF ARMENIANS FROM CILICIA; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

=Letter dated 6/19th April, 1915.=

Every day two or three hundred people from Zeitoun are transferred to BM., under severe guard, and, after a short halt at night, are deported in unknown directions. The hotels and the two Armenian schools are full of these deported families from Zeitoun, Alabash and Furnus. The Government has decided to evacuate by force all the other Armenian regions. It is impossible to describe the misery which is resulting. Old men, invalids, and children four or five years old go in masses, barefooted.

=Letter dated 17/30th May, 1915.=

Since the first days of April, convoys have been coming from Zeitoun and the neighbourhood and passing southward towards the steppes of Mesopotamia. Reckoning only those that have crossed our city, the number of the deported rises to 6,700 persons. Furnus, Geben, Alabash, and the whole region of Zeitoun have been evacuated. Bosniak mouhadjirs replace the Armenians thus exiled. The Turks are in a perfect delirium. It is impossible to describe the horrors suffered by the deported Armenians. Violation, conversion and the rape of women and girls are ordinary and daily facts. The Armenian population of Zeitoun has been annihilated, one or two villages excepted. We are informed that 150 Armenians from Dört Yöl and 1,350 from Hassan-Beyli have been deported to Aleppo.

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Footnote 178:

Name withheld.

XVIII. VILAYET OF ALEPPO.

The Vilayet of Aleppo is not Armenian soil. It is the border province of the Arabic language and the Semitic race, and the only considerable Armenian communities it contains are the villages of Jibal Mousa (which have been dealt with already) and an urban colony in the town of Aintab. In the city of Aleppo itself the Armenian element is altogether insignificant, and it was not as a centre of population, but as a junction of routes, that Aleppo played an important and terrible part in the Armenian deportations of 1915.

Aleppo is the natural meeting-place of all the roads and railways in Asiatic Turkey. It lies immediately south of the great Taurus barrier, which divides the Turco-Armenian provinces of the north-west from the Arabian provinces of the south-east; and it also lies midway between the course of the Euphrates and the Mediterranean coast, at the point where the two approach most closely to one another. On the north-west, the railway leading to Aleppo from Constantinople and Konia over the Taurus and Amanus ranges has practically been completed; from the north a route comes down over the Cilician mountains through Marash and Aintab; from the north-east, through Ourfa, a carriage road converges on Aleppo from Diyarbekir, while southward and eastward the routes radiate out from Aleppo again—the Baghdad Railway, which proceeds due eastward across the Euphrates, and is already complete in this section as far as Ras-ul-Ain; the carriage road south-eastward down the Euphrates to Der-el-Zor; and, finally, the Syrian Railway, which runs due south from Aleppo to Damascus, Beirout and Medina.

All these routes were traversed by the convoys of Armenian exiles, and from the very beginning of the deportations they were continually arriving at Aleppo and leaving again, after a longer or shorter delay in the congested city, for their final destinations beyond.

Batches of Zeitounlis were already passing through Aleppo by the beginning of May, 1915, and the current of exiles from Cilicia went on flowing in a comparatively thin but steady stream during the next three months. At the beginning of August the volume was suddenly increased by the arrival of the first convoys, or remnants of convoys, from the north-east. These first arrivals were from Diyarbekir, and even they had been forty-five days on the road. They were followed in due course by all who survived the far longer journey from the Vilayets of Mamouret-ul-Aziz and Erzeroum. Meanwhile, an even greater mass of exiles had been converging on Aleppo along the Anatolian Railway from all the Armenian districts which its branches tap; but this stream was dammed up indefinitely by the mountain barriers where the railway was still incomplete, and even in December the convoys were still bivouacked on the slopes of Amanus. What was their subsequent fate—whether they died where they lay at Osmania and Islohia, or got through to Aleppo in any considerable numbers—there is little evidence to show. It is only known that 500,000 exiles altogether, out of those who converged upon Aleppo in 1915 from all the quarters above mentioned, were supposed to be still alive, in the spring of 1916, in the region between Aleppo, Damascus and Der-el-Zor.

139. ALEPPO: SERIES OF REPORTS FROM A FOREIGN RESIDENT AT ALEPPO; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

(=a.=) =Report dated 12th May, 1915.=

Between 4,300 and 4,500 families, that is, about 28,000 persons, are being removed by order of the Government from the districts of Zeitoun and Marash to distant places where they are unknown. Thousands have already been sent to the north-west into the provinces of Konia, Kaisaria, Kastamouni, &c., while others have been taken south-eastwards as far as Der-el-Zor, and report says to the vicinity of Baghdad. A traveller coming from Constantinople said that he met about 4,500 unfortunates on their way to Konia. The Armenians themselves say that they would by far have preferred a massacre.

(=b.=) =Report dated 3rd August, 1915.=

The idea of direct attack and massacre that was carried out in former times has been altered somewhat, in that the men and boys have been deported from their homes in great numbers and disappeared en route, and later on the women and children have been made to follow. For some time stories have been prevalent from travellers arriving from the interior of the killing of the males; of great numbers of bodies along the roadside or floating in the Euphrates River; of the delivery to the Kurds by the gendarmes accompanying the convoys of women and children and of all the younger members of the convoys; of unthinkable outrages committed by gendarmes and Kurds, and even of the killing of many of the victims.

At first these stories were not given much credence, but as many of the refugees are now arriving in Aleppo, no doubt any longer remains of the truth of the matter. On the 2nd August about 800 middle-aged and old women, and children under the age of ten years, arrived afoot from Diyarbekir, after forty-five days en route, in the most pitiable condition imaginable. They report the taking of all the young women and girls by the Kurds, the pillaging even of the last bit of money and other belongings, of starvation, of privation and hardship of every description. Their deplorable condition bears out their statements in every detail.

I am informed that 4,500 persons were sent from Sughurt[179] to Ras-ul-Ain, over 2,000 from Mezré to Diyarbekir, and that all the cities of Bitlis, Mardin, Mosul, Suverek[180], Malatia, Besné, &c., have been depopulated of Armenians, the men and boys and many of the women killed, and the balance scattered throughout the country. If this is true, of which there is little doubt, even the latter must naturally die of fatigue, hunger and disease. The Governor of Der-el-Zor, on the Euphrates River, who is now in Aleppo, says that there are 15,000 Armenian refugees in that city. Children are frequently sold to prevent starvation, as the Government furnishes practically no subsistence. The following statistics show the number of families and persons arriving in Aleppo, places whence deported, and number sent further on, up to and including the 30th July:—

WHERE FROM. FAMILIES. PERSONS. SENT AWAY. Tcheuk-Merzemen (Dört Yöl) 400 2,109 734 Odjakli 115 537 137 Euzerli 116 593 173 Hassan Beyli 187 1,118 514 Harni 84 528 34 Karspazar 51 340 — Hadjin 592 3,988 1,025 Roumlou 51 388 296 Shar 150 1,112 357 Sis 231 1,317 — Baghtché 13 68 — Dengala 126 804 — Drtadli 12 104 — Zeitoun 5 8 — Yarpouz 22 97 — Albustan 10 44 — —— —— —— Total 2,165 13,155 3,270

2,100 persons more arrived since the above figures were compiled.

Now all Armenians have been ordered to be deported from the cities of Aintab, Mardin, Bitlis, Antioch, Alexandretta, Kessab, and all the smaller towns in the Aleppo Province, estimated at 60,000 persons in all. It is natural to suppose that they will suffer the fate of those that have gone before, which is appalling to contemplate. The result is that, as 90 per cent. of the commerce of the interior is in the hands of the Armenians, the country is facing ruin. The great bulk of business being done on credit, hundreds of prominent business men other than Armenians face bankruptcy. There will not be left in the places evacuated a single tanner, moulder, blacksmith, tailor, carpenter, clay worker, weaver, shoemaker, jeweller, pharmacist, doctor, lawyer, or any of the professional people or tradesmen, with very few exceptions, and the country will be left in a practically helpless state.

The important American religious and educational institutions in this region are losing their professors, teachers, helpers and students, and even the orphanages are to be emptied of the hundreds of children therein, which ruins the fruits of fifty years of untiring effort in this field. The Government officials in a mocking way ask what the Americans are going to do with these establishments now that the Armenians are being done away with.

The situation is becoming more critical daily, as there is no telling where this thing will end. The Germans are being blamed on every hand, for if they have not directly ordered this wholesale slaughter (for it is nothing less than the extermination of the Armenian race), they at least condone it.

(=c.=) =Report dated 19th August, 1915.=

The city of Aintab is being rapidly depopulated of Armenians, several thousands having already passed through Aleppo on their way to the south. The accompanying gendarmes do nothing to protect their charges against attack by the way. The Armenian community of Aintab is the wealthiest of the kind in this part of the Empire. Their household belongings were left behind to be taken by the first plunderer to arrive. Most of the merchants of the city being Armenians, their stocks are likewise disappearing. It is a gigantic plundering scheme, as well as a final blow to extinguish the race.

Since the 1st August the German Baghdad Railway has brought nine trains of these unfortunate people to Aleppo, each of fifteen truck-loads and each truck containing from thirty-five to forty persons. All these in addition to many thousands that came on foot.

Since the 1st August 20,000 have so far arrived in Aleppo. The trains were mostly switched to the Damascus-Hama line, and run on south to disperse their contents among the Arabs and Druses, while a small proportion were permitted to remain in Aleppo for the time being. They all relate harrowing tales of hardships, abuse, robbery and atrocities committed en route, and, with the exception of those from Aintab, there were few if any men, girls over ten years or becoming young married women among them. Travellers from the interior have related to the writer that the beaten paths are lined with corpses of the victims. Between Ourfa and Arab-Pounar, a distance of about twenty-five miles, there were seen more than 500 unburied corpses along the highway.

On the 17th instant an order arrived from the Minister of the Interior to permit the Armenian Protestants to remain where they were. On the 19th another order came that all Armenians without distinction should be deported.

From Mardin the Government deported great numbers of Syrians, Catholics, Chaldeans and Protestants, and it is feared that all Christians may later be included in the order, and possibly even the Jews. The cry is “Turkey for the Moslems!” Judicious persons, well informed on the question, place the total loss of life up to the 15th August at over 500,000. The territory affected includes the provinces of Van, Erzeroum, Bitlis, Diyarbekir, Mamouret-ul-Aziz, Angora and Sivas; in these the Armenians have already been practically exterminated. This leaves Aleppo and Adana to be completed, and here the movement is in rapid progress.

(=d.=) =Report dated 8th February, 1916.=

I transmit herewith a copy of a report received from reliable sources in reference to the number of Armenian immigrants in this vicinity, between here and Damascus and in the surrounding country, and down the Euphrates River as far as Der-el-Zor, showing a total of about 500,000 persons. In connection with the relief sent by Mr. N. for these people, it would seem proper to state that the sum of £500 (Turkish) weekly is entirely inadequate to aid even a small part thereof. In fact, as a person cannot live on less than two gold piastres per day, it will require the sum of £10,000 (Turkish) (about £9,000 sterling) a day to keep those alive who are in good health, to say nothing of the sick.

The following are the statistics of Armenian immigrants according to the best information, up to the 3rd February, 1916:

Damascus as far as Ma’an, more than 100,000 Hama and surrounding villages 12,000 Homs and surrounding villages 20,000 Aleppo and surrounding villages 7,000 Ma’ara and surrounding villages 4,000 Bab and surrounding villages 8,000 Mumbidj and surrounding villages 5,000 Ras-ul-Ain and surrounding villages 20,000 Rakka and surrounding villages 10,000 Der-el-Zor and surrounding villages, more than 300,000 ——— Total 486,000 ———

140. ALEPPO: MEMORANDUM[181], DATED ALEPPO, 18th JUNE/1st JULY, 1915; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

The number of people from Zeitoun exiled to Konia is more than 6,000; they have been put in the Sandjak of Sultania or Kara-Pounar. More than 20,000 Armenians who have been forced to emigrate are being cast into the deserts amid nomadic tribes, leaving their houses, gardens and tilled lands to the Turkish mouhadjirs. Deprived of all that they possessed, the unfortunate people have not even any graves for their dead.

At Aleppo all the churches and schools are full of exiled Armenians. Rich and poor, teachers and pupils, all are brothers there, victims of the same blow. The inhabitants of the city do their utmost to alleviate the suffering. Those that are deported—women, old men, children—are obliged to cross the deserts on foot, under the burning sun, often deprived of food and water. The most modest complaint is stifled by the most barbarous threats. Overpowered by fatigue, exhausted by hunger, mothers in despair leave on the way their infant children, often only six months old, and continue their journey.... Even in this deplorable state, rapes and violent acts are everyday occurrences.... The Armenians deported from Hadjin could not be recognised as a result of their twelve days’ journey.

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Footnote 179:

Sairt (?).

Footnote 180:

Severeg.

Footnote 181:

Name of author withheld.

141. ALEPPO: MEMORANDUM[182] BY A FOREIGN WITNESS[183] FROM ALEPPO; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

Speaking generally on the question of the expulsion of the Armenians from their native places, you are perhaps not aware that they have all been exiled from the towns in Northern Armenia and Anatolia, such as Harpout, Diyarbekir, Bitlis, Moush, Marash, Zeitoun, Sivas, Erzeroum, etc. They are all being sent south and are gradually moved on from one place to another until they reach the borders of the Syrian Desert. They are met with as far south as Mayadin, an Arab village one day south of Der-el-Zor or seven days’ carriage journey south of Aleppo. Practically all the towns in Syria (Aleppo, Damascus, etc.) are full of these exiles, whose condition is most pitiable, as may be imagined when one considers that some of them have been four or even six months on the road from their native places, passing through country which is practically barren and devoid of any means of obtaining proper sustenance. The Armenians are allowed to accumulate in a town until the numbers become so large that it is necessary to move them on to some other town further south, and the population commences to protest against their presence. One sees them in Aleppo on pieces of waste ground, in old buildings, courtyards and alleyways, and their condition is simply indescribable. They are totally without food and are dying of starvation. If one looks into these places where they are living one simply sees a huddled mass of dying and dead, all mixed up with discarded, ragged clothing, refuse and human excrement, and it is impossible to pick out any one portion and describe it as being a living person. A number of open carts used to parade the streets, looking out for corpses, and it was a common sight to see one of these carts pass containing anything up to ten or twelve human bodies, all terribly emaciated. These carts have since been provided with a lid and painted black, and one constantly sees bodies, mostly of women and children, being dragged out of courtyards and alleyways and thrown into them as one would throw a sack of coal. It is impossible to gauge the number of deaths per diem, but in the Armenian Cemetery trenches are dug and the bodies are simply brought there and thrown in indiscriminately. A number of priests remain at the cemetery all day, and perform some kind of funeral rite as the so-called interment is made. Every now and again an order is given for the town to be cleaned up, and the gendarmes and municipal guards go round and drive out the Armenians from their places of refuge, hustle them down to the railway station, pack them into the trucks like cattle and forward them to Damascus and different towns in the Hidjaz. Occasionally a large convoy is collected and put on the road to Der-el-Zor. Unnecessary brutality is shown in the expulsion of these people, the majority of whom are simply living skeletons, and one sees emaciated and hunger-stricken women and children beaten with whips like dogs in order to make them move.

If one walks round certain quarters of Aleppo at night, one sees an indescribable “something” lying on the ground; one hears a groan, and knows that it is one of these human wrecks who, the following morning, will be thrown into a cart and taken to the cemetery. Many of these people refuse to accept any help whatever, and say that they prefer to die and end their suffering rather than prolong it, since the future gives no hope of any alleviation. The stories they tell are beyond description. When they were expelled from any of the towns in Northern Asia Minor, all the men between the ages of fifteen and sixty were shot down before the eyes of the women and children, either before starting or some little way on the road. Some idea of the decimation of their numbers may be obtained when one learns that out of a convoy of 2,500, which left a village in the vicinity of Harpout, only 600 arrived in Der-el-Zor. One learns from their own stories that many of the women drowned their children in the river en route, since there was no visible means of nourishing them; and practically every family has been depleted through the men being killed, the children dying en route and many of the girls having been carried off by roving bands of Kurdish and Arab robbers on the way. One boy of fourteen years old, from Diyarbekir, described how his father and mother were shot and two of his sisters dragged away en route, so that there remained to him only two little sisters out of the whole family. English-speaking girl students of the American College in H. told stories of the torture of various priests and professors in H., in order to make them divulge the location of supposed arms and ammunition. One girl, who was a nurse in the Military Hospital, swore that one of their professors was attended to by her after having had the hair torn from his face and his finger and toe-nails pulled out[184]. One Armenian priest was said to have suffered the same torture, and finally to have been burned alive; the veracity of this, however, seems impossible in the Twentieth Century. It is no uncommon thing for women and girls who have any claim to good looks to be violated by the different Kurds and Arabs whom they meet on the way, and against whom it is impossible for them to defend themselves. Practically all these convoys are composed of women and children, and men between the ages of fifteen and sixty are rarely met with. Many of these people have been considerably well off, and brought away with them large sums of money secreted on their persons. This, of course, became known to the gendarmes and robbers en route, and they were despoiled of practically everything—not only their money, but their jewellery, clothing, bedding and everything else. Outside practically every town from Mayadin, on the Euphrates, up to Konia, one sees a camp containing anything from 2,000 up to 20,000 of these refugees, and one can imagine that such a large crowd of people, being thrown on to a population which already finds it difficult to obtain employment and food, would cause the position to become intolerable; they must naturally die of starvation, since food cannot be found for such extra numbers.

On all the main routes one finds a continual stream of refugees dragging themselves wearily along and going for ever southwards. Their ultimate destination is unknown to them, but apparently they have a dim hope of at last reaching some place where they will be able to live in comparative comfort and find nourishment. If they knew, however, what they would find and what would ultimately happen to them, they would no doubt prefer simply to sit down and wait for death without going any further.

One woman in Aleppo was raving mad, owing to having lost her child and being unable to ascertain his whereabouts.

Any attempts to help the refugees are immediately nipped in the bud by the authorities, and spies are continually watching the foreign consulates. Several Armenians who called at one of them were afterwards put in prison, and one woman was cruelly beaten by a gendarme, after being compelled to leave the consulate.

142. ALEPPO: MESSAGE DATED 17th FEBRUARY, 1916, FROM FRÄULEIN O.; PUBLISHED IN THE GERMAN JOURNAL “SONNENAUFGANG,” APRIL, 1916.

I want to beg our friends at home not to grow weary of making intercession for the members of the Armenian nation who are in exile here. If there is no visible prospect of a change for the better, a few months more will see the end of them all. They are succumbing in thousands to famine, pestilence and the inclemency of the weather. The exiles at Hama, Homs and in the neighbourhood of Damascus are comparatively better of. They are left where they are, and can look about for means of subsistence. But further East, along the Euphrates, they are driven from place to place, plundered and maltreated. Many of our friends are dead.

XIX. VILAYET OF DAMASCUS AND SANDJAK OF DER-EL-ZOR.

Aleppo was not intended to be the final destination of the Armenian exiles. A certain number of the earlier arrivals were sent to the swampy, malarious districts a short distance to the south and south-east of the city, but by far the greater number were forwarded at least several days’ journey further afield.

Aleppo lies on the inner edge of a great desert amphitheatre, which is buttressed by the Lebanon, the Taurus and the mountains of Kurdistan, and slopes very gradually south-eastward towards the alluvial lowlands at the head of the Persian Gulf, while southward it passes insensibly into the high desert lands of the Arabian Peninsula. This region presents a sharp climatic contrast to the tablelands of Anatolia and Armenia, which are the native country of the Armenian race. Climatically and geographically, Armenia and Anatolia are an integral part of Europe, while Syria and Mesopotamia are the outer fringe of Arabia, and akin, like it, to the Sahara region of North Africa. The frontier between the two climates is formed by the southward escarpment of the Taurus, and the transition between them is abrupt.

The ostensible motive for deporting the Armenians to this country was to remove them from the neighbourhood of the frontiers and from the coast and to plant them among a compact Moslem population of alien (Arabic) speech, where they would find themselves in political isolation as well as in a decisive numerical minority. The actual result was to subject people accustomed to a temperate climate to a climate of a Saharan character, and this under the worst conceivable conditions for such a change of environment—when the victims were destitute of food, clothing and shelter, and physically exhausted by months of travelling on foot over the roughest of roads.

The two chief places selected by the Ottoman Government as destinations for the exiles were Damascus, which lies due south of Aleppo, and is close, like Aleppo itself, to the inner rim of the amphitheatre, and Der-el-Zor, which lies considerably further inwards—six days’ journey by carriage from Aleppo down the course of the Euphrates, where the river cuts through the desert between the mountains of Armenia and the alluvium of the Gulf. Some batches had been sent a further day’s journey still, to Mayadin (Doc. 141, while there are even rumours of their presence (Docs. 11 and 121) within forty-eight hours’ journey of Baghdad.

The condition of these exiles after their arrival is made sufficiently plain in the documents included in this section. Doc. 145 shows that by the 12th July there were already large numbers of Cilicians bivouacked at Der-el-Zor, while it appears from Doc. 143 that they did not begin to arrive at Damascus until the 12th August, 1915.

143. DAMASCUS: REPORT FROM A FOREIGN RESIDENT AT DAMASCUS, DATED 20th SEPTEMBER, BUT CONTAINING INFORMATION UP TO THE 3rd OCTOBER, 1915; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

Since the 12th August, 1915, convoys of Armenian exiles, consisting of from a few hundred to as many as two thousand individuals, have been marched through this city at varying intervals, averaging about two to three or more convoys per week.

On a sober estimate I should say that from 8,000 to 10,000 souls have already thus come through Damascus up to the present time. This has been going on since the 12th August, to my knowledge.

His Excellency the Governor-General of Syria informed me, upon my request, that these people are all Armenians who, because of uprisings and attempts to set up local revolutionary governments in the Vilayets of Van and Bitlis, are being exiled to the country round Damascus and will be distributed in groups of two, three and so on among the various more important towns and villages. His Excellency also informed me—upon my statement that, if the Government permitted, I believed that I could secure funds from the American Red Cross to aid these people, who undoubtedly would be very needy—that the Government would not sanction this, and that the Government was doing everything possible, furnishing food, tents, etc.

Numerous stories are current of hardship, want, suffering from hunger, forced marching when in no condition to walk, cruelty of guards, seizure of young women, giving away and selling of children that they might find homes, etc., etc., but I did not believe them, and even now I am sure that many of the worst stories that are circulating are much exaggerated. Still, there are some which I must credit.

One is that of a woman who, though six or seven months pregnant and naturally in no condition whatever to do the marches, was obliged to keep up with the procession until she dropped in her tracks and died. I have heard of several cases of young girls or boys being bought by people who wished to aid in some way and were importuned by parents to take their children as servants, that they might have homes. It was stated to me also that some soldier guards, in order to urge them on, whipped those who straggled on the march either from utter exhaustion or in quest of food or money from compassionate Christian inhabitants of the places through which they passed.

I have also heard of kindnesses extended by good Moslems who pitied these sufferers, and I overheard a common Moslem soldier—and it is known that such have hardly enough money for themselves—say that he had given two medjidias[185] to the Christian exiles.

Several times I went to the quarter through which the exiles were marched, to see them with my own eyes. Never, however, could I time my visit with their passage.

Kahdem, on the outskirts of the city, is a large piece of common ground where, after passing through Damascus, all the exiles are collected preparatory, it seems, to their being dispersed to the various towns where they are finally to stay.

Some days ago I visited this place to get some idea of conditions. It is a large open tract, practically devoid of grass and possessing but few trees. It was nearly covered with groups of ragged, road-stained, dejected, wholly dispirited individuals. There were only a very few tents or shelters of any kind, and these had the air of being mere improvisations. At the outer fringe of the people I was met by a policeman, who conducted me to the man in charge of the encampment. I saw practically nothing, and learned only what he told me. He was most courteous. According to him (and he said he kept count of it) there were that day something over 2,000 Armenians present on this field; up to that time about 20,000 had passed through Damascus for exile from practically all the vilayets inhabited by Armenians, except the region of Van. He thought they had not arrived from Van yet because it was so distant. A total of 100,000 Armenians were to be distributed among the towns surrounding Damascus before this deportation scheme would be complete, he said. A hospital for those who were ill had been instituted, and was then occupied by about fifty persons, I was informed. He further told me that there were practically no deaths, and that the Government furnished food for them, i.e., for all the exiles. I left the Director of the Encampment’s tent, and the only thing I saw while being conducted to the road was the wagon, outbound, that plies between camp and hospital. It appeared to be well filled. The Spanish Consul took the road to Kahdem the same day. He did not go as close as I, I believe.

One of the exiled Armenians who came to see me said he was a native of Kessab, near Aleppo. According to his statements, he had been on the march some ten days, and, upon being questioned, he told me that the suffering en route had been extreme for those who were not very strong. He said that along the road they had passed the bodies of those in the convoy ahead of theirs who had succumbed. This man declared that his wife and family were coming by train. He nearly broke down in the telling, and said he had no idea what would become of him and cared less.

On the 11th September, 1915, the Spanish Consul and myself happened to be in the Christian quarter, when we came upon a procession of the Armenian exiles on their way to Kahdem. One becomes accustomed to poorly dressed, ragged people in the interior whose faces never seem to have expressed joy, but in the faces of this band of silently trudging automatons one saw written a great weariness, despair and hopeless suffering stoically borne. There were men, women and children, only some of whom took heed of us when we offered them what change we happened to have. The greater part seemed interested only in doggedly pursuing their march until the night’s halt might allow them to rest. It was then a little after six o’clock.

Old and young people were the chief components of the procession. Here there passed a boy hardly over ten years of age, overburdened by a smaller child upon his back; there a woman, with back bent by age, crawling painfully along by the aid of her staff; now a wee infant, crying for its mother lost on the march, on the heels of an old patriarch, dragging along his last possession, a little donkey; then a woman, evidently heavy with child, smothering a moan of pain at each forced step. Young women and men of middle age were noticeable by their absence. From various reports I have heard, it would appear that many exiles have been arriving by train, and that the total number that has passed this way now reaches 22,000.

From a person who has passed that way, I learn that, so far as he could judge, all Armenians south of Ismid were being exiled, and from the same informant, whose word cannot be questioned, I hear that thousands of Armenians were passed by him on the road. They were in the most horrible condition. At Osmania there were some 8,000 exiles quartered. He tells me that for some miles out from this place a most foul odour was noticeable, like that rising from a dirty chicken-run. Upon approaching the low ground on which the exiles were concentrated, the odour became sickening and noisome flies swarmed about him. Passing through the encampment, he saw many people ill, and the bodies of others half-submerged in the water that had collected in pools on the low-lying ground. Some told him they were only waiting for death to free them. On the road from there to Aleppo he passed thousands of exiles on the march, and at a small town near Aleppo he found about 100,000 Armenians encamped. He says that the mortality among these was very great. They had no food nor money to buy any, as it appeared that many convoys had been plundered on the road of what little they possessed by successive armed bands. The party of which my informant was a member had several times been accosted by armed persons in uniform, who thought they were Armenians.

I have heard from a source not quite so authentic, but in which a great deal of confidence may be placed, that the country lying north and north-east of Marash is being entirely denuded of Armenians; that at Homs there was a concentration camp of about 30,000, practically all without shelter; that there had been a massacre at Diyarbekir; that exiles from Kaisaria were allowed to sell their property (a small price only could be obtained in this forced sale) before being sent to Der-el-Zor. From this same source I was also informed that it was rumoured that many exiles had been drowned (by boats being overturned, and so on) in the Euphrates River, while making their crossing.

Just within the last few days—it is now the 3rd October—I was told by an eye-witness that a massacre took place on the 19th September at Ourfa, and that the Armenians were shot, stabbed, bayoneted or flayed by the population in general that day, but that afterwards the slaughter was still being continued by soldiers with bayonets and sharp sabres when this person left on the 22nd. It appears that the Armenian men were collected together, and that one by one they were led out to be slashed up and cut down by the long sabre-knives. In the first day’s massacre three French and Russian civil prisoners were wounded by knife or flail; but I gathered that they soon recovered and that that was all that happened to these prisoners. The person who came from Ourfa told me that en route many women, children and old men were passed, and that soldiers were seen to strike some of these when they stopped to get a drink of water. Soldiers were overheard to say: “Wait until we get you to the Euphrates, and see what happens to you there!” or words to that effect. This information was given me by a person who, as stated above, was actually present at the massacre and who heard the remark above mentioned.

I do not know whether I shall be able to get this through or not. In every instance the faith that might be placed in statements has been indicated as precisely as the writer is able to judge; he can vouch absolutely, of course, only for the things seen or heard by himself as related above.

At Damascus everything appears to be very quiet. An egg was thrown into my carriage yesterday, the 2nd October, but that was by a small boy and indicated little. I do not believe that any trouble from the population is to be feared, unless incited by authority, and of this I have no apprehension.

144. EXILES ON THE EUPHRATES: RECORD, DATED ERZEROUM, JUNE, 1915, BY M. HENRY BARBY, OF AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. H. TOROYAN, AN ARMENIAN PHYSICIAN FORMERLY IN THE SERVICE OF THE OTTOMAN ARMY; PUBLISHED IN “LE JOURNAL,” OF PARIS, 13th JULY, 1916.

Along the burning banks of the distant Euphrates, between sultry Mesopotamia and the Badiet-esh-Sham, the desolate desert of Syria, are encamped the several thousands of deported Armenians who have escaped the great massacre.

Their condition there is such that no words can express the horror of it. That is the unanimous testimony of the rare travellers who have succeeded in visiting the camps where the unhappy victims are dying off, between Aleppo and Baghdad. They are subjected to frightful sufferings—without shelter either against the deadly cold of last winter or against the terrific heat of the present summer, which grows more pitiless every day—and daily they are perishing in great numbers, though those struck down by death are the least to be pitied.

I am now in a position to cite unimpeachable testimony as to the facts of these unheard-of atrocities.

A Turkish army-physician, Dr. H. Toroyan—an Armenian by birth, as appears by his name—was commissioned by the Young Turkish Government to visit the exiles’ camps. The horrors of which he was a helpless witness in the course of his mission, and the hideous scenes at which he was present, affected him so deeply that he determined to make his way out of Turkey, at the risk of his life, in order to reveal to the civilised world the barbarity and infamy of the guilty parties—that is, of the present rulers of Turkey and their accomplices.

Dr. Toroyan, in spite of the almost insurmountable difficulties with which he had to contend, succeeded in escaping and reaching Caucasia. There I met him and his first words with me were these:

“My unhappy countrymen deported to Mesopotamia have besought me to make an appeal on their behalf to the whole civilised world, to the Caucasian Armenians in particular, and above all to the Armenians in America, whose women and children are dying every day—decimated by suffering, hunger and disease and subjected to the devilish cruelty of the zaptiehs who are in charge of them in their place of exile.”

He proceeded to show me the notes which he had taken day by day in the course of his tour of inspection down the Euphrates. It is a long series of awful pictures—stories of murders and tortures and revolting rapes. The bestial instincts of human nature are unleashed in the presence of tears and blood. The Turkish butchers amused themselves by massacring men “for pleasure” and hunting women like beasts of the field.

It was on the 25th November, 1915, that Dr. Toroyan left Djerablous and began to descend the Euphrates on a raft. At Djerablous he saw a convoy of Armenians from Syria and twenty-five Armenian families from Aintab, who were being driven along by gendarmes towards the military tribunal under blows of the lash. Other Armenian families were coming in from Kaisaria and Konia by railway. From the moment they left the train they became the victims of the most atrocious outrages. The Tchatchaus[186] carried off three hundred women and girls (the prettiest) in order to sell them as slaves. All these latter victims belonged to families from Diyarbekir, Mardin and Harpout.

But I will let Dr. Toroyan tell his own story:—

“This camp,” he continued, “was still congested when I left it with Armenians from Adana and Cilicia. Most of them were women and girls. Two of them, whom I knew well but only recognised with difficulty, to so lamentable a condition were they reduced, cast themselves at my feet:

“‘Tell the gallant soldiers (of the Allies) to come quickly to Mesopotamia,’ they cried to me between their sobs; ‘we are worse than dead.’”

The doctor went down on his raft with the current as far as Meskené. There he landed and, escorted by two Turkish gendarmes, paid a visit to the Armenian camp.

“The poor people were in rags which barely covered their bodies,” he said, “and had nothing to shelter them against the weather. Some of them, crouched on the ground, were trying to protect themselves beneath tattered umbrellas, but most of them had nothing at all. I asked my gendarmes what all the strange little mounds of earth were which I saw everywhere, with thousands of dogs prowling round about them.

“‘Those are the graves of the infidels!’ they answered calmly.

“‘Strange, so many graves for such a little village.’

“‘Oh, you do not understand. Those are the graves of these dogs—those who were brought here first, last August. They all died of thirst.’

“‘Of thirst? Was there no water left in the Euphrates?’

“‘For whole weeks together we were forbidden to let them drink.’

“I arrived at last at the extremity of this vast field of graves. There were two old men there, crouched on the ground, sobbing. I questioned them: ‘Where are you from?’ They made no answer. They were stupefied by suffering. Perhaps they had lost the power of speech. Further on, however, another exile, prostrate on the ground, in the midst of other victims belonging to the same family, did give me an answer. I learnt that the camp contained 5,000 Armenians from Mersina and other Cilician towns.

“But now my two gendarmes came up to me. They pointed to a girl: ‘Effendi, let us take her and carry her with us to Baghdad....’

“Without waiting for my answer they called the poor girl. She approached, shrieking with terror. She said several words to me in French. Before she was deported she had been a schoolmistress at Smyrna. She was dying of hunger. I tried to learn from her precise details about the martyrdom of the exiles, but she could answer nothing but: ‘Bread! Bread!’ Then she fainted and fell down unconscious.

“‘She is dead! the schoolmistress, too, has died of hunger!’ piteous voices cried around us. But the gendarmes were anxious to take advantage of their victim’s unconsciousness to gain possession of her. Already they had seized her and were carrying her towards our raft. I stopped them. Then I poured several drops of brandy between the poor girl’s lips and she came to herself again.

“A mother came to implore me. She offered her honour and her life if I would save her son, who was in agony, devoured by a fever. I gave her a little aspirine.

“And now they crowded round me in thousands—these poor emaciated beings with hollow cheeks and eyes, either dulled or unnaturally bright. From every side they flocked together with all the haste they could, and surrounded me with a tumult of despairing cries: ‘Bread! Medicine!’

“The gendarmes rushed at them. Into this pitiful crowd they struck at random with kicks and blows as hard as they could. I left the scene, desperate at my powerlessness to alleviate this infinite suffering.

“I saw two women, one of them old, the other very young and very pretty, carrying the corpse of another young woman; I had scarcely passed them when cries of terror arose. The girl was struggling in the clutches of a brute who was trying to drag her away. The corpse had fallen to the ground, the girl, now half-unconscious, was writhing by the side of it, the old woman was sobbing and wringing her hands.

“I could not interfere. I had the strictest orders. Shaking with rage and indignation, I took refuge on my raft, which was moored to the river bank.

“In the middle of the night I was awakened by desperate shrieks. My two gendarmes, who had remained on shore, had seized some Armenian girls. It was their intention to violate them, and they were striking savagely at the exiles who were trying to interfere. The tumult, which I heard without seeing it, continued. At last the gendarmes returned, the boatman unmoored the raft and bent to his oars. We were starting. The great river boat glided slowly over the smooth water. Suddenly the gendarmes shouted and guffawed as if they were watching a fine farce: ‘The girl! the girl we had to-night!’ I looked, and saw floating on the surface a corpse which they had recognised and which I recognised too. It was the schoolmistress from Smyrna, the poor girl to whom I had spoken only a few hours before. It was she who, in the darkness, had been the victim of these two wild beasts.”

145. DER-EL-ZOR: LETTER, DATED 12th JULY, 1915, FROM SCHWESTER L. MÖHRING, A GERMAN MISSIONARY, DESCRIBING HER JOURNEY FROM BAGHDAD TO THE PASSES OF AMANUS; PUBLISHED IN THE GERMAN JOURNAL “SONNENAUFGANG,” SEPTEMBER, 1915.

At Der-el-Zor, a large town in the desert about six days’ journey from Aleppo, we found the big han full to overflowing. All available rooms, roofs, and verandahs were occupied by Armenians. The majority were women and children, but there were also a certain number of men squatting on their quilts wherever they could find a spot of shade. As soon as I heard that they were Armenians, I started going round and talking to them. They were the people of Furnus (a village in the neighbourhood of Zeitoun and Marash); herded together here in these narrow quarters, they presented an extraordinarily melancholy appearance. When I enquired for children from our Orphanage at BM., they brought me a protégée of Sister 0., Martha Karabashian. She gave me the following account of what had happened.

One day Turkish gendarmes had come to Furnus and arrested and carried off a large number of men, to turn them into soldiers. Neither they nor their families knew where they were being taken to. Those who remained were told that they would have to leave their houses within the space of four hours. They were allowed to take with them as much as they could carry; they might also take their beasts. After the lapse of the specified time the poor people had to march out of their village under the escort of soldiers (zaptiehs), without knowing where they were going or whether they would ever see their village again. To begin with, as long as they were still among the mountains and had some provisions left, things went well enough. They had been promised money and bread, and were actually given some in the early stages—as far as I can remember, it was 30 paras (1½d.) per head per day. But very soon these rations ceased, and there was nothing to be had but bulgur meal—50 drams (= 150 grammes) per head per day. In this fashion the Furnusli, after four weeks of extremely hard travelling via Marash and Aleppo, had arrived at Der-el-Zor. They had already been three weeks there in the han, and had no idea what was to happen to them. They had no more money left, and the provisions supplied by the Turks had also dwindled almost to nothing. It was days since they had had any bread. In the towns they had been barred in at night, and not allowed to speak to the inhabitants. Martha, for instance, had not been allowed at BM. to go to the Orphanage. She said to me sadly: “We had two houses and we had to leave everything; now there are mouhadjirs[187] in them.” There had been no massacres in Furnus and the zaptiehs, too, had treated the people well. They had suffered principally from lack of food and water on the march through the burning hot desert. These Yailadji or Mountaineers, as they called themselves, suffered twice as much from the heat as other people.

The zaptiehs escorting them told us then that, since the massacres, the Armenians had cherished such hatred against the Turks that the latter had always to go in fear of them. The intention now, they said, was to employ the Armenians in building roads, and in this way to move them on gradually to Baghdad. When asked the “wherefore” of this, the zaptiehs explained that the people had been in collusion with Russia. The Armenians themselves declared that they did not know the reason for their expulsion.

Next day, at the midday rest, we fell in with a whole convoy of Armenians. The poor people had made themselves primitive goat’s hair tents after the manner of the Kurds, and were resting in them. But the majority lay on the burning sand without defence against the scorching sun. On account of the number of sick, the Turks had allowed them a day’s rest. It is simply impossible to conceive anything more disconsolate than such a mass of people in the desert under the given circumstances. One could tell by their clothes that they had lived in considerable prosperity, and now misery was written on their faces. “Bread!” “Bread!” was the universal cry. They were the people of Geben, who had been driven out with their Pastor. The latter told me that every day there were five or six deaths among the children and the sick. This very day they had only just buried the mother of a girl about nine years old, who was now quite alone in the world. They besought me most urgently to take the child with me to our Orphanage. The Pastor gave precisely the same account of what had happened as the little girl at Der-el-Zor.

No one without personal experience of the desert can form anything approaching a conception of the misery and distress. The desert is mountainous, but almost entirely without shade. For days together the route leads over rocks and is extremely difficult going. On the left hand, as one comes from Aleppo, there is always the Euphrates, which trails along like a streak of clay, yet not near enough for one to be able to draw water from it. The poor people must suffer intolerable pangs of thirst; no wonder that so many sicken and die.

As it was the midday halt, we, too, unpacked our provisions and prepared to eat. That morning we had had bread and tea; our midday meal consisted once more of hard Arab bread, cheese and a tin of sardines. In addition we had a bottle of mineral water. It was not very sumptuous, and yet it was not an easy task to eat anything in face of that crowd of distressed and suffering humanity. We gave away as much as we possibly could, and each of my three companions silently pressed into my hand a medjidia (3s. 2d.) “for the poor people.” A bag of bread from Baghdad, as hard as stone, was received with extraordinary gratitude. “We shall soak it in water and then the children will eat it,” said the delighted mothers.

Another scene comes back to me, which will give an idea of their destitution. One of my companions threw away an empty glass bottle. An old man threw himself upon it, begged to be allowed to take it for himself, and gave profuse thanks for the boon. Then he went down to the river, washed it out, and brought it back filled with the thick clayey water, carrying it carefully in his arms like a treasure, to thank us for it once more. Now he had at least drinking water for his journey.

Followed by many good wishes we at last continued on our way, with the impression of this misery still weighing upon us. In the evening, when we reached the village, we met yet another Armenian convoy of the same kind. This time it was the people of Zeitoun. There was the same destitution and the same complaint about the heat, the lack of bread and the persecutions of the Arabs. A little girl who had been brought up by Kaiserswerth Deaconesses in the Orphanage at Beirout, told us of her experiences in good German:—

“Why does God allow it? Why must we suffer like this? Why did not they strike us dead at once?” were her complaints; “In the daytime we have no water for the children and they cry of thirst. At night the Arabs come to steal our bedding and clothes. They have taken girls from us and committed outrages against women. If we cannot drag ourselves further on the march, we are beaten by the zaptiehs.”

They also told us that other women had thrown themselves into the water to escape their shame, and that mothers with their new-born children had done the same, because they saw no other way out of their misery. Along the whole desert route there was a dearth of food—even for us who had money to pay for it—on account of the number of Turkish soldiers passing through and resting at every han. In Zeitoun, too, no one had been killed; the people could mention no instance of it.

The Armenian is bound up with his native soil; every change of climate is extremely upsetting to him, and there is nothing he misses so much as clear, cold water. For this reason alone residence in the desert is intolerable for him. A speedy death for the whole family at once seems a better fate to the mothers than to watch death by starvation slowly approaching themselves and their children.

On my arrival at Aleppo I was at once asked about the Armenians, and how they were doing for supplies. Their case had been taken up in every possible way, and representations had been made to the Government on their behalf. All that could be obtained was permission for the formation of an Armenian League of Help, which the Government at Constantinople as well as the Vali of Aleppo had sanctioned. The Armenian community at Aleppo at once proceeded to raise a relief fund among themselves, and have been supporting their poor, homeless brethren with money, food and clothing.

In the Amanus mountains, on our second day’s journey after leaving Aleppo, we met with Armenians again. This time it was the people of Hadjin and the neighbourhood. They explained to us that they were going to Aleppo, but they knew nothing beyond that. They had only been nine days on the road, and did not ask for any assistance. Compared with those in the desert, they were faring sumptuously; they had wagons with them carrying their household goods, horses with foals, oxen and cows, and even camels. The procession making its way up through the mountains seemed endless, and I could not help asking myself how long their prosperity would last. They were still in the mountains on their native soil, and had no suspicion of the terrors of the desert. That was the last I saw of the Armenians, but such experiences are unforgettable, and I publish them here with the most earnest appeal for help. Many of the Armenians may be guilty and may only be suffering what they have brought upon themselves, but the poor women and children need our help.

-----

Footnote 182:

Undated.

Footnote 183:

Name withheld.

Footnote 184:

See Doc. 68, page 272, and Doc. 69, page 278.

Footnote 185:

6s. 4d.

Footnote 186:

Tchetchens (?).

Footnote 187:

Moslem immigrants from Europe.

XX. DOCUMENTS RECEIVED WHILE GOING TO PRESS.

146. DESPATCH FROM MR. HENRY WOOD (DOC. I.): FULLER VERSION, OBTAINED THROUGH THE COURTESY OF THE REPRESENTATIVE OF THE AMERICAN “UNITED PRESS” IN LONDON.

For nearly three months now the 2,000,000 Armenians of Turkey have been undergoing at the hands of the Young Turk Government a renewal of the atrocities of Abd-ul-Hamid, that so far has fallen short only of actual massacre.

So critical is the situation that Ambassador Morgenthau, who, alone, is fighting to prevent wholesale slaughter, has felt obliged to ask the co-operation of the Ambassadors of Turkey’s two Allies. Baron von Wangenheim, the German Ambassador, and Margrave Pallavicini, the Austrian representative at Constantinople, have responded at least to the degree of joining with Ambassador Morgenthau in endeavouring to convince the Turkish Government what a serious mistake it would be for Turkey to permit again a renewal of all the atrocities of the old Turkish régime.

They have been successful to the extent of securing definite promises from the leading members of the Young Turk Government that no orders will be given for massacres. As long as these promises are maintained, no fear is felt, as the danger of a spontaneous uprising of the Moslem population against the Christians is now considered a thing of the past. The critical moment for the Armenians, however, will come, it is feared, when the Turks may meet with serious reverses in the defence now being made of the Dardanelles, or when the Armenians themselves, who not only are in open revolt but are actually in possession of Van and several other important towns, may meet with fresh successes. It is this uprising of the Armenians who are seeking to establish an independent government that the Turks declare is alone responsible for the terrible measures now being taken against them.

In the meantime, the position of the Armenians and the system of deportation, dispersion and extermination that is being carried out against them beggars all description.

Although the present renewal of the Armenian atrocities has been under way for three months, it is only just now that reports creeping into Constantinople from the remotest points of the interior show that absolutely no portion of the Armenian population has been spared.

It now appears that the order for the present cruelties was issued in the early part of May, and was at once put into execution with all the extreme genius of the Turkish police system—the one department of government for which the Turks have ever shown the greatest aptitude both in organisation and administration. At that time sealed orders were sent to the police of the entire Empire. These were to be opened on a specified date that would ensure the orders being in the hands of every department at the moment they were to be opened. Once opened, they provided for a simultaneous descent at practically the same moment on the Armenian population of the entire Empire.

At Broussa, in Asiatic Turkey, the city which it is expected the Turks will select for their capital in the event of Constantinople falling, I investigated personally the manner in which these orders were carried out. From eye-witnesses in other towns from the interior I found that the execution of them was everywhere identical.

At midnight, the police authorities swooped down on the homes of all Armenians whose names had been put on the proscribed list sent out from Constantinople. The men were at once placed under arrest, and then the houses were searched for papers which might implicate them either in the present revolutionary movement of the Armenians on the frontier or in plots against the Government which the Turks declare exist. In this search, carpets were torn from the floors, draperies stripped from the walls, and even the children turned out of their beds and cradles in order that the mattresses and coverings might be searched.

Following this search, the men were then carried away, and at once there began the carrying out of the system of deportation and dispersion which has been the cruellest feature of the present anti-Armenian wave. The younger men, for the most part, were at once drafted into the Army. On the authority of men whose names would be known in both America and Europe if I dared mention them, I am told that hundreds if not thousands of these were sent at once to the front ranks at the Dardanelles, where death in a very short space of time is almost a certainty. The older men were then deported into the interior, while the women and children, when not carried off in an opposite direction, were left to shift for themselves as best they could.

The terrible feature of this deportation up to date is that it has been carried out on such a basis as to render practically impossible in thousands and thousands of cases that these families can ever again be reunited. Not only wives and husbands, brothers and sisters, but even mothers and their little children have been dispersed in such a manner as to preclude practically all hope that they will ever see each other again.

Simultaneously with these arrests of the population throughout the Empire, the police at Constantinople swooped down on the alleged leaders of an Armenian society that was declared to have for its object not only the wresting from the Turkish Empire of part of its territory for the establishment of an independent Armenia, but also the overthrow of the Turkish Government. These were tried by court martial, and on the 15th June nineteen of them were hanged in front of the Ministry of War at Constantinople. Among the number was one man who had been a cashier for the Singer Sewing Machine Company in one of its Turkish branches. As a result of vigorous protests which followed on the part of prominent people at Constantinople, the Turks at once promised that no more wholesale hangings should take place.

Of all the terrible vengeances so far meted out by the Turks in the present anti-Armenian crusade, none appear to have equalled that inflicted on the population of the city of Zeitoun. This was an Armenian town of 20,000 population which had never as a matter of fact been completely subjected by the Turks. Situated well up in almost inaccessible mountain fastnesses, it had even maintained a sort of independence.

With the participation of Turkey in the present war and the need of every possible man for military service, a detachment of Turkish soldiers was sent against the town, with orders to force the young Armenians to accept military service. The latter instead attacked the Turkish soldiers, killed some 300 of them and, with the additional arms thus secured, prepared for a determined resistance. An overwhelming Turkish force, however, was sent against the town; it fell, and then the Turks carried out in the extremest degree their newly devised system of deportation and dispersion.

Twenty thousand Turks from Thrace were taken to Zeitoun and established in the houses that for generations had belonged to the Armenian families. The latter were then scattered to the four winds of the Empire.

I talked with eye-witnesses who, coming to Constantinople from the interior, had seen this miserable population being dispersed and deported. They were being herded across the country by soldiers in groups ranging from 50 to several hundred. Old men who were unable to maintain the fast pace set by the mounted soldiers were beaten till they fell dead in their tracks. Children who were likewise too tender to stand the terrible strain dropped out by the wayside, while the mothers were driven relentlessly on with no hopes of ever again being able to find their little ones. Other mothers with babies in arms, unable to see the latter die under their very eyes, unable to give them the nourishment necessary to sustain life, and unable to bear the agony of leaving them by the wayside to an unknown fate, dropped them in wells as they passed, thus ending the sufferings of the little ones and having at least the consolation of knowing their fate.

The bulk of this miserable population from Zeitoun, that was able to withstand this herding across the desert interior of Asiatic Turkey, was planted largely in two places. One portion was established in a marshy region which, up to the present time, had never been habitable on account of the deadly malaria; the other portion was sent down in the direction of the Persian Gulf, to a locality so deadly that the poor victims prayed to be sent to the malarial marshes instead. Their prayers were in vain.

As in the system of deportation carried out in all other portions of the Empire, scores if not hundreds of these families from Zeitoun were separated and transplanted in such a manner as practically to preclude all possibility of their ever being reunited again.

In defence of these terrible measures which have been taken, the Turks at Constantinople declare that no one but the Armenians themselves is to blame. They state that when the present attack began on the Dardanelles, the Armenians were notified that if they took advantage of the moment when the Turks were concentrating every energy for the maintenance of the Empire, to rise in rebellion, they would be dealt with without quarter. This warning, however, the Armenians failed to heed. They not only rose in rebellion, occupying a number of important towns, including Van, but extended important help to the Russians in the latter’s campaign in the Caucasus. As all these Armenians are Ottoman subjects, they have to be dealt with according to the stringent Turkish laws on such subjects.

While the Turks freely admit that this revolt of the Armenians was and is confined to those living near the Russian border, the authorities at Constantinople declare that at the present moment, when the very existence of the Empire is at stake from the attacks of outside enemies, it is quite out of the question for them to search out among the 2,000,000 Armenians of the Turkish Empire the comparatively few guilty ones and punish them alone. They declare that they have no choice except to ensure their safety against all the Armenians. By punishing all, they are certain to strike down the guilty ones and to prevent any more uprisings among the others.

While this is the Turkish side of the situation, there is also another side which I shall give on the authority of men who have passed practically their entire lives in Turkey and whose names, if I dared mention them, would be recognised in both Europe and America as competent authority. According to these men, the decision has gone out from the Young Turk Party that the Armenian population of Turkey must be set back fifty years. This has been decided upon as necessary in order to ensure the supremacy of the Turkish race in the Ottoman Empire, which is one of the basic principles of the Young Turk Party. The situation, I am told, is absolutely analogous to that which preceded the Armenian massacres under Abd-ul-Hamid. So far, however, the Young Turks have confined themselves to the new system of deportation, dispersion and separation of families.

To the Armenian population in general that is affected at the present moment by the carrying out of these orders, I have found but one exception. This is the Armenian population of Constantinople, which numbers about 70,000. There Ambassador Morgenthau assumed a sort of unofficial protectorate and guarantee for the Armenians, with the result that up to the present moment less than 300 of them have been molested.

So terrible have been the sufferings of the Armenians during the past three months that at the moment I left Constantinople, in order to be able to write this story, there had begun a reversal of feeling towards them even amongst the Turks themselves. The latter declared that the orders, which had been issued solely as a necessary safeguard for the Empire against the Armenians, had been carried out by the local authorities, especially in the districts far from Constantinople, with a degree of severity that had never been intended. Talaat Bey, Minister of the Interior, had even begun to permit a few dozen of the men, whose loyalty to the Turkish Government was beyond question, to return to their homes.

The condition of the Armenian population at the present moment, however, is pitiful beyond words. Practically all the families have been deprived of their means of support by the deportation of the husbands, fathers and sons. The women and children who have been left behind to shift for themselves are practically helpless, as at the present moment, when the entire Empire is being drained of every resource for the carrying on of the war, neither work nor food is to be had. In thousands of cases, too, the deported families have been planted among strong Musulman communities, where the Christian Armenians are despised and opposed at every turn.

In the midst of all this misery help is only being extended from two quarters. Ambassador Morgenthau, at Constantinople, is working day and night to induce the Turkish Government to relent from the severity of its measures, and the American missionaries throughout the Empire have also dropped all thought of religious propaganda in order to attend to the material needs of the victims. Their combined efforts, however, constitute hardly a drop of help in the whole sea of misery.

The situation is rendered especially difficult by the fact that nothing can be done in an official way even by governments like the United States. The Armenians are subjects of the Ottoman Empire, and the latter has the full right to deal with them as it thinks necessary in the interests of the Empire as a whole.

147. URMIA, SALMAS, AND HAKKIARI: FULLER STATEMENT BY MR. PAUL SHIMMON, EDITED, AS A PAMPHLET, BY THE REV. F.N. HEAZELL, ORGANISING SECRETARY OF THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY’S ASSYRIAN MISSION.

The scene of the Assyrian massacres is the plain of Urmi (or Urmia) on the west side of the lake of that name in N.W. Persia. The city of Urmi is situated on the western side of the lake; further west are the mountains of Kurdistan, forming the frontier between Turkey and Persia. These mountains give shelter to the wild bands of Kurds (ever ready to descend on the plain of Urmi), who can easily retire to their inaccessible homes with their ill-gotten spoil. For some years past a Russian force has been stationed in the Urmi plain, with the object of keeping the Kurds under control. These troops were distributed between Khoi, Salmas, Urmi, and Soujboulak, at the extreme south of the lake. Urmi is an isolated spot, and, from a military point of view, ill-suited for defence against a strong attacking force. It is easily accessible to the Kurds from the west, while the two high passes on both north and south, and the lake on the east, seal up a besieged army in a very dangerous locality.

The plain of Urmi has a charm for all travellers; in the spring and early summer it is a veritable paradise. Its running waters, its gardens, its vineyards, orchards, and melon fields, its tobacco plantations and rice fields, give a variety of colour and a beauty of scene seldom met with in the East.

The plain of Urmi is the home of some thirty-five thousand of the Assyrian (or East Syrian) Christians, part of whom dwell in the city, the rest being distributed among seventy villages scattered over the plain. These people are cultivators of the soil and keepers of vineyards. Away to the west, united to them by religion and language, five the mountaineer Syrians. First, we have many villages in the districts of Tergawar and Mergawar, both in Persia; then comes Nochea, the seat of the Metropolitan Bishop, Mar Khananishu. Still further west, over the frontier into Turkey, in the very heart of the mountains, dwells the Patriarch, Mar Shimun, at once a civil and ecclesiastical ruler, who is responsible to the Turkish Government for the independent tribes of Baz, Djîlu, Tkhuma, and Tiari, who are spread over the tract of country which stretches from Djoulamerk to Amadia and then down towards Mosul.

The proverbial “calm before the storm” was literally true in the case of the massacre of the Syrian Christians. In the Urmi plain, the presence of Russian troops for many years past brought security and prosperity. Raiding on the part of the Kurds was stopped, and highway robbery was no longer heard of. It did not mean that the Moslems were any more friendly disposed towards the Christians; they feared them, that was all. The old hatred for the Christian race slumbered for a time, and dared not show itself, so long as the Russian troops were there to see that the peace was not disturbed.

Events began to take a different turn with the outbreak of war in Europe. The Kurds, always ready for a fight, began to plunder the rich districts of Tergawar and Mergawar; the Christian inhabitants fled to Urmi, and were distributed among the villages of the plain. In October, 1914, the Kurds made a determined effort to capture the city. A violent assault was made by them, and for a time they withstood the fire of the Russian artillery. They sacked and burned the villages of Anhar and Alwach, and advanced within gunshot of the city. Reinforcements arrived, and with the help of Syrians, armed by the Russians, the Kurds and Turks were driven back. Then it was that the Russian officers found that the Syrians could do great service in scouting, and they employed trained Syrians to keep open the lines of communication.

Such was the condition of affairs before the declaration of war between the Allied Powers and Turkey. After the declaration of war the curtain was withdrawn and the drama was played, the like of which has not yet been seen, even in this most cruel war.

The Turks had become aggressive on the Russian frontier near the Caucasus. In December they massed troops at Sari-Kamysh, near Kars, and sought to cut the railway to Tiflis. This created a scare in the Caucasus which was serious enough to cause a withdrawal of the Russian forces from N.W. Persia. Orders reached Urmi on the 30th December for the withdrawal of the Russian troops, but these were not made known to the European missionaries and Syrians until three days later. The news came like a thunderclap. The Christian inhabitants were entirely unprepared; when they awoke to the fact of the danger they were in, they found that the roads were all blocked, the Russian protectors had left, means of transport were wanting, the Kurdish and Turkish armies were almost at the city gates; they were caught in a trap. A large number of the Syrians outside the city and many Armenians were able to get away; most of these were from the Nazlu district, others were refugees from the Turkish frontier, some ten thousand in all. Two English missionaries then left, also the Belgian officials of the Persian Government and some prominent Syrians of Urmi. All the rest remained behind.

The Russian army left on Saturday, the 2nd January, and on the next day the Persian Moslems plundered the village of Tcharbash, and Dilgusha, the two districts which contained the houses of the well-to-do Christian population. It was a painful sight to see the notable Moslems of the city taking part in this plunder. The whole city was out, “blessing each other’s feast,” as they termed it, and carrying off everything that came to hand. Houses were stripped of furniture, and even doors and windows carried away. There was also an attempt to plunder some of the houses within the city, but this was frustrated by the efforts of the French and American missionaries.

There is no doubt that the presence of the American missionaries, and of Mr. Nisan, who remained in the English Mission-house, prevented matters from taking a worse turn. The American flag, which was flying over the American and English houses, had some influence in restraining the brutal savagery of the mob.

In the villages, however, the reign of terror had begun. The Kurds had been informed of the Russian retirement, and were soon at work plundering and massacring the Christians in the Baranduz district (S. Urmi). Dizateka, Sâtloui, Aliabad, Shimshadjean, Babaroud, Darbaroud, Sardaroud, Teka, and Ardishai were already in their hands. Looting, plundering, massacre and rape were the order of the day. In one village, half Moslem and half Christian, the Syrians took shelter in the houses of their Moslem neighbours, and hid themselves under the heaps of snow in the yards. In Ardishai, Kasha Ablakhat, the Syrian priest, was escaping on horseback with his daughter; he was killed and the girl carried off to Kurdistan, where she was married by force to a Kurd. Four months later came the sad news that she had died. During her illness she had as companion another Syrian girl, also a captive. This other girl relates that the Moslem women came and turned the sick woman’s bed towards the south, the direction to which all Moslems look on their deathbed. The invalid begged her companion to turn her face to the east, that she might die a Christian.

In another village all the male population but three were killed, or died of typhoid fever.

One young man had just arrived from the United States after an absence of nine years; he had come home to be married. The next morning, he, his mother, sister, and an uncle were all killed. Their property was carried off and 500 tomans in cash. Most of the people were killed in their flight; their bodies were not buried, for no one dared to go and perform this office. Many of the bodies were eaten by dogs.

There is one large village—Geogtapa—some five miles from the city of Urmi. To this place many people from the south of Urmi plain fled for safety, as they thought the inhabitants were well able to defend themselves. But on Monday night, the 4th January, a messenger from the Kurds came, saying that if the people surrendered and paid a large sum of money, their village would be spared. The villagers sent to Urmi to consult the village master, but long before the messengers returned the Kurds had commenced their attack on the place. The Christians put up a magnificent fight, but could not hold out long before overwhelming numbers. The Kurds were also assisted by the Persian Moslems, who were eager to pay off old scores against their Christian neighbours. As the day wore on the situation grew desperate. The cries of women and children, who had gathered in the churches, were heart-rending. The smoke of the burning buildings from four sides overcame the defenders. Finally all took refuge in the two churches on the brow of the hill, which dominates the village. Late in the afternoon, by God’s providence, a rescue was made. Dr. Packard, the American missionary, with three Syrian attendants, came with the American flag and made terms of capitulation. The men, women, and children were to be allowed to go out alive, and the village and all the firearms were surrendered. Late that night, Dr. Packard, with some two thousand people, reached Urmi, where with difficulty shelter was found for them in quarters already crowded, in which they passed four months of untold horrors and suffering.

In Geogtapa, one elderly woman was left behind because she could not move on account of infirmity; her husband and daughter decided to stay with her. The Kurds killed the two old people, and on the daughter refusing to become Moslem, she also was killed.

Another pathetic case was that of an old priest and his wife, who thought if they gave up everything to the Kurds their lives would be spared. These people were visited by five different parties of Kurds in succession. They helped themselves to the property of the house, and took all the money they could find. Then came another party and asked for money; they were told there was nothing left. Then the old man, with the Bible in his hands, was murdered in the presence of his wife. They decided to kill the woman also, but in some mysterious way she avoided them and hid herself. After six days of hiding she crawled out and got to a neighbouring village, where she found shelter with some Moslems, who sent her to the city.

Nazlu District.

The Baranduz river villages and Geogtapa are south of the city of Urmi, and so were the first to fall a prey to the Kurds as they advanced from the south. The villages of the Nazlu district, such as Âda, Superghan, Mushawa, Sherabad, and Karadjalu, some of the wealthiest, not being in the line of advance, should have escaped the horrors of the other villages; but their turn came later, and their story of their woes is equally heartrending.

Âda, one of the largest villages, had been a place of refuge for many Syrians and Armenians late in the year 1914. Then when the Russian army passed that way many of the people followed them, to the number of sixty. The rest, however, all remained. Sunday, the 3rd January, passed off quietly, but the next day their troubles commenced. The Persian Moslems began to plunder the Syrian Christians. They broke open the houses, carried off the doors and windows, and emptied the buildings. No one was killed, however, although some shots were fired to intimidate the people. The Syrians exercised great restraint, as they feared a general massacre if they opposed the Moslems who came against them. The elders of the village, while this was going on, sent to the city to ask for protection. The messengers returned with a Turkish and Persian flag and a few soldiers, thinking this would be security for them; but they were deceived, for almost at once the Kurds attacked the village from all points. They stripped every man they found, took his money, and then killed him. As the others fled to the vineyards, they were followed by the Moslems, who killed them there. It is said that one Persian Moslem had killed twenty-five persons, and said: “I am not satisfied yet.” Some eighty bodies lay about unburied; many who had been wounded were left to die of their wounds, as there was no one to tend them after they fell. The women and children, who had climbed to the roofs to avoid the fury of the Kurds, were afterwards brutally treated by their attackers, who behaved with the greatest barbarity. The churches were polluted, and the holy books destroyed. Many women were carried off and forced to become Moslems, and afterwards sold or married to their enemies.

A pathetic case is reported from Karadjalu. A woman, fleeing with her two children—her husband was abroad—met a Moslem mullah in her flight. He took the children, stripped them of their clothing, and threw them all into a stream, which was on the point of freezing. He then offered to marry the woman. On her refusal he left the woman on the road to her fate. She returned to the stream, and, taking her children from the water, carried them to a vineyard near by, where she placed them in a hollow place with some straw over them to try and warm them; both children died in the morning. Later the sorrowing woman found her way to Urmi, and five months afterwards the Russians caught this inhuman brute and made him suffer for his crime.

The flight to Urmi.

The city of Urmi became a veritable city of refuge for the Syrians and Armenians from the villages of the whole plain. By far the larger number found shelter in the American Mission premises, and some more in the compound of the English Mission, where Mr. Nisan was living. We have read of the flight from Antwerp in the Times, but it is a fairy tale compared with what happened in Urmi. Women arrived at the city in a bleeding condition. Some had been stripped of part of their clothes on the way, and arrived in one tunic shivering in the bitter cold of January; some told us how they had been stopped by four different bands of robbers; many were carried off, made captives, and forced to become Moslems.

The French Mission also afforded another place of refuge, where the French Lazarists, with Monseigneur Sontag and the Sisters of Charity, live. The crowded state of all the houses in the city quickly bred disease, which, combined with semi-starvation, made life unbearable. The Americans threw open their College and Hospital outside the city, and these were soon overcrowded. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Mission premises and the American yard close by formed one great quadrangle, and over this block the American flag was flying. In normal times these buildings could accommodate five hundred people; now there were some ten thousand crowded into this same area. After the first rush was over, the missionaries went to the villages, to search for this or that person who was missing. In this way many young women were restored to their families and delivered from Moslem captivity. But many of the less fortunate had to remain in the Moslem houses to which they had been carried. Many were ill and could not move; others were enceintes, and were ashamed to return to their homes. A young Moslem was carrying his Syrian “wife” to another village when he met Dr. Packard on the road. The girl threw herself at his feet and asked to be freed from her captor. She was taken to Urmi, only to die after a few weeks of typhoid fever.

The problem of feeding so large a number of people was a great one, and only half a pound of bread a day could be provided. But the worst suffering was caused by the overcrowding. Every available space was filled—rooms, churches, corridors, cellars, and stables, all alike were crowded with human beings.

Under these conditions, combined with the bad water supply and the lack of sanitary arrangements in an oriental city, it is not surprising that typhoid fever soon broke out and carried off thousands of people. More than four thousand lost their lives from this disease, while a thousand were killed by the Kurds in the villages. An accurate statement, prepared by the European missionaries, shows that 20 per cent. of the Urmi Christians perished in four months.

At the beginning of this reign of terror which we have described, the Kurds of Mamash, Mangur, Zarza, in the south, poured into the city. The Herki and the Begzadi from the west poured in at the same time. The son of one prominent sheikh from Shamsdinan came from Nochea and established himself in Dilgusha, just outside the city gates. On the arrival of the Turkish army, a few days later, order was for a time restored, and the Kurds and Moslems restrained from the bigger acts of violence. But as soon as the Turkish officers got hold of the reins of government the lives of the Christians became unbearable. For a time a Djihad—a Holy War—was spoken of on all sides, and the Christians gave up all hopes of being allowed to live. The Turks made it quite clear that they had come to serve Turkey, and did not conceal their desire to get rid of all Christians. They also set to work to fill their own pockets; 6,600 tomans were taken from the shop and store owners and other well-to-do people. They prepared a list of “suspected persons,” who were to be put to death if not ransomed by the payment of a sum of money. In many cases the money was not forthcoming, and the prisoners were put to death.

It was in this way that Mar Dinkha, Bishop of Tergawar, met his death. Mar Elia, the Russian Bishop, was ransomed after a payment of 5,500 tomans had been made to the Turks.

The Tragedy of Gulpashan.

The case of the treatment of the village of Gulpashan is without parallel in the history of the Urmi massacres. It is the most wealthy and prosperous of all the villages of the plain, and its inhabitants are quiet and law-abiding people. When the sister village of Geogtapa was plundered and burnt, by an ominous fate Gulpashan was spared. Karani Agha, a Kurdish Chief, well spoken of as a man of high principle, had announced that the village was his property and that it was to be spared. For two months the people were left in peace. It was said to be due to a friendship which existed between the Christian village masters, one of whom was related to the German Consular Agent at Urmi, and the Moslems. A servant of the German Agent was there, and Turkish soldiers were placed to guard the village. On the 24th February, a band of Persian fedais, who had been unsuccessful in an attempt on Salmas, returned to Urmi and attacked the village. They feigned friendliness at first, until they had got the men of the place in their power. Then they tied them together with ropes and drove them to the cemetery, where they butchered them in a barbarous and cruel way. Then the men, still wild with blood, turned on the women, and, after treating them in an unseemly manner, put some of them to death. The American missionaries went afterwards and buried the dead, which they did in many other places also. This was the last of the massacres in the Urmi plain. The awful deeds that were perpetrated here were telegraphed to America, whereupon such strong representations were made by the United States Government that an order was given for their cessation.

The Massacre in Salmas.

In the plain of Salmas, to the west of Lake Urmi, there are many large and beautiful villages inhabited by Syrians and Armenians. For the most part these people had fled to Russia before the flight from Urmi took place; but their homes and fields shared the same fate as those in Urmi. The Turks found on their arrival there that a good number of Christians had hidden themselves in the houses of friendly Moslems. The Moslem Hadjis were ordered to prepare a letter, which every Christian must sign, stating that they had received kind consideration at the hands of their protectors. This was only a trick on the part of the Turks, for in this way they got to know the names and dwelling-places of about 725 Armenians and Syrians in Salmas. A few days later all these men, roped together in gangs, were marched to the fields at night between Haftevan and Khusrawa, and some were shot, while others were hacked to pieces, in one way and another, in the most horrible fashion. This happened in March, only three days before the return of the Russian troops. This timely arrival of help prevented the women of the place from sharing a like fate.

The Attack on the Syrians in the Turkish Mountains.

The rest of the awful story comes from the Turkish side, where the Patriarch and the larger number of the Syrians live in the mountains of Kurdistan. It was many months before news reached their brethren in Urmi as to what had been happening some hundred miles away. The Patriarch, Mar Shimun, was driven from his home in Quodshanis. He fled to Tiari with all the members of his household. The Patriarch’s house was burnt, together with many other houses, including the house of the English Mission. Mar Shimun, writing to England a few days ago, tells us that for four months he has been a wanderer with his people, carrying on a war with the Turks and Kurds. They only gave up fighting when Turkish artillery was brought against them, which made it impossible for them to offer an effective resistance. Tiari and Tkhuma, both of which districts embrace many Christian villages, have been entirely destroyed. In August last 35,000 mountaineers fled to Salmas, Persia, but the larger part of the Syrians are still in the mountains wandering about from place to place, without food, and with no hope of anyone coming to their relief. The most pathetic part of the story is this. Surma, the Patriarch’s sister, with Esther, her sister-in-law, and three small children, went down to Tchumbar in Tiari in June last for safety. With the approach of the Turkish army they soon had to flee to Dadoush, and from there to the great Church of Mar Audishu, in the Tâl country. They always had to travel on foot with just the clothes they could carry. “Often-times,” Surma writes, “we were hungry, and the little children, who were with us, would fall asleep on the road, as we always had to travel at night.” Surma spent three months in Mar Audishu, expecting to leave at any moment, when the enemy drew near. During that time there was food but almost no water, and none at all could be spared for washing or bathing. Occasionally they walked to a stream to bathe and wash their clothes.

The last day of their stay there was the saddest of all. On that day their brother Ishaya died of fever. Mar Shimun, hearing of his illness, had come over the day before. The enemy was then very near, and they could hear the sound of the guns in Tkhuma. Just when the funeral of their brother was to take place, Surma, Romi, and Esther with her children were compelled to leave the place, lest they should be caught by the enemy. Mar Shimun, two priests, and a few laymen remained behind at this time of danger to bury their brother. The burial service was quickly said and the body hastily interred, and Mar Shimun hastened after the fugitive women and children. They were only just in time, for, a few hours after their departure, the Turks arrived and made straight for the church, having heard that the Patriarch’s household was there.

When writing to us on the 6th October, Mar Shimun says that he is in a village in Salmas, Persia, with his sisters and one or two members of his family. At the present moment there are with him 35,000 Syrians camped out in the plain of Salmas (4,000 feet above sea-level), sleeping in the fields with no clothes to cover them at night, clad in the rags which they have worn for many months, without food or shelter. The British Consul has telegraphed to England to say that unless these people are helped by charitable folk at home, two-thirds of them will die. No Christian nation has ever suffered for their religion as these people, and none has so great a claim on us as this unhappy Syrian remnant.

A List of the Ruined Nestorian Villages. A. BARANDUZ DISTRICT:— 1. Darbaroud. 2. Sardaroud (Armenian). 3. Babaroud. 4. Ardishai. 5. Teka. 6. Alkian. 7. Kurtapa. 8. Shenabad. 9. Kosabad. 10. Mouradaloui. 11. Dizateka. 12. Shimshadjean. 13. Satloui. 14. Aliabad. 15. The Tazakands. 16. Diza of Baranduz. 17. Saralan. 18. Gulpashan.

B. URMI RIVER DISTRICT:— 1. Geogtapa[188] (partly destroyed). 2. Wazerabad. 3. Tcharbash. 4. Sangar—Burzukhan. 5. Sangar—Beglerbegi. 6. Alwaj. 7. Seir. 8. Haidarloui. 9. Mar Sargis. 10. Hasar and Kom. 11. Anhar. 12. Diza Agha Ali.[189] 13. Balaw. 14. Kizilashuk (chiefly Armenian). 15. Gerdabad (chiefly Armenian). 16. Mata d’Zaya and Karagöz.

C. NAZLU RIVER DISTRICT:— 1. Ismael Agha’s Kala. 2. Armudagatch. 3. Kosi.[190] 4. Nazi. 5. Karalari. 6. Shumbulabad. 7. Superghan. 8. Ada. 9. Mushabad. 10. Yengidja. 11. Khaneshan. 12. Sherabad. 13. Gavilan. 14. Djemalabad.

D. TERGAWAR DISTRICT:— All villages, including— 1. Queana. 2. Mawana. 3. Palulan.

E. HAKKIARI DISTRICT (Ottoman territory):— All Tiari. All Tkhoma, except Mazra’a. All Barwar.

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Footnote 188:

400 families, the largest village in the district.

Footnote 189:

Nearest village to the city of Urmi.

Footnote 190:

Only one barn said to be left standing.

148. FIRST EXODUS FROM URMIA: NARRATIVE OF MR. J.D. BARNARD, OF THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY’S ASSYRIAN MISSION; PUBLISHED IN THE “ASSYRIAN MISSION QUARTERLY PAPER,” APRIL, 1915.

I have been asked to give a brief account of our journey home from Urmi. I will merely confine myself to the happenings on the road.

On the 3rd January we got upon our way, but we were in some doubt as to what course to pursue. The army, we were told, was taking the route northwards to Khoi, on the direct road to Russia. However, we did not like to quit the country altogether unless we were absolutely obliged, so we finally decided to make our way round the north of the Lake to Tabriz and there confer with our consul, if he were still present—reports varied on this point. An additional reason for the selection of this route was that M. Cordonnier was going in that direction, and his Customs officials who accompanied him were of incalculable assistance to us, as they knew the road, transacted all necessary business, and acted as an armed escort in case of an encounter with ugly customers by the way.

We had not gone far before we came up with a sight which we shall never forget to our dying day. As far as the eye could reach in either direction was a great river of fugitives, comprising very nearly the whole Christian population of the villages of the Urmi plain. They had had to flee at a moment’s notice with such things as they could carry; a great number were absolutely without food; the nights were bitterly cold; and many old people and little children died by the way. Especially painful was the passage over the high pass leading into the plain of Salmas. It was covered with deep snow, which on the northern slope became ice, and the sight of these poor creatures slipping and stumbling down the steep descent, with the precious beasts of burden falling from fatigue and totally unable to rise again, was one that Belgium could hardly equal. Worst of all was the feeling that we were powerless to render any assistance. Many a mother cried for a lift for her little ones on our horses, but what could one do in the midst of thousands?

On the second day we parted from this sad procession, they going on towards Khoi, and we, as I said above, taking the road eastward round the Lake. We met with all manner of reports by the way; it was quite impossible to learn the truth of what had happened at Tabriz, and we never knew what the next bend in the road was to bring forth. At one halting-place we met with a striking instance of the ups and downs of an oriental career, being overtaken by an ex-official of some importance in the service of the Governor of Urmi, now humbly and shamelessly suing our companion, against whom he had so often worked, for a place in the douanes. As we rounded the end of the Lake we saw a great column of smoke rising up from Sherafkhané, the landing-stage for the boats on the eastern shore, and were informed that the supply of petroleum was being burnt to prevent its falling into the hands of the enemy, the boats having been previously sunk.

On reaching Sofian we found a considerable number of Russian troops in the village, and took courage. We tried to telephone through to Tabriz to enquire who was there, but without success, so left our tired animals to come on in the morning—we had been travelling most of the previous night—while we went on to Tabriz in a carriage which most opportunely happened to be obtainable. We arrived that evening, the fifth day of our wanderings, to find that all the English residents had left some days ago; so we proceeded to the American consulate to ask advice. This was concise and definite: “The Russian troops may leave any minute—the Turks are only nine miles away—you had better get on as fast as you can.” Again fortune favoured us, and we managed to procure a carriage which had just returned from conveying our consul, Mr. Shipley, to the frontier, only waiting a few hours to refresh ourselves, while things were made ready....

149. ERZEROUM: LETTER, DATED 21st MARCH, 1916, FROM THE REV. ROBERT S. STAPLETON TO THE HON. F. WILLOUGHBY SMITH, U.S. CONSUL AT TIFLIS; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

I have just posted a letter to you in reply to yours of the 29th February. This letter comes in the form of a request from the Armenians here. Let me give a few details of happenings here this last year and a half as a preface to the request.

When the mobilisation began here in August, 1914, the Armenians responded to it in goodly numbers and were placed in the ranks as well as in the hospitals as nurses and attendants. During the first half of last year they were taken from the ranks and hospitals and placed in the road-gangs. The doctors and druggists were still retained as such, but pushed to the rear. The artisans of this land were mostly from this race, and many were retained here for such work, as there was need, even after the others were deported last June.

As the Turkish Army is retreating these bands are being massacred in cold blood. Here is an item that was brought to me by the brother of one of our school-girls. He had been in the road-gang and then was put in with a crowd of workers who were preparing a club-house here. In January they were sent to Erzindjan and there lodged in prison. When the Commander and Governor from here arrived there the first order was to take these fifty Armenians out and shoot them. Four escaped by falling and lying under the dead till evening, and then by hard travelling came here. It is said that other gangs are being treated in a similar way.

Now the request is to ask you if you have means to bring these facts to the attention of Mr. Morgenthau, that he might intercede in the name of humanity against this wholesale slaughter of these men who have been working for the Turkish Army. Not a few women and children are being rescued as this side advances, having been kept by the Kurds. We were able to keep about twenty girls, with two women and one of our men teachers, who is still with us as my interpreter.

The Armenians of Russia are spending a great deal of money and time in this rescue work, for which many have come here. They feel very deeply when they hear these reports from the other side of the fighting line. I sincerely hope that some pressure can be brought to bear to stop this cruelty.

A SUMMARY OF ARMENIAN HISTORY UP TO AND INCLUDING THE YEAR 1915.

I. THE EUROPEAN WAR AND ARMENIA.

The War has brought us into a new relation with Armenia and the Armenian people. We knew them before as the name of an ancient civilisation, a stubborn rearguard of Christendom in the East, a scene of mission work and massacres and international rivalry; but only a few of us—missionaries, geographers, travellers and an occasional newspaper correspondent—were personally acquainted with the country and its inhabitants. To most people they remained a name, and when we read of their sufferings or traditions or achievements they made little more impression than the doings of the Hittites and Assyrians, who moved across the same Near Eastern amphitheatre several millenniums ago. We had no living contact, no natural relation, with Armenia in our personal or even in our political life.

Such a relation has suddenly been created between us by the War, and it is one of the strangest ironies of war that it fuses together and illuminates the very fabric it destroys. The civilisation in which we lived was like a labyrinth, so huge and intricate that none of the dwellers in it could altogether grasp its structure, while most of them were barely conscious that it had any structural design at all. But now that the War has caught it and it is all aflame, the unity and symmetry of the building are revealed to the common eye. As the glare lights it up from end to end, it stands out in its glory, in matchless outline and perspective; for the first time (and possibly for the last) we see its parts simultaneously and in proper relation, and realise for one moment the marvel and mystery of this civilisation that is perishing—the subtle, immemorial, unrelaxing effort that raised it up and maintained it, and the impossibility of improvising any equivalent structure in its place. Then the fire masters its prey; the various parts of the labyrinth fall in one by one, the light goes out of them, and nothing is left but smoke and ashes. This is the catastrophe that we are witnessing now, and we do not yet know whether it will be possible to repair it. But if the future is not so dark as it appears, and what has perished can in some measure be restored, our best guide and inspiration in the task will be that momentary, tragic, unique vision snatched out of the catastrophe itself.

The Armenians are not protagonists in the War; they bear none of the guilt for its outbreak and can have little share in the responsibility of building up a better future. But they have been seared more cruelly than any of us by the flames, and, under this fiery ordeal, their individual character as a nation and their part in the community of the civilised world have been thrown into their true relief.

For the first time, England and the Armenians are genuinely in touch with one another. In this desperate struggle between freedom and reaction we are fighting on the same side, striving for the same end. Our lot in the struggle has not, indeed, been the same, for while England is able to act as well as to suffer, the Armenians have suffered with hardly the power to strike a blow. But this difference of external fortune only strengthens the inward moral bond; for we, who are strong, are fighting not merely for this or that political advantage, this or that territorial change, but for a principle. The Powers of the Entente have undertaken the championship of small nationalities that cannot champion themselves. We have solemnly acknowledged our obligation to fulfil our vow in the case of Belgium and Serbia, and now that the Armenians have been overtaken by a still worse fate than the Serbians and the Belgians, their cause, too, has been taken up into the general cause of the Allies. We cannot limit our field in doing battle for our ideal.

It is easier, of course, for the people of France, Great Britain and America to sympathise with Belgium than with a more unfamiliar nation in a distant zone of the War. It needs little imagination to realise acutely that the Belgians are “people like ourselves,” suffering all that we should suffer if the same atrocities were committed upon us; and this realisation was made doubly easy by the speedy publication of minute, abundant, first-hand testimony. The Armenians have no such immediate access to our sympathies, and the initial unfamiliarity can only be overcome by a personal effort on the part of those who give ear to their case; but the evidence on which that case rests has been steadily accumulating, until now it is scarcely less complete or less authoritative than the evidence relating to Belgium. The object of the present volume has been to present the documents to English and American readers in as accurate and orderly a form as possible.

Armenia has not been without witness in her agony. Intense suffering means intense emotional experience, and this emotion has found relief in written records of the intolerable events which obsessed the witnesses’ memories. Some of the writers are Armenians, a larger number are Americans and Europeans who were on the spot, and who were as poignantly affected as the victims themselves. There are a hundred and forty-nine of these documents, and many of them are of considerable length; but in their total effect they are something more than an exhaustive catalogue of the horrors they set out to describe. The flames of war illuminate the structure of the building as well as the destruction of it, and the testimony extorted under this fiery ordeal gives an extraordinarily vivid impression of Armenian life—the life of plain and mountain, town and village, intelligenzia and bourgeoisie and peasantry—at the moment when it was overwhelmed by the European catastrophe.

In Armenia, though not in Europe, the flames have almost burnt themselves out, and, for the moment, we can see nothing beyond smoke and ashes. Life will assuredly spring up again when the ashes are cleared away, for attempts to exterminate nations by atrocity, though certain of producing almost infinite human suffering, have seldom succeeded in their ulterior aim. But in whatever shape the new Armenia arises, it will be something utterly different from the old. The Armenians have been a very typical element in that group of humanity which Europeans call the “Near East,” but which might equally well be called the “Near West” from the Indian or the Chinese point of view[191]. There has been something pathological about the history of this Near Eastern World. It has had an undue share of political misfortunes, and had lain for centuries in a kind of spiritual paralysis between East and West—belonging to neither, partaking paradoxically of both, and wholly unable to rally itself decidedly to one or the other—when it was involved with Europe in the European War. The shock of that crowning catastrophe seems to have brought the spiritual neutrality of the Near East to a violent end, and however dubious the future of Europe may be, it is almost certain that it will be shared henceforth by all that lies between the walls of Vienna and the walls of Aleppo and Tabriz[192]. This final gravitation towards Europe may be a benefit to the Near East or another chapter in its misfortunes—that depends on the condition in which Europe emerges from the War; but, in either case, it will be a new departure in its history. It has been drawn at last into a stronger orbit, and will travel on its own paralytic, paradoxical course no more. This gives a historical interest to any record of Near Eastern life in the last moments of the Ancient Régime, and these Armenian documents supply a record of a very intimate and characteristic kind. The Near East has never been more true to itself than in its lurid dissolution; past and present are fused together in the flare.

II. AN OUTLINE OF ARMENIAN HISTORY.

The documents in this volume tell their own story, and a reader might be ignorant of the places with which they deal and the points of history to which they refer, and yet learn from them more about human life in the Near East than from any study of text-books and atlases. At the same time a general acquaintance with the geographical setting and historical antecedents is clearly an assistance in understanding the full significance of the events recorded here, and as this information is not widely spread or very easily accessible, it has seemed well to publish an outline of it, for the reader’s convenience, in the same volume as the documents themselves. As many as possible of the places referred to are marked on the map at the end of the book, while here, in this historical summary, a brief account may be given of who the Armenians are and where they live.

Like the English, the French and most other nations, the Armenians have developed a specific type of countenance, and yet it would not always be easy to tell them by sight, for they are as hybrid in their physical stock as every other European or Near Eastern people. There are marked differences of pigmentation, feature and build between the Armenians of the East, West and South, and between the mountaineers, plain-dwellers and people of the towns, and it would be rash to speculate when these various strains came in, or to lay it down that they were not all present already at the date at which we first begin to know something about the inhabitants of the country[193].

We hear of them first in the annals of Assyria, where the Armenian plateau appears as the land of Nairi—a no-man’s-land, raided constantly but ineffectually by Assyrian armies from the lowlands of Mosul. But in the ninth century B.C. the petty cantons of Nairi coalesced into the Kingdom of Urartu[194], which fought Assyria on equal terms for more than two hundred years and has left a native record of its own. The Kings of Urartu made their dwelling on the citadel of Van[195]. The face of the rock is covered with their inscriptions, which are also found as far afield as the neighbourhood of Malatia, Erzeroum and Alexandropol. They borrowed from Assyria the cuneiform script, and the earliest inscriptions at Van are written in the Assyrian language; but they quickly adapted the foreign script to their native tongue, which has been deciphered by English and German scholars, and is considered by them to be neither Semitic nor Indo-European, nor yet to have any discernible affinity with the still obscurer language of the Hittites further west. We can only assume that the people who spoke it were indigenous in the land. Probably they were of one blood with their neighbours in the direction of the Caucasus and the Black Sea, Saspeires[196] and Chalybes and others; and if, as ethnology seems to show, an indigenous stock is practically ineradicable, these primitive peoples of the plateau are probably the chief ancestors, in the physical sense, of the present Armenian race[197].

The modern Armenian language, on the other hand, is not descended from the language of Urartu, but is an Indo-European tongue. There is a large non-Indo-European element in it—larger than in most known branches of the Indo-European family—and this has modified its syntax as well as its vocabulary. It has also borrowed freely and intimately from the Persian language in all its phases—a natural consequence of the political supremacy which Iran asserted over Armenia again and again, from the sixth century B.C. to the nineteenth century A.D. But when all these accretions have been analysed and discarded, the philologists pronounce the basis of modern Armenian to be a genuine Indo-European idiom—either a dialect of the Iranian branch or an independent variant, holding an intermediate position between Iranian and Slavonic.

This language is a much more important factor in the national consciousness of the modern Armenians than their ultimate physical ancestry, but its origin is also more difficult to trace. Its Indo-European character proves that, at some date or other, it must have been introduced into the country from without[198], and the fact that a non-Indo-European language held the field under the Kings of Urartu suggests that it only established itself after the Kingdom of Urartu fell. But the earliest literary monuments of the modern tongue only date from the fifth century A.D., a thousand years later than the last inscription in the Urartian language, so that, as far as the linguistic evidence is concerned, the change may have occurred at any time within this period. One language, however, does not usually supplant another without considerable displacements of population, and the only historical event of this kind sufficient in scale to produce such a result seems to be the migration of the Cimmerians and Scythians in the seventh century B.C. These were nomadic tribes from the Russian steppes, who made their way round the eastern end of the Caucasus, burst through into the Moghan plains and the basin of Lake Urmia, and terrorised Western Asia for several generations, till they were broken by the power of the Medes and absorbed in the native population. It was they who made an end of the Kingdom of Urartu, and the language they brought with them was probably an Indo-European dialect answering to the basic element in modern Armenian. Probability thus points to these seventh century invaders as being the source of the present language, and perhaps also of the equally mysterious names of “Hai(k)” and “Haiasdan,” by which the speakers of this language seem always to have called themselves and their country. But this is a conjecture, and nothing more[199], and we are left with the bare fact that Armenian[200] was the established language of the land by the fifth century A.D.

The Armenian language might easily have perished and left less record of its existence than the Urartian. It is a vigorous language enough, yet it would never have survived in virtue of its mere vitality. The native Anatolian dialects of Lydia and Cilicia, and the speech of the Cappadocians[201], the Armenians’ immediate neighbours on the west, were extinguished one by one by the irresistible advance of Greek, and Armenian would assuredly have shared their fate if it had not become the canonical language of a national church before Greek had time to penetrate so far eastward. Armenia lay within the radius of Antioch and Edessa (Ourfa), two of the earliest and strongest centres of Christian propaganda. King Tiridates (Drdat) of Armenia was converted to Christianity some time during the latter half of the third century A.D.[202] and was the first ruler in the world to establish the Christian Faith as his State religion. Christianity in Armenia adopted a national garb from the first. In 410 A.D. the Bible was translated into the Armenian language, in a new native script specially invented for the purpose, and this achievement was followed by a great outburst of national literature during the course of the fifth century. These fifth century works are, as has been said, the earliest monuments of the Armenian language. Most of them, it is true, are simply rather painstaking translations of Greek and Syriac theology, and the bulk of the creative literature was theological too. But there was also a notable school of historical writers (Moses of Khorene is its most famous representative), and the really important result of the stimulus that Christianity brought was the permanent preservation of the language’s existence and its development into a medium for a national literature of a varied kind.

Thus the conversion of Armenia to Christianity, which took place at a more or less ascertainable date, was an even more important factor in the evolution of Armenian nationality than the original introduction of the national language, and the Armenians have done well to make St. Gregory the Illuminator, the Cappadocian Missionary to whom the conversion was due, their supreme national hero[203]. Henceforth, church and language mutually sustained each other, to the great enhancement of the vital power of both. They were, in fact, merely complementary aspects of the same national consciousness, and the national character of the church was further emphasised when it diverged in doctrine from the main body of Christendom—not by the formulation of any new or heretical dogma, but by omission to ratify the modifications of the primitive creed which were introduced by the Œcumenical Councils of the fifth century A.D.[204]

This nationalisation of the church was the decisive process by which the Armenians became a nation, and it was also this that made them an integral part of the Near Eastern world. Christianity linked the country with the West as intimately as the cuneiform script of Urartu had linked it with the civilisation of Mesopotamia; and the Near Eastern phenomenon consists essentially in the paradox that a series of populations on the borderland of Europe and Asia developed a national life that was thoroughly European in its religion and culture, without ever succeeding in extricating themselves politically from that continual round of despotism and anarchy which seems to be the political dispensation of genuinely Oriental countries.

No communities in the world have had a more troubled political history than these Near Eastern nationalities, and none have known how to preserve their church and their language so doggedly through the most appalling vicissitudes of conquest and oppression. In this regard the history of Armenia is profoundly characteristic of the Near East as a whole.

The strong, compact Kingdom of Urartu lies at the dawn of Armenian history like a golden age. It had only existed two centuries when it was shattered by the invaders from the Russian steppes, and the anarchy into which they plunged the country had to be cured by the imposition of a foreign rule. In 585 B.C. the nomads were cowed and the plateau annexed by Cyaxares the Mede, and, after the Persians had taken over the Medes’ inheritance, the great organiser Darius divided this portion of it into two governments or satrapies. One of these seems to have included the basins of Urmia and Van, and part of the valley of the Aras[205]; the other corresponded approximately to the modern Vilayets of Bitlis, Mamouret-ul-Aziz and Diyarbekir, and covered the upper valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates[206]. They were called respectively the satrapies of Eastern and Western Armenia, and this is the origin of the name by which the Haik and their Haiasdan are now almost universally known to their neighbours. The word “Armenia” (Armina)[207] first appears in Darius’ inscriptions; the Greeks adopted it from the Persian official usage, and from the Greeks it has spread to the rest of the world, including the Osmanli Turks[208].

Under the Persian Dynasty of the Achæmenids and their Macedonian successors, the two Armenian satrapies remained mere administrative divisions. Subject to the payment of tribute, the satraps were practically independent and probably hereditary, but the rulers’ autonomy did not enable their subjects to develop any distinctive national life. In religion and culture the country took on a strong Persian veneer; and the situation was not essentially changed when, early in the second century B.C., the two reigning satraps revolted simultaneously from their overlord, the Seleucid King of Western Asia[209], and each founded a royal dynasty of their own. The decisive change was accomplished by Tigranes (Dikran) the Great (94 to 56 B.C.), a scion of the Eastern Dynasty, who welded the two principalities into one kingdom, and so created the first strong native sovereignty that the country had known since the fall of Urartu five centuries before.

If Gregory the Illuminator is the ecclesiastical hero of Armenia, King Tigranes is his political forerunner and counterpart. He was connected by marriage with Mithradates, the still more famous King of Pontic Cappadocia, who may be taken as the first exponent of the Near Eastern idea. Mithradates attempted to build an empire that should be at once cosmopolitan and national, Hellenic and Iranian, of the West and of the East, and Tigranes was profoundly influenced by his brilliant neighbour and ally. He set himself the parallel ambition of reconstructing round his own person the kingdom of the Seleucids, which had been shaken a century before by a rude encounter with Rome, weakened still further by the defection of Tigranes’ own predecessors, and was now in the actual throes of dissolution. He laid himself out a new capital on the northern rim of the Mesopotamian steppe, somewhere near the site of Ibrahim Pasha’s Viran Shehr, and peopled it with masses of exiles deported from the Greek cities he devastated in Syria and Cilicia. It was to be the Hellenistic world-centre for an Oriental King of Kings; but all his dreams, like Mithradates’, were shattered by the methodical progress of the Roman power. A Roman army ignominiously turned Tigranes out of Tigranokerta, and sent back his Greek exiles rejoicing to their homes. The new Armenian kingdom failed to establish its position as a great power, and had to accept the position of a buffer state between Rome on the west and the Parthian rulers of Iran. Nevertheless, Tigranes’ work is of supreme political importance in Armenian history. He had consolidated the two satrapies of Darius into a united kingdom, powerful enough to preserve its unity and independence for nearly five hundred years. It was within this chrysalis that the interaction of religion and language produced the new germ of modern Armenian nationality; and when the chrysalis was rent at last, the nation emerged so strongly grown that it could brave the buffets of the outer world.

Before Tigranes, Armenia had belonged wholly to the East. Tigranes loosened these links and knit certain new links with the West. The period that followed was marked by a perpetual struggle between the Roman and Parthian Governments for political influence over the kingdom, which was really a battle over Armenia’s soul. Was Armenia to be wrested away altogether from Oriental influences and rallied to the European world, or was it to sink back into being a spiritual and political appanage of Iran? It seemed a clear issue, but it was not destined to be decided in either sense. Armenia was to be caught for two millenniums in the uncertain eddy of the Nearer East.

In this opposition of forces, the political balance inclined from the first in favour of the Oriental Power. The Parthians succeeded in replacing the descendants of Tigranes by a junior branch of their own Arsacid Dynasty; and when, in 387 A.D., the rivals agreed to settle the Armenian question by the drastic expedient of partition, the Sassanid kings of Persia (who had superseded the Parthians in the Empire of Iran) secured the lion’s share of the spoils, while the Romans only received a strip of country on the western border which gave them Erzeroum and Diyarbekir for their frontier fortresses. In the cultural sphere, on the other hand, the West was constantly increasing its ascendancy. King Tiridates was an Arsacid, but he accepted Christianity as the religion of the State he ruled; and when, less than a century after his death, his kingdom fell and the greater part of the country and the people came directly under Persian rule, the Persian propaganda failed to make any impression. No amount of preaching or persecution could persuade the Armenians to accept Zoroastrianism, which was the established religion of the Sassanian State. They clung to their national church in despite of their political annihilation, and showed thereby that their spiritual allegiance was given irrevocably to the West.

The partition of 387 A.D. produced as long a political interregnum in Armenian history as the fall of Urartu in the seventh century B.C. In the second quarter of the seventh century A.D., the mastery of Western Asia passed from the Persians to the Arabs, and the Armenian provinces changed masters with the rest. Persian governors appointed by the Sassanid King of Kings were superseded by Arab governors appointed by the Omayyad and Abbasid Caliphs, and the intolerance of Zoroastrianism was replaced by the far stronger and hardly less intolerant force of Islam. Then, in the ninth century, the political power of the Abbasid Caliphate at Baghdad began to decline, the outlying provinces were able to detach themselves, and three independent dynasties emerged on Armenian soil:—

(a) The Bagratids founded a Christian principality in the north. Their capital was at Ani, in the upper basin of the Aras, and their rule in this district lasted nearly two centuries, from 885 to 1079 A.D.

(b) The Ardzrounids founded a similar Christian principality in the basin of Van. They reigned here from 908 to 1021 A.D.

(c) The Merwanids, a Kurdish dynasty, founded a Moslem principality in the upper basin of the Tigris. Their capital was at Diyarbekir, but their power extended northward over the mountains into the valley of the Mourad Su (Eastern Euphrates), which they controlled as far upwards as Melazkerd. They maintained themselves for a century, from 984 to 1085 A.D.

The imposing remains of churches and palaces at Ani and elsewhere have cast an undue glamour over the Bagratid House, which has been extended, again, to all the independent principalities of early mediæval Armenia. In reality, this phase of Armenian history was hardly more happy than that which preceded it, and only appeared a Golden Age by comparison with the cataclysms that followed. From the national point of view it was almost as barren as the century of satrapial independence which preceded the reign of Tigranes, and in the politics of this period parochialism was never transcended. Bagratids and Ardzrounids were bitter rivals for the leadership of the nation, and did not scruple to call in Moslem allies against one another in their constant wars. The south-western part of the country remained under the rule of an alien Moslem dynasty, without any attempt being made to cast them out. Armenia had no second Tigranes in the Middle Ages, and the local renewals of political independence came and went without profit to the nation as a whole, which still depended for its unity upon the ecclesiastical tradition of the national Gregorian Church.

In the eleventh century A.D., a new power appeared in the East. The Arab Empire of the Caliphs had long been receiving an influx of Turks from Central Asia as slaves and professional soldiers, and the Turkish bodyguard had assumed control of politics at Baghdad. But this individual infiltration was now succeeded by the migration of whole tribes, and the tribes were organised into a political power by the clan of Seljuk. The new Turkish dynasty constituted itself the temporal representative of the Abbasid Caliphate, and the dominion of Mohammedan Asia was suddenly transferred from the devitalised Arabs to a vigorous barbaric horde of nomadic Turks.

These Turkish reinforcements brutalised and at the same time stimulated the Islamic world, and the result was a new impetus of conquest towards the borderlands. The brunt of this movement fell upon the unprepared and disunited Armenian principalities. In the first quarter of the eleventh century the Seljuks began their incursions on to the Armenian plateau. The Armenian princes turned for protection to the East Roman Empire, accepted its suzerainty, or even surrendered their territory directly into its hands. But the Imperial Government brought little comfort to the Armenian people. Centred at Constantinople and cut off from the Latin West, it had lost its Roman universality and become transformed into a Greek national state, while the established Orthodox Church had developed the specifically Near Eastern character of a nationalist ecclesiastical organisation. The Armenians found that incorporation in the Empire exposed them to temporal and spiritual Hellenisation, without protecting them against the common enemy on the east. The Seljuk invasions increased in intensity, and culminated, in 1071 A.D., in the decisive battle of Melazkerd, in which the Imperial Army was destroyed and the Emperor Romanos II. taken prisoner on the field. Melazkerd placed the whole of Armenia at the Seljuk’s mercy—and not only Armenia, but the Anatolian provinces of the Empire that lay between Armenia and Europe. The Seljuks carried Islam into the heart of the Near East.

The next four-and-a-half centuries were the most disastrous period in the whole political history of Armenia. It is true that a vestige of independence was preserved, for Roupen the Bagratid conducted a portion of his people south-westward into the mountains of Cilicia, where they were out of the main current of Turkish invasion, and founded a new principality which survived nearly three hundred years (1080-1375). There is a certain romance about this Kingdom of Lesser Armenia. It threw in its lot with the Crusaders, and gave the Armenian nation its first direct contact with modern Western Europe. But the mass of the race remained in Armenia proper, and during these centuries the Armenian tableland suffered almost ceaseless devastation.

The Seljuk migration was only the first wave in a prolonged outbreak of Central Asiatic disturbance, and the Seljuks were civilised in comparison with the tribes that followed on their heels. Early in the thirteenth century came Karluks and Kharizmians, fleeing across Western Asia before the advance of the Mongols; and in 1235 came the first great raid of the Mongols themselves—savages who destroyed civilisation wherever they found it, and were impartial enemies of Christendom and Islam. All these waves of invasion took the same channel. They swept across the broad plateau of Persia, poured up the valleys of the Aras and the Tigris, burst in their full force upon the Armenian highlands and broke over them into Anatolia beyond. Armenia bore the brunt of them all, and the country was ravaged and the population reduced quite out of proportion to the sufferings of the neighbouring regions. The division of the Mongol conquests among the family of Djengis Khan established a Mongol dynasty in Western Asia which seated itself in Azerbaijan, accepted Islam and took over the tradition of the Seljuks, the Abbasids and the Sassanids. It was the old Asiatic Empire under a new name, but it had now incorporated Armenia and extended north-westwards to the Kizil Irmak (Halys). For the first time since Tigranes, the whole of Armenia was reabsorbed again in the East, and the situation grew still worse when the Empire of these “Ilkhans” fell to pieces and was succeeded in the fifteenth century by the petty lordship of Ak Koyunli, Kara Koyunli and other nomadic Turkish clans.

The progressive anarchy of four centuries was finally stilled by the rise of the Osmanli power. The seed of the Osmanlis was one of those Turkish clans which fled across Western Asia before the Mongols. They settled in the dominions of the Seljuk Sultans, who had established themselves at Konia, in Central Anatolia, and who allowed the refugees to carve out an obscure appanage on the marches of the Greek Empire, in the Asiatic hinterland of Constantinople. The son and successor of the founder was here converted from Paganism to Islam[210], towards the end of the thirteenth century A.D., and the name of Osman, which he adopted at his conversion, has been borne ever since by the subjects of his House.

The Osmanli State is the greatest and most characteristic Near Eastern Empire there has ever been. In its present decline it has become nothing but a blight to all the countries and peoples that remain under its sway; but at the outset it manifested a faculty for strong government which satisfied the supreme need of the distracted Near Eastern world. This was the secret of its amazing power of assimilation, and this quality in turn increased its power of organisation, for it enabled the Osmanlis to monopolise all the vestiges of political genius that survived in the Near East. The original Turkish germ was quickly absorbed in the mass of Osmanlicised native Greeks[211]. The first expansion of the State was westward, across the Dardanelles, and before the close of the fourteenth century the whole of South-Eastern Europe had become Osmanli territory, as far as the Danube and the Hungarian frontier. The seal was set on these European conquests when Sultan Mohammed II. entered Constantinople in 1453, and then the current of expansion veered towards the east. Mohammed himself absorbed the rival Turkish principalities in Anatolia, and annexed the Greek “Empire” of Trebizond. In the second decade of the sixteenth century, Sultan Selim I. followed this up with a sweeping series of campaigns, which carried him with hardly a pause from the Taurus barrier to the citadel of Cairo. Armenia was overrun in 1514; the petty Turkish chieftains were overthrown, the new Persian Empire was hurled back to the Caspian, and a frontier established between the Osmanli Sultans and the Shahs of Iran, which has endured, with a few fluctuations, until the present day.

In the sixteenth century the whole Near Eastern world, from the gates of Vienna[212] to the gates of Aleppo and Tabriz, found itself united under a single masterful Government, and once more Armenia was linked securely with the West. From 1514 onwards the great majority of the Armenian nation was subject to the Osmanli State. It is true that the province of Erivan (on the middle course of the Aras) was recovered by the Persians in the seventeenth century, and held by them till its cession to Russia in 1834. But, with this exception, the whole of Armenia remained under Osmanli rule until the Russians took Kars, in the war of 1878. These intervening centuries of union and pacification were, on the whole, beneficial to Armenia; but with the year 1878 there began a new and sinister epoch in the relations between the Osmanli State and the Armenian nation.

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Footnote 191:

There seems to be no available name to convey the Janus-character of this region. “Balkan” has all the connotation, but the word is allocated already to a much too limited geographical area. “Levantine” covers a wider geographical field, but suggests merely the superficial characteristics which the Near Eastern peoples share with many others in a certain transient stage of development.

Footnote 192:

The limits of the Near East are not easy to define. On the north-west, Vienna is the most conspicuous boundary-mark, but one might almost equally well single out Trieste or Lvov or even Prag. Towards the south-east, the boundaries are even more shadowy. It is perhaps best to equate them with the frontiers of the Arabic language, yet the genius of the Near East overrides linguistic barriers, and encroaches on the Arabic-speaking world on the one side as well as on the German-speaking world on the other. Syria is essentially a Near Eastern country, and a physical geographer would undoubtedly carry the Near Eastern frontiers up to the desert belt of the Sahara, Nefud and Kevir.

Footnote 193:

There is one physical type, classified by ethnologists as “Armenoid” or “Anatolian,” which seems to be both indigenous and persistent in the Anatolian Peninsula and in the triangle included between the Black Sea, the Mediterranean and the Caspian. Its characteristics are very individual—a “sugarloaf” skull, broad from side to side and sliced off at the back; prominent cheek-bones; a fleshy, hooked nose; and a rather clumsy, thick-set body. These features are distinguishable in the ancient Hittites of Eastern Anatolia, as they are portrayed in the native and Egyptian monuments of the 14th and 13th centuries B.C.; in the modern Tchatchadzé nomads of Lycia (the extreme South-West of the Peninsula); and in a considerable percentage of the living Armenian people, scattered all over the Near East.

Footnote 194:

Called “Ararat” in the Bible and “Alarodioi” by Herodotus.

Footnote 195:

“The City of Dhuspas (Tosp) in the land of Biaina (Van).” In the course of history the names have been transposed; Van is now the town, and Tosp the district.

Footnote 196:

Round the present town of Isbir, in the Tchorok Valley.

Footnote 197:

The chief evidence for the racial unity of all these primitive populations is the survival of the name of Khaldis, the national god of Urartu, throughout the Armenian plateau. On the banks of the Aras we have the district of Khaldiran, and the northern affluents of the river are fed by Lake Khaldir. Further west, the modern Vilayet of Trebizond was called the Province of Khaldia under the late Roman Empire, and there is still a Diocese of Khaldia maintained by the Orthodox Greek Church in the immediate hinterland of Trebizond.

Footnote 198:

The original focus from which the Indo-European languages spread having been situated apparently in what is now Austria-Hungary and the Ukraine.

Footnote 199:

It is equally possible that the modern Armenian language was introduced into the country at an earlier date, and existed there side by side with the official language of the Urartu inscriptions. Egyptian records show that an Iranian people, the Mitanni (Matienoi), were established in Northern Mesopotamia as early as the 16th century B.C., and their name clung to the Urmia basin as late as Strabo’s day. They were the western outposts of Indo-European settlement on the Iranian plateau. On the whole, however the Mitanni are more likely to have been the originators of the Kurdish language than of the Armenian.

Footnote 200:

In the classical form, of which the spoken language of to-day is a development.

Footnote 201:

Probably a synthesis of Hittite and Cimmerian, corresponding to the Urartu-Scythian blend which we have suggested as the origin of Armenian.

Footnote 202:

The traditional date varies from 261 to 301 A.D.

Footnote 203:

A suggestive parallel to the way in which another foreign missionary, St. Patrick, has become the national hero of Ireland.

Footnote 204:

In 553 A.D. the national individuality of the Gregorian (Armenian) Church was given formal expression by the foundation of a new ecclesiastical era.

Footnote 205:

Herodotus’ “Province of the Matienoi, Alarodioi and Saspeires.”

Footnote 206:

This is the probable extent of Herodotus’ puzzling “Province of the Armenians and Paktyes,” and the certain extent of the later Sophene.

Footnote 207:

The provenance of this name is as obscure as every other problem of Armenian origins. It may mean “the land of Erimenas,” a king of Urartu, known from an inscription on a votive offering at Van, just as the neighbouring province of Azerbaijan derives its name from the satrap Atropates; or (as Lord Bryce suggests) it may be a “portmanteau word,” perhaps compounded of Urartu and Minni, the Assyrian name for the upper basin of the Greater Zab. The name of Kat-Patuka (Cappadocia) is a possible analogy to this latter suggestion.

Footnote 208:

Turkish “Ermen-ler.”

Footnote 209:

The Seleucid Dynasty had inherited most of the Asiatic dominions acquired by Alexander the Great when he conquered the Achæmenid (Persian) Empire.

Footnote 210:

This is the view of Mr. Herbert Adams Gibbons, the most recent historian of the early Ottoman Empire.

Footnote 211:

The people of the East Roman Empire in its latter days were Greeks in the sense that they spoke the “Romaic” modification of the Ancient Greek language; but most of them had only become Greeks by the loss of their native language at the date when the Armenians, unlike them, had successfully preserved theirs.

Footnote 212:

The Osmanlis besieged Vienna twice, and held a frontier within ninety miles of it for a century and a half.

III. DISPERSION AND DISTRIBUTION OF THE ARMENIAN NATION.

We have now traced the political vicissitudes of Armenia down to its incorporation in the Ottoman Empire, and are in a position to survey the effects of this troubled political history on the social life and the geographical extension of the Armenian people.

At the present day the Armenians are, next to the Jews, the most scattered nation in the world, but this phenomenon does not begin to appear until a comparatively late stage in their history. At the time of the Partition of 387 A.D. they were still confined to a compact territory between the Euphrates, Lake Urmia and the River Kur. It was the annexation of the western marches to the Roman Empire that gave the first impetus to Armenian migration towards the west. After 387 A.D. the Roman frontier garrisons were moved forward into the new Armenian provinces, and these troops were probably recruited in the main, according to the general Roman custom, from the local population. But in the middle of the seventh century the Roman frontiers were shorn away by the advance of the new Arab power; the garrisons beyond the Euphrates were withdrawn towards the north-west, and, after a century of darkness and turmoil, during which all the old landmarks were effaced, we find that the “Armeniac Army Corps District” has shifted from the banks of the Euphrates to the banks of the Halys (Kizil Irmak) and become approximately coincident with the modern Vilayet of Sivas. This transference of the troops must have meant in itself a considerable transference of Armenians, and it can be taken for granted that the retiring armies were accompanied by a certain portion of the civilian population. We can thus date back to the seventh century the beginning of those flourishing Armenian colonies in the towns of north-eastern Anatolia which suffered so terribly in the ordeal of 1915.

The mountain zone between the Roman fortress of Sivas (Sebasteia) on the Halys and the Arab posts along the Euphrates, from Malatia to Erzeroum, was now debatable territory between the Moslem and the Christian Empires, and in the eighth century it was held by an independent community of Armenian heretics called Paulikians. These Paulikians led an untamed, Ishmaelitish existence. They were excommunicated for their tenets by the Gregorian Armenian Church, as well as by the Orthodox Patriarch at Constantinople, and they raided impartially in the territories of the Roman Empire and the Arab Caliphate. The Emperors waged against them a war of extermination, and anticipated the present Ottoman policy by deporting them from their mountain fastnesses to the opposite ends of the Imperial territory. In 752 A.D. a number of them were settled in Thrace, to exercise their military prowess in holding the frontier against the Bulgars; and, in 969 A.D., the Emperor John Tzimiskes (himself an Armenian) transplanted a further body of them to Philippopolis. It may be doubted whether there is any direct connexion between them and the present (Gregorian) Armenian colony in the latter city, but their numbers and influence must have been considerable, if one may judge by the vigorous spread of their tenets among the Bulgars and the Southern Slavs, and they are noteworthy as the forerunners of the Armenian Dispersion in Europe, as well as of the Protestant Reformation.[213]

Migrations on a larger scale were produced by the Turkish invasions of the eleventh century. In 1021 A.D., for instance, the Ardzrounian Dynasty of Van surrendered its home territory to the Roman Empire in exchange for a more sheltered principality at Sivas. It only reigned sixty years in exile before it was overwhelmed there also by the advance of the Turkish tide; but the present Armenian villages in the Sivas Vilayet are doubtless derived from these Ardzrounian refugees. In the very year, again, in which the sovereignty of the Ardzrounids was extinguished at Sivas, the Bagratids of Ani founded themselves a second kingdom in Cilicia. We have spoken of this kingdom already; it is represented to-day by a chain of Armenian mountain towns and villages which stretches all the way from the headwaters of the Sihoun (Saros) and Djihoun (Pyramos) to the shores of the Gulf of Alexandretta.

The still more terrible invasions of the thirteenth century scattered the Armenians even further afield. The relations of Lesser Armenia with the Crusader Principalities opened for the Armenians a door into Western Europe. When the Roupenian Dynasty became extinct, it was succeeded by a branch of the French House of Lusignan summoned from Cyprus, and in 1335 there was the first secession from the national Gregorian Church to the Communion of Rome. These new adherents to the Papal allegiance spread far and wide over Latin Christendom. A strong colony of Armenian Catholics established itself at Lemberg, recently won by Polish conquest for the Catholic Church; and others settled at Venice, the European focus of the Levantine trade. In this Venetian settlement the tradition of Armenian culture was kept alive by the famous brotherhood of Mekhitarist Monks. They founded the first Armenian printing press here, in 1565, and maintained a constant issue of Armenian publications. Their greatest work was a magnificent thesaurus of the Armenian language, which appeared in 1836.

This Roman Catholic connexion has been of very great importance in preserving the link between Armenia and the west, and since the beginning of the nineteenth century the bonds have been strengthened by a Protestant strand. The American Missions in Turkey were founded in 1831. Debarred by the Ottoman Government from entering into relations with the Moslem population, they devoted themselves to the Christian elements, and the Armenians availed themselves more eagerly than any other Near Eastern nationality[214] of the gifts which the Americans offered. Four generations of mission work have produced a strong Protestant Armenian community, but proselytism has not been the deliberate object of the missionaries. They have set themselves to revive and not to convert the national Armenian Church, and their schools and hospitals have been open to all who would attend them, without distinction of creed. Their wide and well-planned educational activity has always been the distinctive feature of these American Missions in the Ottoman Empire. Besides the famous Robert College and the College for Women on the Bosphorus, they have established schools and other institutions in many of the chief provincial towns, with fine buildings and full staffs of well-trained American and Armenian teachers. Due acknowledgment must also be given to the educational work of the Swiss Protestants and of the Jesuits; but it can hardly compare with the work of the Americans in scale, and will scarcely play the same part in Armenian history. There is little need here to speak in praise of the American missionaries; their character will shine out to anyone who reads the documents in this volume. Their religion inspires their life and their work, and their utter sincerity has given them an extraordinary influence over all with whom they come in contact. The Ottoman Government has trusted and respected them, because they are the only foreign residents in Turkey who are entirely disinterested on political questions; the Gregorian Church cooperates with them and feels no jealousy, and all sections of the Armenian nation love them, because they come to give and not to get, and their gifts are without guile[215]. America is exercising an unobtrusive but incalculable influence over the Near East. In the nineteenth century the missionaries came to its rescue from America; in the twentieth century the return movement has set in, and the Near Eastern people are migrating in thousands across the Atlantic. The Armenians are participating in this movement at least as actively as the Greeks, the Roumans, the Serbs, the Montenegrins and the Slovaks, and one can already prophesy with assurance that their two-fold contact with America is the beginning of a new chapter in Armenian history.

Meanwhile the subjection of Armenia proper to the Mongol Ilkhans for nearly two centuries, and subsequently to the Shahs of modern Persia for certain transitory periods, produced a lesser, but not unimportant, dispersion towards the east. In the seventeenth century the skilled and cultured Armenian population of Djoulfa, on the River Aras, was carried away captive to the Persian capital of Ispahan, where the exiles started a printing press and established a centre of Armenian civilisation. Ever since then the Armenian element has been a factor in the politics and the social development of Iran, and from this new centre they have spread over the Indian Peninsula hand in hand with the extension of British rule.

Thus the Armenian nation has been scattered, in the course of the centuries, from Calcutta to New York, and has shown remarkable vitality in adapting itself to every kind of alien environment[216]. The reverse side of the picture is the uprooting of the nation from its native soil. The immigrant tribes from Central Asia did not make a permanent lodgment in the Armenian homelands. Some of them drifted back into Azerbaijan and the steppe country along the coast of the Caspian and the lower courses of the Aras and the Kur; others were carried on towards the north-west, along the ancient Royal Road, and imposed the Moslem faith and the Turkish language upon the population of Central Anatolia. The Armenian plateau, entrenched between Tigris, Euphrates and Aras, stood out like a rock, dividing these two Turkish eddies. Nevertheless, the perpetual shock of the Seljuk and the Mongol raids relaxed the hold of the Armenians on the plateau. The people of the land were decimated by these invasions, and when the invaders had passed on beyond or vanished away, the terrible gaps in the ranks of the sedentary population of Armenia proper were filled by nomadic Kurdish shepherds from the south-east, who drifted into Old Armenia from the mountain girdle of Iran, just as the Albanians drifted into the Kossovo Plain from their own less desirable highlands, after the population of Old Serbia had been similarly decimated by the constant passage of the Ottoman armies.

This Kurdish penetration of Armenia had begun already by the tenth century A.D.; it was far advanced when the Osmanlis annexed the country in 1514, and it was confirmed by the policy of the Ottoman Government, which sought to secure its new territories by granting privileges to the Kurdish intruders and inviting their influx in greater numbers from their homelands in the sphere of influence of the rival Persian Empire. The juxtaposition of nomad and cultivator, dominant Moslem and subject Giaour, was henceforth an ever-present irritant in the social and political conditions of the land; but it did not assume a fatal and sinister importance until after the year 1878, when it was fiendishly exploited by the Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid.

But before we examine the relations between the Armenian nation and the Ottoman Government, it will be well to survey the distribution of the Armenian element in the Ottoman Empire, as it had developed during the four centuries of Ottoman rule that elapsed between the campaign of Selim I. and the intervention of Turkey in the present European War. The survey shall be brief, for it has been anticipated, sometimes in greater detail, in the separate notes prefixed to the different groups of documents in the volume.

A traveller entering Turkey by the Oriental Railway from Central Europe would have begun to encounter Armenians at Philippopolis in Bulgaria, and then at Adrianople, the first Ottoman city across the frontier. Had he visited any of the lesser towns of Thrace, he would have found much of the local trade and business in Armenian hands, and when he arrived at Constantinople he would have become aware that the Armenians were one of the most important elements in the Ottoman Empire. He would have seen them as financiers, as export and import merchants, as organisers of wholesale stores; and when he crossed the Bosphorus and explored the suburban districts on the Asiatic side, he might even have fancied that the Armenian population in the Empire was numerically equal to the Turkish. The coast of the Sea of Marmora was overlooked by flourishing Armenian villages; at Armasha, above Ismid, there was a large Theological Seminary of the Gregorian Church, and there were important Swiss and American institutions at Bardizag (Baghtchedjik) and Adapazar. At Adapazar alone the Armenian population numbered 25,000.

Beyond Adapazar, however, the Armenian element dwindled, and anyone who followed the Anatolian Railway across Asia Minor to the rail-head in the northern spurs of Taurus, would have felt that he was travelling through an essentially Turkish land. There were colonies of Armenian artisans and shopkeepers and business men in important places on the line, like Afiun Kara Hissar or Konia; but there were an equal number of Greeks, and both in town and country the Turks outnumbered them all. But once Taurus was crossed, the Armenians came again to the fore. They were as much at home in the Cilician plain and coastland as on the littoral of the Sea of Marmora and the Bosphorus. Adana, Tarsus and Mersina, with their Armenian churches and schools, had the same appearance of being Armenian cities as Adapazar or Ismid: and if at this point the traveller had left the beaten track and worked his way up north-eastward into the Cilician highlands, he would have found himself for the first time in an almost exclusively Armenian country, and would have remarked a higher percentage of Armenians in the population than in any other district of Turkey till he came to Van. But this belt of Armenian villages, though thickly set, was quickly passed, and when you emerged on the south-eastern side of it and stepped out on to the rim of the Mesopotamian amphitheatre, you had reached one of the boundaries of the Armenian Dispersion. There were Armenian outposts in the cities of the fringe—Marash, Aintab, Ourfa, Aleppo—but as soon as you plunged into the Mesopotamian steppe or the Syrian desert you were in the Arabic world, and had left Armenia behind[217].

The traveller would have seen more of the Armenians if he had turned off from the Anatolian Railway at Eski Shehr, a few hours’ journey south of Adapazar, and taken the branch line eastward to Angora. At Angora the Armenians were again a conspicuous element, and the further east you went from Angora the more they increased in social and numerical importance. Beyond the Kizil Irmak (Halys), in the Sandjak of Kaisaria and the Vilayet of Sivas, they constituted the great majority of the urban middle class. The strongest centres of Armenian national life in Turkey were towns like Marsovan, Amasia, Zila, Tokat, Shabin Kara-Hissar or the City of Sivas itself, or such smaller places as Talas and Everek in the neighbourhood of Kaisaria. In all this region Turks and Armenians were about equally balanced, Turks in the country and Armenians in the town, and the proportions were the same in the riviera zone along the Black Sea coast—Samsoun and Kerasond and Trebizond—though here other racial elements were intermingled—Lazes and Greeks, and the advance guards of the Kurds.

Trebizond in ancient times was the last Greek colony towards the east, and it is always a place that beckons travellers forward, for it is the terminus of that ancient caravan route which stretches away across Persia into the far interior of the Asiatic continent. Anyone who started to follow this highway across the mountains, through Gumushkhané and Baibourt to Erzeroum, would have noticed little change in these first stages of his journey from what he had seen in the Vilayet of Sivas. There were the same Turkish countryside and the same Armenian towns, with, perhaps, an increasing Armenian element in the rural population, culminating in an actual preponderance of Armenian villages when you reached the plain of Erzeroum. With Erzeroum the second section of the caravan road begins; it crosses from valley to valley among the headwaters of the Aras and the Eastern Euphrates (Mourad Su), and winds away eastward at the foot of Ararat in the direction of Bayazid and Tabriz. But here the explorer of Armenia must turn his face to the south, and, as he does so, his eyes are met by a rampart of mountains more forbidding than those he has traversed on his journey from the coast, which stretch across the horizon both east and west.

This mountain barrier bears many names. It is called the Bingöl Dagh where it faces Erzeroum; further westward it merges into the ill-famed Dersim; but the whole range has a common character. Its steeper slope is towards the north, and this slope is washed by the waters of the Aras and the Kara Su (Western Euphrates), which flow east and west in diametrically opposite directions, flanking the foot of the mountain wall with a deep and continuous moat.

Whoever crosses this moat and penetrates the mountains passes at once into a different world. The western part of Turkey, which we have been describing so far, is a more or less orderly, settled country—as orderly and settled, on the whole, as any of the other Near Eastern countries that lie between the Euphrates and Vienna. The population is sedentary; it lives in agricultural villages and open country towns. But when you cross the Euphrates, you enter a land of insecurity and fear. The peasant and townsman live on sufferance; the mastery is with the nomad; you are setting foot on the domain of the Kurd.

This insecurity was the chronic condition of Armenia proper, and it was not merely due to the unfortunate political experiences of the land. In its geographical configuration, as well as in its history, the Armenian plateau is a country of more accentuated characteristics and violent contrasts than the Anatolian Peninsula which adjoins it on the west. It contains vast stretches of rolling, treeless down, where the climate is too bleak and the soil too thin for cultivation; and, again, there are sudden depressions where the soil is as rich and the climate as favourable as anywhere in the world. There are the deep ravines of rivers, like the Mourad Su, which carve their course haphazard across tableland and plain. There are volcanic cones, like the Sipan and the Nimroud Dagh, and lacustrine areas, like the basin of Lake Van. The geography of the country has partitioned it eternally between the shepherd and the cultivator—the comparatively dense and sedentary population of the plains and the scattered and wandering inhabitants of the highlands—between civilisation and development on the one hand and an arrested state of barbarism on the other. The Kurd and the Armenian are not merely different nationalities; they are also antagonistic economic classes, and this antagonism existed in the country before ever the Kurdish encroachments began. Most of the nomadic tribes that frequent the Armenian plateau now pass for Kurds, but many of them are only nominally so. In the Dersim country, for instance, which coincides roughly with the peninsula formed by the Western and Eastern branches of the Euphrates (Kara Su and Mourad Su), the Kurds are strongly diluted with the Zazas, whose language, as far as it has been investigated, bears at least as much resemblance to Armenian as to Kurdish, and whose primitive paganism, though it may have taken some colour from Christianity, is free to this day from the slightest veneer of Islam.[218] These Zazas represent an element which must have existed in the land from the beginning and have harassed the national rulers of Mediæval and Ancient Armenia as much as it harasses the modern Armenian townsman and peasant or the local Ottoman authorities.

On the eve of the catastrophe of 1915, this region beyond the Euphrates was a treasure-house of mingled populations and diversified forms of social life. Its north-western bastion is the Dersim, a no-man’s-land of winding valleys and tiny upland plains, backing northwards on to the great mountain retaining-wall, with its sheer fall to the Euphratean moat. In the Dersim innumerable little clans of Zazas and Kurds lived, and continue to live, their pastoral, brigand life, secluded from the arm of Ottoman authority. A traveller proceeding south from Erzeroum would give the Dersim a wide berth on his right and cross the peninsula at its neck, by the headwaters of the Aras and the plain of Khnyss. He would strike the course of the Mourad Su where it cuts successively through the fertile, level plains of Melazkerd, Boulanik and Moush, and here he would find himself again for a moment (or would have done so two years ago) in peaceful, almost civilised surroundings—populous country towns, with a girdle of agricultural villages and a peasantry even more uniformly Armenian than the population of the plain of Erzeroum. The plain of Moush is the meeting-place of all the routes that traverse the plateau. If you ascend from its south-eastern corner and mount the southern spurs of the Nimroud volcano, you suddenly find yourself on the edge of the extensive basin of Lake Van, and can follow a mountain road along its precipitous southern shore; then you descend into the open valley of Hayotz-Tzor, cross a final ridge with the pleasant village of Artamid on its slopes, and arrive a few hours later in the city of Van itself.

Van, again, before April, 1915, was the populous, civilised capital of a province, with a picturesque citadel-rock overlooking the lake and open garden suburbs spreading east of it across the plain. The City of Van, with the surrounding lowlands that fringe the eastern and north-eastern shores of the lake, was more thoroughly Armenian than any part of the Ottoman Empire. In the Van Vilayet[219] alone the Armenians not merely outnumbered each other racial element singly, but were an absolute majority of the total population. These Armenians of Van played a leading and a valiant part in the events of 1915.

Yet Van, though a stronghold of Armenian nationality, was also the extremity, in this direction, of Armenian territory; south-east of Van the upper valley of the Zab and the basin of Lake Urmia were jointly inhabited by Christian Syrians and Moslem Kurds, until the Syrians, too, were involved in the Armenians’ fate. To complete our survey, we have to retrace our steps round the northern shores of Lake Van till we arrive once more in the plain of Moush.

The plain of Moush is closed in on the south and south-west by another rampart of mountains, which forms the southern wall of the plateau and repeats with remarkable exactness the structure of that northern wall which the traveller encounters when he turns south from the plain of Erzeroum. This southern range, also, falls precipitously towards the north, first into the plain of Moush, and, further westward, into the waters of the Mourad Su, which wash it like a moat all the way to their junction with the Kara Su, below Harpout. And, like the northern range, again, the southern rampart unfolds itself to the south in a maze of high hills and tangled valleys, which only sink by degrees into the plains of Diyarbekir—a detached bay of the great Mesopotamian steppe. These southern highlands are known as the Sassoun; they are a physiographical counterpart to the highlands of Dersim, and are likewise the harbour of semi-independent mountaineers. But whereas the Dersimlis are pagan Zazas or Moslem Kurds, and were at constant feud with their Armenian neighbours, the Sassounlis were themselves Armenians, and were in the closest intercourse with their kinsmen in the valley of the Mourad Su and in the plains of Moush and Boulanik.

Sassoun was one of the most interesting Armenian communities in the Ottoman Empire. It was a federation of about forty mountain villages, which lived their own life in virtual independence of the Ottoman authorities at Bitlis or Diyarbekir, and held their own against the equally independent Kurdish tribes that ringed them round. They were prosperous shepherds and laborious cultivators of their mountain slopes—a perfect example of the cantonal phase of economic development, requiring nothing from outside and even manufacturing their own gunpowder. The Sassounli Armenians were in the same social stage as the Scottish Highlanders before 1745; the Armenians of Van, Sivas and Constantinople were people of the twentieth century, engaged in the same activities and living much the same life as the shopkeepers and business men of Vienna or London or New York.

Only an enterprising traveller would have struck up into Sassoun if he wished to make his way from Moush to Diyarbekir. The beaten track takes a longer course to the south-eastern corner of the plain, and then breasts the mountain wall to the south (where the branch-road turns eastward to Lake Van). From Norshen, the last village of the plain, an easy pass leads over a saddle and brings the traveller unexpectedly to the important city of Bitlis, which lies under the shadow of the ridge, immediately south of the watershed. Bitlis is the capital of a vilayet, and before Djevdet Bey retreated upon it in June, 1915, there was a numerous Armenian element in its population. But Bitlis, again, was one of the limits of the Armenian dispersion. The waters which rise round the city flow southward to the Tigris, and the highroad winds down with them towards the plains, which are inhabited by a confused population of Jacobites[220] and Arabs, Turks and Kurds. If you had followed the Tigris upstream across the levels to Diyarbekir, you would have passed few Armenian villages on the road, even before June, 1915; and at Diyarbekir itself, a considerable city, there was only a weak Armenian colony—a feeble link in the chain of Armenian outposts on the fringe of the Mesopotamian steppe. But Diyarbekir is on the line of that Royal Road by which men have gone up from time immemorial from Baghdad and beyond to the coasts of the Bosphorus and the Ægean. The highway runs on north-west across the flats, passes Arghana and Arghana Mines, climbs the southern escarpment of the Armenian plateau up the valley of the Arghana Su, skirts the Göldjik Lake on the watershed, and slopes down, still north-westwards, to Harpout, near the course of the Mourad Su. Many convoys of Armenian exiles traversed this road in the opposite direction during the summer months of 1915, on their way from their native plateau to the alien climate of the Arabian deserts. But our survey of the Armenians in Turkey is complete, and we can travel back in imagination from Harpout to Malatia, from Malatia to Sivas, and so on continually north-westward, till we return again to the point from which we started out.

This somewhat elaborate itinerary will have served its purpose if it has made clear the extraordinary vitality and versatility of the Armenian nation in the Ottoman Empire at the moment when its extermination was planned and attempted by the established Government of the country. The Government had been of little service to any of its subjects; it had never initiated any social or economic developments on its own part, and had invariably made itself a clog upon the private enterprises of native or foreign individuals. Yet, under this pall of stagnation and repression, there were manifold stirrings of a new life. Wherever an opportunity presented itself, wherever the Government omitted to intervene, the Armenians were making indefatigable progress towards a better civilization. They were raising the pastoral and agricultural prosperity of their barren highlands and harassed plains; they were deepening and extending their education at the American schools; they were laying the foundation of local industries in the Vilayet of Sivas; they were building up Ottoman banking and shipping and finance at Trebizond and Adana and Constantinople. They were kindling the essential spark of energy in the Ottoman Empire, and anyone acquainted with Near Eastern history will inevitably compare their promise with the promise of the Greeks a century before. The apologists of the Ottoman Government will seize with eagerness upon this comparison. “The Greeks,” they will say, “revolted as soon as they had fallen into this state of fermentation. The Young Turks did more prudently than Sultan Mahmoud in forestalling future trouble.” But if we examine the relations between the Ottoman Government and the Armenian people we shall find that this argument recoils upon its authors’ heads.

IV. THE ARMENIAN PEOPLE AND THE OTTOMAN GOVERNMENT.

When the Ottoman Government entered the European War in 1914, it had ruled Armenia for just four hundred years, and still had for its subjects a majority of the Armenian people. Anyone who inquires into the relations between the Government and the governed during this period of Near Eastern history will find the most contradictory opinions expressed. On the one hand he will be told that the Armenians, like the rest of the Christians in Turkey, were classed as “Rayah” (cattle[221]) by the dominant race, and that this one word sums up their irremediable position; that they were not treated as citizens because they were not even treated as men. On the other hand, he will hear that the Ottoman Empire has been more liberal to its subject nationalities than many states in Western Europe; that the Armenians have been perfectly free to live their own life under a paternal government, and that the friction between the Government and its subjects has been due to the native perversity and instability of the Armenian character, or, worse still, to a revolutionary poison instilled by some common enemy from without. Both these extreme views are out of perspective, but each of them represents a part of the truth.

It is undoubtedly true (to take the Turkish case first) that the Armenians have derived certain benefits from the Ottoman dispensation. The caste division between Moslem and Rayah, for instance, may stamp the Ottoman “State Idea” as mediæval and incapable of progress; but this has injured the state as a whole more appreciably than the penalised section of it, for extreme penalisation works both ways. The Government ruled out the Christians so completely from the dominant Moslem commonwealth that it suffered and even encouraged them to form communities of their own. The “Rayah” became “Millets”—not yoke-oxen, but unshackled herds.

These Christian Millets were instituted by Sultan Mohammed II, after he had conquered Constantinople in 1453 and set himself to reorganise the Ottoman State as the conscious heir of the East Roman Empire. They are national corporations with written charters, often of an elaborate kind. Each of them is presided over by a Patriarch, who holds office at the discretion of the Government, but is elected by the community and is the recognised intermediary between the two, combining in his own person the headship of a voluntary “Rayah” association and the status of an Ottoman official. The special function thus assigned to the Patriarchates gives the Millets, as an institution, an ecclesiastical character[222]; but in the Near East a church is merely the foremost aspect of a nationality, and the authority of the Patriarchates extends to the control of schools, and even to the administration of certain branches of civil law. The Millets, in fact, are practically autonomous bodies in all that concerns religion, culture and social life; but it is a maimed autonomy, for it is jealously debarred from any political expression. The establishment of the Millets is a recognition, and a palliation, of the pathological anomaly of the Near East—the political disintegration of Near Eastern peoples and the tenacity with which they have clung, in spite of it, to their corporate spiritual life.

The organisation of the Millets was not a gain to all the Christian nations that had been subjected by the Ottoman power. Certain orthodox populations, like the Bulgars and the Serbs, actually lost an ecclesiastical autonomy which they had enjoyed before, and were merged in the Millet of the Greeks, under the Orthodox Patriarch at Constantinople. The Armenians, on the other hand, improved their position. As so-called schismatics, they had hitherto existed on sufferance under Orthodox and Catholic governments, but the Osmanlis viewed all varieties of Christian with an impartial eye. Mohammed II. summoned the Gregorian Bishop of the Armenian colony at Broussa, and raised him to the rank of an Armenian Patriarch at Constantinople. The Ottoman conquest thus left the Gregorian Armenians their religious individuality and put them on a legal equality with their neighbours of the Orthodox Faith, and the same privileges were extended in time to the Armenians in communion with other churches. The Gregorian Millet was chartered in 1462, the Millet of Armenian Catholics in 1830, and the Millet of Armenian Protestants in the ’forties of the nineteenth century, as a result of the foundation of the American Missions.

The Armenians of the Dispersion, therefore, profited, in that respect, by Ottoman rule, and even in the Armenian homeland the account stood, on the whole, in the Ottoman Government’s favour. The Osmanlis are often blamed for having given the Kurds a footing in this region, as a political move in their struggle with Persia; but the Kurds were not, originally, such a scourge to the Armenians as the Seljuks, Mongols, or Kara Koyunli, who had harried the land before, or as the Persians themselves, whom the Osmanlis and the Kurds ejected from the country. The three centuries of Kurdish feudalism under Ottoman suzerainty that followed Sultan Selim’s campaign of 1514 were a less unhappy period for the Armenians than the three centuries and more of anarchy that had preceded them. They were a time of torpor before recuperation, and it was the Ottoman Government again that, by a change in its Kurdish policy, enabled this recuperation to set in. In the early part of the nineteenth century a vigorous anti-feudal, centralising movement was initiated by Sultan Mahmoud, a reformer who has become notorious for his unsuccessful handling of the Greek and Serbian problems without receiving the proper credit for his successes further east. He turned his attention to the Kurdish chieftains in 1834, and by the middle of the century his efforts had practically broken their power. Petty feudalism was replaced by a bureaucracy centred in Constantinople. The new officialdom was not ideal; it had new vices of its own; but it was impartial, by comparison, towards the two races whom it had to govern, for the class prejudice of the Moslem against the well-behaved Rayah was balanced by the exasperation of the professional administrator with the unconscionable Kurd. In any case, this remodelling of the Ottoman State in the early decades of the nineteenth century introduced a new epoch in the history of the Armenian people. Coinciding, as it did, with the establishment of the American Missions and the chartering of the Catholic and Protestant Millets, it opened to the Armenians opportunities of which they availed themselves to the full. An intellectual and economic renaissance of Armenian life began, parallel in many respects to the Greek renaissance a century before.

This comparison brings us back to the question: Was the Armenian revival of the nineteenth century an inevitable menace to the sovereignty and integrity of the Ottoman State? Is the disastrous breach between Armenian and Turk, which has actually occurred, simply the fruit of wrong-headed Armenian ambitions? That is the Turkish contention; but here the Turkish case breaks down, and we shall find the truth on the Armenian side.

The parallel with the Greek renaissance is misleading, if it implies a parallel with the Greek revolution. The Greek movement towards political separatism was, in a sense, the outcome of the general spiritual movement that preceded it; but it was hardly an essential consequence, and certainly not a fortunate one. The Greek War of Independence liberated one fraction of the Greek race at the price of exterminating most of the others and sacrificing the favoured position which the Greek element had previously enjoyed throughout the Ottoman Empire. It was not an encouraging precedent for the Armenians, and the objections to following it in their own case were more formidable still. As we have seen, no portion of Ottoman territory was exclusively inhabited by them, and they were nowhere even in an absolute majority, except in certain parts of the Province of Van so that they had no natural rallying point for a national revolt, such as the Greeks had in the Islands and the Morea. They were scattered from one end to another of the Ottoman Empire; the whole Empire was their heritage, and it was a heritage that they must necessarily share with the Turks, who were in a numerical majority and held the reins of political power. The alternative to an Ottoman State was not an Armenian State, but a partition among the Powers, which would have ended the ambitions of Turk and Armenian alike. The Powers concerned were quite ready for a partition, if only they could agree upon a division of the spoils. This common inheritance of the Armenians and the Turks was potentially one of the richest countries in the Old World, and one of the few that had not yet been economically developed. Its native inhabitants, still scanty, backward and divided against themselves, were not yet capable of defending their title against spoilers from without; they only maintained it at present by a fortuitous combination in the balance of power, which might change at any moment. The problem for the Armenians was not how to overthrow the Ottoman Empire but how to preserve it, and their interest in its preservation was even greater than that of their Turkish neighbours and co-heirs. Our geographical survey has shown that talent and temperament had brought most of the industry, commerce, finance and skilled intellectual work of Turkey into, the Armenians’ hands. The Greeks may still have competed with them on the Ægean fringe, and the Sephardi Jews in the Balkans, but they had the whole interior of the Empire to themselves, with no competition to fear from the agricultural Turks or the pastoral Kurds. And if the Empire were preserved by timely reforms from within, the position of the Armenians would become still more favourable, for they were the only native element capable of raising the Empire economically, intellectually and morally to a European standard, by which alone its existence could permanently be secured. The main effort must be theirs, and they would reap the richest reward.

Thus, from the Armenian point of view, a national entente with the Turks was an object of vital importance, to be pursued for its ultimate results in spite of present difficulties and drawbacks. About the middle of the nineteenth century there seemed every likelihood of its being attained. The labours of Sultan Mahmoud and the influence of Great Britain and France had begun to inoculate the Turkish ruling class with liberal ideas. An admirable “Law of Nationalities” was promulgated, and there was a project for a parliamentary constitution. It looked, to an optimist, as if the old mediæval caste-division of Moslem and Rayah might die away and allow Armenian, Turk and Kurd to find their true relation to one another—not as irreconcilable sects or races, but as different social elements in the same community, whose mutual interest was to co-operate for a common end.

This was the logical policy for the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire to pursue, and the logic of it was so clear that they have clung to it through difficulties and drawbacks sufficient to banish logic altogether—“difficulties” which amounted to a bankruptcy of political sense in the Imperial Government, and “drawbacks” which culminated in official massacres of the Armenian population. There were two causes of this sinister turn of events: the external crisis through which the Empire passed in the years 1875-8, and the impression this crisis made upon Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid, who came to the throne in 1876, when it was entering upon its gravest phase.

In these years the Empire had been brought to the verge of ruin by the revolt of a subject Christian population, the Bosniak Serbs, which spread to the other subject races in the Balkan provinces, and by a momentary breakdown in the diplomatic mechanism of the European balance of power, which enabled Russia to throw her military force into the scales on the Balkan rebels’ behalf. The ruin was arrested and partially repaired, when Turkey lay prostrate under Russia’s heel, by a reassertion of the balance of power, which deprived Russia of most of her gains and half the Balkan Christians of their new-won liberties. Abd-ul-Hamid was clever enough to learn from these experiences, but not, unfortunately, to learn aright, and he devoted all his astuteness to carrying out a policy far more injurious to the Empire than the troubles it was meant to avert. He seems to have inferred from the war with Russia that Turkey was not and never would be strong enough to hold its own against a first-class power; it was not her internal strength that had saved her, but the external readjustment of forces. Therefore, any attempt to strengthen the Empire from within, by reconciling its racial elements and developing its natural resources, was Utopian and irrelevant to the problem. The only object of importance was to insure against an attack by any single Power by keeping all the Great Powers in a state of jealous equilibrium. Now the breakdown of this equilibrium, in 1877, which had been so disastrous for Turkey, had been directly caused by an antecedent disturbance of equilibrium within the Empire itself. A subject Christian nationality had tried to break away violently from the Ottoman body-politic. Here was the root of the whole trouble, to Abd-ul-Hamid’s mind, and the primary object of his policy must be to prevent such a thing from happening again. The subject nationalities of the Empire were not for him unrealised assets; they were potential destroyers of the State, more formidable even than the foreign Powers. Their potentialities must be neutralised, and the surest course, with them as with the Powers, was to play them off against one another. In fine, the policy of Abd-ul-Hamid was the exact antithesis of the instinctive Armenian policy which we have indicated above; it was not to strengthen the Empire by bringing the nationalities into harmony, but to weaken the nationalities, at whatever cost to the Empire, by setting them to cut each other’s throats. Abd-ul-Hamid applied this policy for forty years. The Macedonians and the Armenians were his special victims, but only the Armenians concern us here.

It was inevitable that the Armenians should be singled out by Abd-ul-Hamid for repression. When Turkey sued for peace in 1878, the Russian troops were in occupation of the greater part of the Armenian plateau, and the Russian plenipotentiaries inserted an Article (No. 16) in the Treaty of San Stefano making the evacuation of these provinces conditional upon the previous introduction of reforms in their administration by the Ottoman Government. A concrete scheme for the reorganisation of the six vilayets in question[223] had already been drawn up by a delegation of their Armenian inhabitants. It provided for the creation of an Armenian Governor-General, empowered to appoint and remove the officials subordinate to him; a mixed gendarmerie of Armenians and the sedentary elements in the Moslem population, to the exclusion of the nomadic Kurds; a general assembly, consisting of Moslem and Christian deputies in equal numbers; and equal rights for every creed. The Ottoman Government had approved and even encouraged this project of provincial autonomy when it feared that the alternative was the cession of the provinces to Russia. As soon as it had made certain of the Russian evacuation, its approval turned to indifference; and when the European Congress met at Berlin to revise the San Stefano Treaty, the Ottoman emissaries exerted themselves to quash the project altogether. In this they were practically successful, for the Treaty drawn up at Berlin by the Congress merely engaged the Ottoman Government, in general terms[224], to introduce “ameliorations” in the “provinces inhabited by Armenians,” without demanding any guarantee at all[225]. The Russian troops were withdrawn and the ameliorations were a dead letter. The Ottoman Government was reminded of them, in 1880, by a collective Note from the six Powers. But it left the Note unanswered, and after the diplomatic démarches had dragged on for two years the question was shelved, on Bismarck’s suggestion, because no Power except Great Britain would press it.

The seed of the “Armenian Reforms” had thus fallen upon stony ground, except in the mind of Abd-ul-Hamid, where it lodged and rankled till it bore the fruit of the “Armenian Massacres.” The project had not really been a menace to Ottoman sovereignty and integrity. It was merely a proposal to apply in six vilayets that elementary measure of “amelioration” which was urgently needed by the Empire as a whole, and without which it could never begin to develop its internal strength. But to Abd-ul-Hamid it was unforgivable, for to him every concession to a subject Christian nationality was suspect. He had seen the Bulgars given ecclesiastical autonomy by the Ottoman Government in 1870 and then raised by Russia, within eight years, into a semi-independent political principality. Armenian autonomy had been averted for the moment, but the parallel might still hold good, for Russia’s influence over the Armenians had been increasing.

Russia had conquered the Armenian provinces of Persia in 1828[226], and this had brought within her frontier the Monastery of Etchmiadzin, in the Khanate of Erivan, which was the seat of the Katholikos of All the Armenians. The power of this Katholikos was at that time very much in abeyance. He was an ecclesiastical relic of the ancient united Armenian Kingdom of Tigranes and Tiridates, which had been out of existence for fourteen hundred years. There was another Katholikos at Sis, a relic of the mediæval kingdom of Cilicia, who did not acknowledge his supremacy, and he was thrown into the shade altogether by the Armenian Patriarch at Constantinople, who was the official head of the Armenian Millet in the Ottoman Empire—at that time an overwhelming majority of the Armenian people. But Russian diplomacy succeeded in reviving the Katholikos of Etchmiadzin’s authority. In the ’forties of the nineteenth century, when Russian influence at Constantinople was at its height and Russian protection seemed the only recourse for Turkey against the ambition of Mehemet Ali, the ecclesiastical supremacy of Etchmiadzin over Constantinople and Sis was definitely established, and the Katholikos of Etchmiadzin, a resident in Russian territory, became once more the actual as well as the titular head of the whole Gregorian Church. Russia had thus acquired an influence over the Armenians as a nation, and individual Armenians were acquiring a reciprocal influence in Russia. They had risen to eminence, not only in commerce, but in the public service and in the army. They had distinguished themselves particularly in the war of 1877. Loris Melikov, Lazarev and Tergoukasev, three of the most successful generals on the Russian side, were of Armenian nationality. Melikov had taken the fortress of Kars, and the Treaty of Berlin left his conquest in Russia’s possession with a zone of territory that rounded off the districts ceded by Persia fifty years before. The Russian frontier was thus pushed forward on to the Armenian plateau, and now included an important Armenian population—important enough to make its mark on the general life of the Russian Empire[227] and to serve as a national rallying-point for the Armenians who still remained on the Ottoman side of the line.

Such considerations outweighed all others in Abd-ul-Hamid’s mind. His Armenian subjects must be deprived of their formidable vitality, and he decided to crush them by resuscitating the Kurds. From 1878 onwards he encouraged their lawlessness, and in 1891 he deliberately undid the work of his predecessor, Mahmoud. The Kurdish chieftains were taken again into favour and decorated with Ottoman military rank; their tribes were enrolled as squadrons of territorial cavalry; regimental badges and modern rifles were served out to them from the Government stores, and their retaining fee was a free hand to use their official status and their official weapons as they pleased against their Armenian neighbours. At the same time the latter were systematically disarmed; the only retaliation open to them was the formation of secret revolutionary societies, and this fitted in entirely with Abd-ul-Hamid’s plans, for it made a racial conflict inevitable. The disturbances began in 1893 with the posting up of revolutionary placards in Yozgad and Marsov an. This was soon followed by an open breach between Moslem and Christian in the districts of Moush and Sassoun, and there was a rapid concentration of troops—some of them Turkish regulars, but most of them Hamidié Kurds. Sassoun was besieged for several months, and fell in 1894. The Sassounlis—men, women and children—were savagely massacred by the Turks and Kurds, and the attention of Great Britain was aroused. In the winter of 1894-5 Great Britain persuaded France and Russia to join her in reminding the Ottoman Government of its pledge to introduce provincial reforms, and in the spring they presented a concrete programme for the administration of the Six Vilayets. In its final form it was a perfunctory project, and the counter-project which the Ottoman Government announced its intention of applying in its stead was more illusory still. It was promulgated in 1895, but the first of a new series of organised massacres had already taken place a few days earlier, at Trebizond, and in the following months the slaughter was extended to one after another of the principal towns of the Empire. These atrocities were nearly all committed against peaceful, unarmed urban populations. The only place that resisted was Zeitoun, which held out for six months against a Turkish army, and was finally amnestied by the mediation of the Powers. The anti-Armenian outbreaks were instigated and controlled by the Central Government, and were crowned, in August, 1896, by the great massacre at Constantinople, where for two days the Armenians, at the Government’s bidding, were killed indiscriminately in the streets, until the death-roll amounted to many thousands. Then Abd-ul-Hamid held his hand. He had been feeling the pulse of public opinion, both abroad and at home, and he saw that he had gone far enough[228]. In all more than 100,000 men, women and children had perished, and for the moment he had sufficiently crippled the Armenian element in his Empire.

Yet this Macchiavellian policy was ultimately as futile as it was wicked. In the period after the massacres the Armenian population in Turkey was certainly reduced, partly by the actual slaughter and partly by emigration abroad. But this only weakened the Empire without permanently paralysing the Armenian race. The emigrants struck new roots in the United States and in the Russian Caucasus, acquired new resources, enlisted new sympathies; and Russia was the greatest gainer of all. The Armenians had little reason, at the time, to look towards Russia with special sympathy or hope. In Russia, as in Turkey, the war of 1877-8 had been followed by a political reaction, which was aggravated by the assassination of the Tsar, Alexander II., in 1881; and the Armenians, as an energetic, intellectual, progressive element in the Russian Empire, were classed by the police with the revolutionaries, and came under their heavy hand. Yet once an Armenian was on the Russian side of the frontier his life and property at least were safe. He could be sure of reaping the fruits of his labour, and had not to fear sudden death in the streets. During the quarter of a century that followed the Treaty of Berlin, the Armenian population of the Russian provinces increased remarkably in prosperity and numbers, and now, after the massacres, they were reinforced by a constant stream of Ottoman refugees. The centre of gravity of the Armenian race was shifting more and more from Ottoman to Russian territory. Russia has profited by the crimes of her neighbours. The Hamidian régime lasted from 1878 to 1908, and did all that any policy could do to widen the breach between the Ottoman State and the Armenian people. Yet the natural community of interest was so strong that even thirty years of repression did not make the Armenians despair of Ottoman regeneration.

Nothing is more significant than the conduct of the Armenians in 1908, when Abd-ul-Hamid was overthrown by the Young Turkish Revolution, and there was a momentary possibility that the Empire might be reformed and preserved by the initiative of the Turks themselves. At this crisis the real attitude of the different nationalities in the Empire was revealed. The Kurds put up a fight for Abd-ul-Hamid, because they rejoiced in the old dispensation. The Macedonians—Greek, Bulgar and Serb—who had been the Armenians’ principal fellow-victims in the days of oppression, paid the Constitution lip-homage and secretly prepared to strike. They were irreconcilable irredentists, and saw in the reform of the Empire simply an obstacle to their secession from it. They took counsel with their kinsmen in the independent national States of Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece, and, four years later, the Balkan League attacked Turkey and tore away her Macedonian provinces by force.

The Armenians, on the other hand, threw themselves wholeheartedly into the service of the new régime. As soon as the Ottoman Constitution was restored, the Armenian political parties abandoned their revolutionary programme in favour of parliamentary action, and co-operated in Parliament with the Young Turkish bloc so long as Young Turkish policy remained in any degree liberal or democratic. The terrible Adana massacres, which occurred less than a year after the Constitution had been proclaimed, might have damped the Armenians’ enthusiasm (though at first the proof that the Young Turks were implicated in them was not so clear as it has since become). Yet they showed their loyalty in 1912, when the Turks were fighting for their existence. It was only under the new laws that the privilege and duty of military service had been extended to the Christian as well as the Moslem citizens of the Empire, and the disastrous Balkan Campaign was the first opportunity that Armenian soldiers were given of doing battle for their common heritage. But they bore themselves so well in this ordeal that they were publicly commended by their Turkish commanders. Thus, in war and peace, in the Army and in Parliament, the Armenians worked for the salvation of the Ottoman Commonwealth, from the accession of the Young Turks in 1908 till their intervention in the European War in 1914. It is impossible to reconcile with this fact the Turkish contention that in 1914 they suddenly reversed their policy and began treacherously to plot for the Ottoman Empire’s destruction.

V. THE DEPORTATIONS OF 1915: ANTECEDENTS.

There is no dispute as to what happened in 1915. The Armenian inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire were everywhere uprooted from their homes, and deported to the most remote and unhealthy districts that the Government could select for them. Some were murdered at the outset, some perished on the way, and some died after reaching their destination. The death-roll amounts to upwards of six hundred thousand; perhaps six hundred thousand more are still alive in their places of exile; and the remaining six hundred thousand or so have either been converted forcibly to Islam, gone into hiding in the mountains, or escaped beyond the Ottoman frontier. The Ottoman Government cannot deny these facts, and they cannot justify them. No provocation or misdemeanour on the part of individual Armenians could justify such a crime against the whole race. But it might be explained and palliated if the Armenians, or some of them, were originally in the wrong; and therefore the Ottoman Government and its German apologists have concentrated their efforts on proving that this was the case.[229] There are three main Turkish contentions, none of which will bear examination.

The first contention is that the Armenians took up arms and joined the Russians, as soon as the latter crossed the Ottoman frontier. The standard case its champions cite is the “Revolt of Van.” The deportations, they maintain, were only ordered after this outbreak to forestall the danger of its repetition elsewhere. This contention is easily rebutted. In the first place, there was no Armenian revolt at Van. The Armenians merely defended the quarter of the city in which they lived, after it had been beleaguered and attacked by Turkish troops, and the outlying villages visited with massacre by Turkish patrols. The outbreak was on the Turkish side, and the responsibility lies with the Turkish governor, Djevdet Bey. The ferocious, uncontrollable character of this official was the true cause of the catastrophe. Anyone who reads the impartial American testimony on this point, in section II. of the present collection of documents, will see that this was so. And, in the second place, the deportations had already begun in Cilicia before the fighting at Van broke out. The Turks fired the first shot at Van on the 20th April, 1915; the first Armenians were deported from Zeitoun on the 8th April, and there is a record of their arrival in Syria as early as the 19th[230]. The case of Van, which the apologists have made so much of, simply falls to the ground[231], and they cannot rehabilitate themselves by adducing any previous revolt at Zeitoun. It is true that twenty-five fugitive conscripts defended themselves for a day in a monastery near Zeitoun against Turkish troops, and decamped into the mountains during the night. But this happened only one day before the deportation, and the deportation must have been decided upon far in advance, for it was preceded by a protracted inquisition for arms, and there were Moslem refugees from the Balkans concentrated on the spot, ready to occupy the Zeitounlis’ houses the moment the rightful owners were carried off. During all these preliminary proceedings—most of which were violations of the charter of liberties held by Zeitoun from the Ottoman Government—the population as a whole (15,000 individuals as against the 25 who rebelled) very scrupulously kept the peace. This was the policy of the leaders, and they were obeyed by the people. Nothing happened at Zeitoun that can account for the Government’s scheme of deportation.

There were several other instances in which the Armenians took up arms, but none of them are relevant to the case. They were all subsequent in date to these cardinal instances, and were simply attempts at self-defence by people who had seen their neighbours massacred or deported, and were threatened with the same fate themselves. The Armenians of Moush resisted when they were attacked by Djevdet Bey, who had already tried to massacre the Armenians of Van and had succeeded in massacring those of Sairt and Bitlis. The Armenians of Sassoun resisted when the Kurds had destroyed their kinsmen in the plain of Diyarbekir and were closing in upon themselves. This was in June, and the Nestorian Christians of Hakkiari resisted under the same circumstances and at the same date. Further west, a few villages took up arms in the Vilayet of Sivas, after the rest of the Sivas Armenians had been deported; and at Shabin Kara-Hissar the Armenians drove out their Turkish fellow-townsmen and stood for several weeks at bay, when they heard how the exiles from Trebizond and Kerasond had been murdered on the road. The defence of Djibal Mousa in August (the only story in this volume with a happy ending) was similarly inspired by the previous fate of Zeitoun. The resistance at Ourfa in September was another act of despair, provoked by the terrible procession of exiles from Harpout and the north-east, which had been filing for three months through Ourfa before the Armenian colony there was also summoned to take the road. These are all the instances of resistance that are reported, and they were all a consequence of the deportations, and not their cause. It may be added that, wherever resistance was offered, the Turks suppressed it with inconceivable brutality, not merely retaliating upon the fighting men, but, in most cases, massacring every Armenian man, woman and child in cold blood after the fighting was over. These cases were not palliations of the atrocities, but occasions of the worst excesses.

The second contention is that there was a general conspiracy of Armenians throughout the Empire to bring about an internal revolution at a moment when all the Ottoman military forces were engaged on the frontiers, and so deliver the country into the hands of the Allies. The prompt action of the Ottoman Government in disarming, imprisoning, executing and deporting the whole people—innocent and guilty alike—is alleged to have crushed this movement before it had time to declare itself. This is an insidious line of argument, because it refuses to be tested by the evidence of what actually occurred. If the actual outbreaks were isolated, inspired by panic, confined to self-defence, and posterior in date to the Government’s own preventive measures, all that, on this hypothesis, is not a proof of the Armenians’ innocence, but only of the Government’s energy and foresight. Yet when this indictment is examined, it, too, is found to rest on the most frivolous grounds.

The revolution, it is alleged, was to break out when the Allies landed in Cilicia—but such a landing was never made; or it was arranged in conjunction with the landing at the Dardanelles—but the landing was made and the outbreak never happened. Indeed, it is hard to see what the Armenians could have done, for nearly all their able-bodied men between twenty and forty-five years of age were mobilised at the beginning of the war, and the age limit was soon extended in either direction to eighteen and fifty. The Turks make sweeping allegations about secret stores of bombs and arms, which prove to be false in every case where they can be checked. The Armenians certainly possessed a moderate number of rifles and revolvers, because, for the past six years, under the Young Turkish régime, they had been permitted to carry arms for their personal security, a privilege that had always been enjoyed, as a matter of course, by every Moslem in the Ottoman Empire. But evidently there were not enough arms in their possession to go round, even among the comparatively few men left behind after mobilisation; for when, in the winter of 1914-5, the Ottoman authorities made a house-to-house search for arms, and conducted their inquisition by atrocious physical tortures, the Armenians bought arms from each other and from their Moslem neighbours, in order to be able to deliver them up and suffer no worse punishment than mere imprisonment. This practice is recorded independently by several trustworthy witnesses from various localities[232].

The stories of bombs are more extravagant still. In the town of X., for instance, a bomb was unearthed in the Armenian cemetery, which was made the pretext for the most atrocious procedure against the Armenian inhabitants. Yet the bomb was rusty with age, and was believed to date from the days of Abd-ul-Hamid, when the Young Turks, as well as the Armenian political parties, were a secret revolutionary organisation and not averse to using bombs themselves. In the same town, a blacksmith in the employment of the American College was cruelly tortured for “constructing a bomb”; but the “bomb” turned out to be a solid iron shot which he had been commissioned to make for the competition of “putting the weight” in the College athletic sports.

It was also alleged that Armenians resident on the coast had been in treacherous communication with the Allied fleets. The Armenian boatmen of Silivri[233], for instance, on the Sea of Marmora, were deported on the ground that they had furnished supplies to British submarines; and before this, as early as April, 1915, half-a-dozen Armenians from Dört Yöl, a village on the Gulf of Alexandretta, were hanged at Adana on the charge of having signalled to the Franco-British cruiser squadron—a step which was followed up by the deportation of the whole population of Dört Yöl into the interior, to do navvy-work on the roads. This charge against Dört Yöl can be checked, for the witness of the hangings (a resident in Cilicia of neutral nationality and excellent standing)[234] states, from his personal knowledge, that only one Armenian from Dört Yöl had had any communication with the Allied warships. This evidence is authoritative, and it has probability on its side; for, if Dört Yöl was in regular communication with the Allied squadron, it is inconceivable that the Armenians of Djibal Mousa, a few miles further down the coast, should have taken 44 days to attract the same squadron’s attention, when it was a question for them of life and death[235].

Thus the second contention breaks down, and we are left with the third, which lays little stress on justice or public safety and bases the case on revenge. The Armenian civil population in the Ottoman Empire, it is argued, owes its misfortunes to the Armenian volunteers in the Russian Army. “Our Armenians in Turkey,” say the Turks in effect, “have certainly suffered terribly from the measures we have taken; they may even have suffered innocently; but can you blame us? Was it not human nature that we should revenge ourselves on the Armenians at home for the injury we had received from their compatriots fighting against us at the front in the Russian ranks—men who had actually volunteered to fight against us in the enemy’s cause?”

This is almost the favourite argument of the apologists, and yet it is surely the most monstrous of any, for these Armenian volunteers owed no allegiance to the Turks at all, but were ordinary Russian subjects. Through territorial acquisitions and free immigration from across the frontier, the Russian Government had, by 1914, acquired the sovereignty over little less than half the Armenian race[236]. Russia was as much the lawful “fatherland” of this substantial minority as Turkey was of the remainder. It is a misfortune for any nation to be divided between two allegiances, especially when the states to which they owe them elect to go to war; but it is at least an alleviation of the difficulty, and one that does honour to both parties concerned, when either fraction of the divided nationality finds itself in sympathy, even under the test of war, with the particular state to which its allegiance is legally due. The loyalty of the Russian Armenians to Russia[237] cast no imputation upon the Ottoman Armenians, and was no concern of the Turks. The latter will probably explain that they had no objection to the Russian Armenians doing their duty, but resented their doing more: “The conscripts naturally answered the summons, but why did those who were exempt equip themselves so eagerly as volunteers? The Ottoman Armenians adopted a painfully different attitude. At the beginning of the war, the Young Turkish Party sent representatives to the Congress of the Armenian ‘Dashnaktzoutioun’ Party at Erzeroum, offered them concessions to their nationality, and called upon them to organise volunteers and join in the invasion of Russian territory[238]. Yet they decidedly refused—refused in this case when their kinsmen did not wait to be asked in the other. This reveals the real sympathies and aspirations of the Armenian people, not only the Armenians in Russia, but those in our country as well.”

There is, of course, a crushing answer to these tirades. If the Armenians felt so differently towards the Turks and the Russians, then that was a serious reflection on their treatment by the Turks, and the logical way to change their feelings was to treat them better. Could the civilian Armenians who remembered the massacre of their innocent kinsfolk at Adana a few years before have been expected to volunteer in support of those who had commanded these massacres? Could their feelings have been other than they were? But so long as only their feelings were in question and their behaviour remained correct, the Turks had no right to proceed with them in any but a humane and constitutional manner. The argument can be driven home by a parallel. There are Polish volunteer legions in the Austro-Hungarian Army. What would the Turks’ German apologists have said if the Russian Government had appeased its resentment against these Austrian-Polish volunteers by wiping out all the Russian-Polish civilians on their own side of the frontier?

It is a significant fact that all these Turkish complaints are directed against Russian Armenians in Russian service. There is no hint of treachery or malingering on the part of those Ottoman Armenians who had been drafted, many of them illegally, into the Turkish Army—no insinuation that their record was not as satisfactory in 1914 as in 1912[239]. To the editor’s knowledge, the German apologists have only been able to fasten upon two “traitors” in the legal (though not in the moral) sense of the word. There have been refugees, of course, like Mourad of Sivas, who escaped into the Caucasus when the atrocities were in full course—men who had just been compelled to fight for their lives, and had seen their neighbours and kinsfolk massacred once more on all sides of them. Not even the German apologists would dare to censure these men under these circumstances for enrolling in the volunteers. But there are only two cases adduced of Ottoman subjects who went over to the Russians before the atrocities began—a certain Karakin Pasdermadjian, a deputy in the Ottoman Parliament, and another Armenian named Suren, stated to have been a delegate at the “Dashnaktzoutioun” Congress at Erzeroum. “In face of this,” argues the German writer from whose pamphlet these instances are taken[240], “it was the Ottoman Government’s duty to uphold public law and order. In wartime, measures of this kind assume an especially weighty and pressing character”—and with this generality he implicitly condones the atrocities of 1915. If this represents the official apologia of the Ottoman Government, the only answer is a reductio ad absurdum. On the same principle, when Sir Roger Casement landed from a German submarine on the Irish coast, it would have been the British Government’s duty to deport all the Roman Catholic inhabitants of Ireland and maroon them, say, on the coast of Labrador or in the central desert of Australia. The parallel is exact, and leaves nothing more to be said, unless, indeed, what was said by Talaat Bey, the Young Turkish Minister of the Interior, in a recent interview with a correspondent of the Berliner Tageblatt[241]. “The sad events that have occurred in Armenia,” he vouchsafed, “have prevented my sleeping well at night. We have been reproached for making no distinction between the innocent Armenians and the guilty; but that was utterly impossible, in view of the fact that those who were innocent to-day might be guilty to-morrow.” There is no need of further witnesses.

The various Turkish contentions thus fail, from first to last, to meet the point. They all attempt to trace the atrocities of 1915 to events arising out of the war; but they not only cannot justify them on this ground, they do not even suggest any adequate motive for their perpetration. It is evident that the war was merely an opportunity and not a cause—in fact, that the deportation scheme, and all that it involved, flowed inevitably from the general policy of the Young Turkish Government. This inference will be confirmed if we analyse the political tenets to which the Young Turks were committed.

The Young Turkish movement began as a reaction against the policy of Abd-ul-Hamid. Its founders repudiated his “neutralisation of forces”; they maintained that the Ottoman Empire must stand by its own strength, and that this strength must be developed by a radical internal reconstruction. From their asylum at Paris they preached the doctrines of the French Revolution—religious toleration, abolition of caste-privileges, equality of all citizens before the law, equality of obligation to perform military service, constitutional government through a representative parliament. And when they came into power, they made some attempt to put these doctrines into practice. In Turkey for a brief space of the year 1908, as in France twelve decades before, the vision of “Pure Reason” did bring peace and goodwill among men. Nearly all the foreign observers who were in the country when “Huriet” came, testify to this momentary, magic transfiguration of hatred into love; and the Armenians, who had desired more than any of their neighbours to see this day, might well believe that the Young Turks’ ideal was identical with their own. Yet there were vital differences beneath the surface. The Young Turks realised that the Christian elements were an asset; they did not propose, at the outset, to destroy them, as Abd-ul-Hamid had done; but they wanted still less to co-operate with them as separate partners in the Ottoman State. The “Millets” were as abhorrent to them, as an institution, as the autocracy of Abd-ul-Hamid. They set up against the principle of the “Millet” the programme of “Ottomanisation.” The Turkish leaven was to permeate the non-Turkish lump, until it had all become of one uniform Turkish substance. In Parliament this programme took such forms as a bill to make the Turkish language the universal and compulsory medium of secondary education[242], and the Armenian deputies found themselves opposing it in concert with the Liberal Party, which included the Arab bloc and stood for the toleration of national individualities. The Young Turks, in fact, had imbibed both the good currents and the bad in the modern political atmosphere of Western Europe—its democratic doctrines but its chauvinism as well. Most political theorists debarred from responsible practice give this same confused allegiance to incompatible ideals, and all, when they come into power, are compelled by circumstances to choose which master they will serve. In 1908, the choice of the Young Turks was not predestined; the “Committee of Union and Progress” might have set its face towards either of its divided goals; but disillusionment soon decided its orientation. The magic dawn of “Huriet” faded; the old, crushing burden of Ottoman Government descended upon shoulders not expert, like Abd-ul-Hamid’s, at balancing the weight; the Austro-Bulgarian violation of the Treaty of Berlin and the subsequent territorial losses of the Balkan War shook the Young Turkish Party’s prestige, aggravated the difficulty of their problem, and embittered their attitude towards its solution. The current of chauvinism gained upon them more and more, and their intervention in the European War demonstrated that its mastery was complete, for their calculations in intervening were of a thoroughly Prussian character. A military triumph was to restore them their prestige; it was to recover ancient territories of the Empire in Egypt, the Caucasus and the coveted Persian province of Azerbaijan; it was to shake off the trammels of international control, and solve the internal problem by cutting the Gordian Knot. But the hopes of conquest and prestige were early shattered by the strategical failures of the winter of 1914-5, which were almost as humiliating as those of 1912, and then the Young Turks concentrated savagely upon “Ottomanisation” at home.

Ottomanisation has become the Young Turks’ obsession[243]. Their first act after declaring war was to repudiate the Capitulations; their latest stroke has been to declare the Turkish language the exclusive medium of official business in the Empire, with only a year’s delay—a step which has caused consternation among their German allies. And in this mood they turned to the Armenian question, which happened at the moment to have reached an important phase.

In 1912-3 the diplomatists of Europe had once more met in consultation over the Ottoman Empire, and the Armenians had presented their case to the Conference at London, as they had presented it at Berlin thirty-five years before.[244] When the Conference proved unable to take cognizance of their petition, they applied to the individual governments of the Powers. The Russian Government took the initiative and drafted a new scheme for the administration of the Six Vilayets, which it submitted to the Signatories of the Treaty of Berlin. The German Government opposed, but was won over by the Russian diplomacy and by the representations of the Armenian delegates, who repaired to Berlin in person. Then, when the German opposition had been withdrawn, the Russian draft was revised by the Ambassadors of the Powers at Constantinople, accepted, with modifications, by the Young Turkish Government, and actually promulgated by them on the 8th February, 1914.

In its final shape, the scheme still embodied the main points of reform which had been regarded as cardinal ever since 1878. There was to be a mixed Gendarmerie, under a European chief, recruited from the Turks and Armenians, but closed to the Kurds; Moslem and Christian were to be equal before the law; the Armenian language was to be a recognised medium in the courts and public offices (a bitter clause for the Young Turkish nationalists); there were to be no restrictions on the multiplication of Armenian schools. Finally, the vilayets affected by the scheme[245] were to be divided into two groups, and each group was to be placed under a European Inspector-General. The two Inspector-Generals were authorised to appoint and dismiss all officials in their respective spheres, except those “of superior rank.” They were themselves to be appointed by the Ottoman Government, on the recommendation of the Powers, for a term of ten years, and not to be removable within this period. The Government duly proceeded to select two candidates for these Inspectorates, a Dutchman and a Norwegian, but its treatment of these gentlemen soon showed that in diplomacy, at any rate, the Young Turks had adopted the methods of Abd-ul Hamid. A clause was inserted in the Inspectors’ contract of engagement, empowering the Government to denounce it at any moment upon payment of an indemnity of one year’s salary—a flat violation of the ten years’ term provided for under the scheme; and the list of “superior officials” was inflated until the patronage of the Inspectors, which, next to their irremovability, would have been their most effective power, was reduced to an illusion. The unfortunate nominees were spared the farce of exercising their maimed authority. They had barely reached their provinces when the European War broke out, and the Government promptly denounced the contracts and suspended the Scheme of Reforms, as the first step towards its own intervention in the conflict.

Thus, at the close of 1914, the Armenians found themselves in the same position as in 1883. The measures designed for their security had fallen through, and left nothing behind but the resentment of the Government that still held them at its mercy. The deportations of 1915 followed as inexorably from the Balkan War and the Project of 1914 as the massacres of 1895-6 had followed from the Russian War and the Project of 1878. Only in the execution of their revenge the Young Turks revealed all the sinister features of their dissimilarity to Abd-ul-Hamid. The Sultan, so far as he differed from the familiar type of Oriental despot, had been an opportunist in the tradition of Metternich—a politician of mature experience and delicate touch, unencumbered by any constructive programme to disturb the artistry of his game of finesse. He repressed the Armenians to a nicety after preparing for it eighteen years. The Young Turks were adventurers who had caught the catchwords of another generation and another school—the apes of Danton and Robespierre, and doctrinaires to the core. For the old, anachronistic ascendency of Moslem over Rayah, to the maintenance of which Abd-ul-Hamid had cynically devoted his abilities, they substituted the idea of Turkish nationalism, which clothed the same evil in a more clearly-cut and infinitely more dynamic form. They were fanatics with an unreasoned creed, builders with a plan that they meant to carry through, and no half-measures would content them, no inhibitions of prudence or humanity deter them from the attempt to realise the whole. Hindrances only exasperated them to sweeping action, and a blind concentration on their programme shielded them from doubts. “Our acts,” Talaat Bey is reported to have said, in the interview quoted above, “have been dictated to us by a national and historical necessity. The idea of guaranteeing the existence of Turkey must outweigh every other consideration.” The first of these sentiments is the pure-milk of the eighteenth century ideologues; there is a Prussian adulteration in the second, which smacks of more recent times. It is the voice of the youngest, crudest, most ruthless national movement in Europe, and the acts which it excuses, and which the documents in this volume describe, were the barbarous initiation of the Near East into the European fraternity.

VI. THE DEPORTATIONS OF 1915: PROCEDURE.

The atrocities of 1915 are described in detail in the documents collected in this book, but it will be well to give in conclusion a bare summary of events, partly to make the detail less confusing to the reader, and partly to bring out the essential unity of design which underlay the procedure against the Armenians at the various dates and in the various provinces of the Empire to which the documents relate. This fundamental uniformity of procedure is more sinister than the incidental aggravations of the crime by Kurds, peasants, gendarmes or local authorities. It is damning evidence that the procedure itself, which set in motion all the other forces of evil, was conceived and organised by the Central Government at Constantinople.

The dismissal of the Inspectors-General and the abrogation of the reforms were followed immediately by the mobilisation of the Ottoman Army for eventual participation in the war, and with this the sufferings of the Armenians began. It has been mentioned already that the Young Turks had extended the duty of military service to their Christian fellow-citizens, and that the Armenian recruits had distinguished themselves in the Balkan War; but naturally the measure was not retrospective, and Armenians who were already past the statutory age of training when it was introduced, were allowed to pay the “Rayah” poll-tax as before, under the formula of an exemption-tax in lieu of military service. In the autumn of 1914, however, there was a general levy of all males in the Empire from twenty years of age to forty-five, and soon from eighteen to fifty, in which the Armenians, whether they had paid their annual exemption-tax or not, were included with the rest. There were also drastic requisitions of private supplies, by which the Armenians, again, were the principal sufferers, since they were the chief merchants and store-keepers of the country. These were considerable hardships and injustices, but they were not necessarily in themselves the result of a malevolent design. Apart from what actually followed, they might have been simply the inevitable penalties of a country which had been embarked by its Government on a struggle for existence.

In October, when mobilisation was completed, the Government had, in fact, declared war on the Allies, and in December its grandiose military operations began. Enver Pasha, with the main Ottoman forces, started an encircling movement against the Russian troops in Caucasia, along a front extending from Erzeroum to the Black Sea Coast; Halil Bey led a flying column across the frontier of Azerbaijan, and raised the Kurds; Djemal Pasha felt his way across the Sinai Peninsula towards the Suez Canal. For a week or two the invading armies met with success. They reached Ardahan, almost in the rear of Kars, they pushed the Russians back from their rail-head at Sari-Kamysh, and they occupied the capital of Azerbaijan, Tabriz. But then the campaign broke down in disaster. Two Turkish army corps were destroyed at Sari-Kamysh in the first week of January, 1915, and the rest were driven out of Russian territory by the end of the month; on the 30th January, the Russians even re-occupied Tabriz. Djemal’s Egyptian expedition was a month in arrear, but its fortunes were the same. He reached the Canal at the beginning of February, after a creditable desert march, only to return by the way he came, after an abortive night attack. There was no more question of the offensive for the Turks, but only of defending their own straggling frontiers; and this breakdown was a bitter blow to Young Turkish official circles, for it shattered half the hopes that had lured them into the war. The unmeasured optimism of the winter gave place to equally violent depression, and under the influence of this new atmosphere the persecution of the Armenians entered a second and more positive phase.

A decree went forth that all Armenians should be disarmed. The Armenians in the Army were drafted out of the fighting ranks, re-formed into special labour battalions, and set to work at throwing up fortifications and constructing roads. The disarming of the civil population was left to the local authorities, and in every administrative centre a reign of terror began. The authorities demanded the production of a definite number of arms. Those who could not produce them were tortured, often in fiendish ways; those who procured them for surrender, by purchase from their Moslem neighbours or by other means, were imprisoned for conspiracy against the Government. Few of these were young men, for most of the young had been called up to serve; they were elderly men, men of substance and the leaders of the Armenian community, and it became apparent that the inquisition for arms was being used as a cloak to deprive the community of its natural heads. Similar measures had preceded the massacres of 1895-6, and a sense of foreboding spread through the Armenian people. “One night in the winter,” writes a foreign witness of these events[246], “the Government sent officers round the city to all Armenian houses, knocking up the families and demanding that all weapons should be given up. This action was the death-knell to many hearts.”

The appalling inference was in fact correct, for the second phase of persecution passed over without a break into the third and final act, and it is evident that the whole train had been laid by the Ministry at Constantinople before the first arms were called in or the first Armenian thrown into prison. This carries the detailed organisation of the scheme at least as far back as February, 1915, and, indeed, the elaborate preparations that had already been made by the 8th April, the date of the first deportation at Zeitoun, presuppose at least as long a period. It is extremely important to emphasise these chronological facts, because they refute the attempt of the apologists to disconnect the last phase from the phases that preceded it, and to represent it as an emergency measure dictated by the military events of the spring.

In reality, the situation had been growing tenser before the spring began. In outlying villages, the inquisition for arms had been accompanied by open violence. Men had been massacred, women violated and houses burnt down by the gendarmerie patrols, and such outrages had been particularly frequent in the Vilayet of Van, where the soldiers seem to have been exasperated by their recent reverses and were certainly stimulated by the truculence of the Governor Djevdet Bey, who had returned to his administrative duties after his unsuccessful campaigning beyond the frontier. The crowning outrage was the murder of four Armenian leaders from the City, when they were on their way to an outlying district to keep the peace, at Djevdet’s own request, between the local Armenians and their Moslem neighbours. The Armenian inhabitants of the City of Van took warning from the fate of the villagers and from this last and most sinister crime, and prepared themselves, in case of need, for self-defence. Their action was justified by Djevdet Bey himself, for he had been drawing a cordon round the garden suburbs of Van, where the majority of the Armenian population lived, and on the 20th April he unleashed his troops upon them without provocation. The Armenians of Van found themselves fighting for their lives against a murderous attack by what was supposed to be the lawful Government of their country. There had been the same sequence of events at Zeitoun. The search for arms had been accompanied by a formidable concentration of troops in the town, and the final phase had been opened, not indeed by a butchery, but by the deportation of the first batch of the inhabitants. This had occurred on the 8th April, twelve days before Djevdet Bey’s outbreak at Van, and both events were previous to the new turn in the military situation. In fact, it was the distress of the Armenian civil population at Van that decided the Russian initiative. A Russian column, with a strong contingent of Russian-Armenian volunteers, forced its way towards the city from the direction of Bayazid, and relieved the defenders on the 19th May, after they had been besieged for a month. The strategy of encirclement was now retorted upon the Turks themselves, for on the 24th May another Russian column occupied Urmia, and drove the last of the Turco-Kurdish invaders out of Azerbaijan. A British expeditionary force was simultaneously pressing up the Tigris, and while events were taking this serious turn in the east, the heart of the Empire was threatened by the attack on the Dardanelles. By the end of May, 1915, the outlook was as desperate as in the bad days of 1912, but it must be emphasised again that the final phase in the procedure against the Armenians had already begun before these acute military dangers emerged above the horizon. The military straits in which the Young Turks found themselves in the spring of 1915 may have precipitated the execution of their Armenian scheme, but have no bearing whatever upon its origination.

On the 8th April, then, the final phase began, and the process carried out at Zeitoun was applied to one Armenian centre after another throughout the Ottoman Empire. On a certain date, in whatever town or village it might be (and the dates show a significant sequence), the public crier went through the streets announcing that every male Armenian must present himself forthwith at the Government Building. In some cases the warning was given by the soldiery or gendarmerie slaughtering every male Armenian they encountered in the streets, a reminiscence of the procedure in 1895-6; but usually a summons to the Government Building was the preliminary stage. The men presented themselves in their working clothes, leaving their shops and work-rooms open, their ploughs in the field, their cattle on the mountain side. When they arrived, they were thrown without explanation into prison, kept there a day or two, and then marched out of the town in batches, roped man to man, along some southerly or south-easterly road. They were starting, they were told, on a long journey—to Mosul or perhaps to Baghdad. It was a dreadful prospect to men unequipped for travel, who had neither scrip nor staff, food nor clothes nor bedding. They had bidden no farewell to their families, they had not wound up their affairs. But they had not long to ponder over their plight, for they were halted and massacred at the first lonely place on the road. The same process was applied to those other Armenian men (and they numbered hundreds or even thousands in the larger centres) who had been imprisoned during the winter months on the charge of conspiracy or concealment of arms, though in some instances these prisoners are said to have been overlooked—an involuntary form of reprieve of which there were also examples during the French Reign of Terror in 1793. This was the civil authorities’ part, but there was complete co-ordination between Talaat Bey’s Ministry of the Interior and Enver Pasha’s Ministry of War, for simultaneously the Armenian Labour Battalions, working behind the front, were surrounded by detachments of their combatant Moslem fellow-soldiers and butchered in cold blood.

The military authorities also made themselves responsible for the civil population of Bitlis, Moush and Sassoun, who were marked out for complete and immediate extermination on account of their proximity to Van and the advancing Russian forces. This task was carried out by military methods with the help of the local Kurds—another reversion to the tactics of Abd-ul-Hamid—but its application appears to have been limited to the aforementioned districts. In the rest of the Empire, where the work was left in the hands of the civil administration, the women and children were not disposed of by straightforward massacre like the men. Their destiny under the Government scheme was not massacre but slavery or deportation.

After the Armenian men had been summoned away to their death, there was usually a few days interval in whatever town it might be, and then the crier was heard again in the streets, bidding all Armenians who remained to prepare themselves for deportation, while placards to the same effect were posted on the walls.[247] This applied, in actual fact, to the women and children, and to a poor remnant of the men who, through sickness, infirmity or age, had escaped the fate marked out for their sex. A period of grace was in most cases accorded for the settlement of their affairs and the preparation of their journey; but here, again, there were cases in which the victims were taken without warning from the loom, the fountain or even from their beds, and the respite, where granted, was in great measure illusory. The ordinary term given was a bare week, and it was never more than a fortnight—a time utterly insufficient for all that had to be done. There were instances, moreover, in which the Government broke its promise, and carried away its victims before the stated day arrived.

For the women there was an alternative to deportation. They might escape it by conversion to Islam; but conversion for an Armenian woman in 1915 meant something more physical than a change of theology. It could only be ratified by immediate marriage with a Moslem man, and if the woman were already a wife (or, rather, a widow, for by this time few Armenian husbands remained alive), she must part with any children she had, and surrender them to be brought up as true Moslems in a “Government Orphanage”—a fate of uncertain meaning, for no such institutions were known to be in existence[248]. If the convert could find no Turk to take her, or shrank from the embraces of the bridegroom who offered himself, then she and her children must be deported with the rest, however fervently she had professed the creed of Islam. Deportation was the alternative adopted by, or imposed upon, the great majority.

The sentence of deportation was a paralysing blow, yet those condemned to it had to spend their week of grace in feverish activity, procuring themselves clothing, provisions and ready money for the road. The local authorities placed every possible obstacle in their way. There was an official fiction that their banishment was only temporary, and they were therefore prohibited from selling their real property or their stock. The Government set its seal upon the vacated houses, lands and merchandise, “to keep them safe against their owners’ return;” yet before these rightful owners started on their march they often saw these very possessions, which they had not been allowed to realise, made over by the authorities as a free gift to Moslem immigrants, who had been concentrated in the neighbourhood, in readiness to step into the Armenians’ place[249]. And even such household or personal chattels as they were permitted to dispose of were of little avail, for their Moslem neighbours took shameless advantage of their necessity, and beat them down to an almost nominal price, so that when the day of departure arrived they were often poorly equipped to meet it.

The Government charged itself with their transport, and indeed they were not in a position to arrange for it themselves, for their ultimate destination was seldom divulged. The exiles from each centre were broken up into several convoys, which varied in size from two or three hundred to three or four thousand members. A detachment of gendarmerie was assigned to every convoy, to guard them on the way, and the civil authorities hired or requisitioned a certain number of ox-carts (arabas), usually one to a family, which they placed at their disposal; and so the convoy started out. The mental misery of exile was sufficiently acute, but it was soon ousted by more material cares. A few days, or even a few hours, after the start, the carters would refuse to drive them further, and the gendarmes, as fellow-Moslems, would connive at their mutinousness. So the carts turned back, and the exiles had to go forward on foot. This was the beginning of their physical torments, for they were not travelling over soft country or graded roads, but by mule-tracks across some of the roughest country in the world. It was the hot season, the wells and springs were sometimes many hours’ journey apart, and the gendarmes often amused themselves by forbidding their fainting victims to drink. It would have been an arduous march for soldiers on active service, but the members of these convoys were none of them fitted or trained for physical hardship. They were the women and children, the old and the sick. Some of the women had been delicately brought up and lived in comfort all their lives; some had to carry children in their arms too young to walk; others had been sent off with the convoy when they were far gone with child, and gave birth on the road. None of these latter survived, for they were forced to march on again after a few hours’ respite; they died on the road, and the new-born babies perished with them. Many others died of hunger and thirst, sunstroke, apoplexy or sheer exhaustion. The hardships endured by the women who accompanied their husbands on Sir John Moore’s retreat to Corunna bear no comparison with the hardships these Armenian women endured. The Government which condemned them to exile knew what the journey would mean, and the servants of the Government who conducted them did everything to aggravate their inevitable physical sufferings. Yet this was the least part of their torture; far worse were the atrocities of violence wantonly inflicted upon them by fellow human beings.

From the moment they left the outskirts of the towns they were never safe from outrage. The Moslem peasants mobbed and plundered them as they passed through the cultivated lands, and the gendarmes connived at the peasants’ brutality, as they had connived at the desertion of the drivers with their carts. When they arrived at a village they were exhibited like slaves in a public place, often before the windows of the Government Building itself, and every Moslem inhabitant was allowed to view them and take his choice of them for his harem; the gendarmes themselves began to make free with the rest, and compelled them to sleep with them at night. There were still more horrible outrages when they came to the mountains, for here they were met by bands of “chettis” and Kurds. The “chettis” were brigands, recruited from the public prisons; they had been deliberately released by the authorities on a consideration which may have been tacit but which both parties clearly understood. As for the Kurds, they had not changed since 1896, for they had always retained their arms, which Abd-ul-Hamid had served out and the Young Turks could not or would not take away; and they had now been restored to official favour upon the proclamation of the Holy War, so that their position was as secure again as it had been before 1908. They knew well what they were allowed and what they were intended to do. When these Kurds and chettis waylaid the convoys, the gendarmes always fraternised with them and followed their lead, and it would be hard to say which took the most active part in the ensuing massacre—for this was the work which the brigands came to do. The first to be butchered were the old men and boys—all the males that were to be found in the convoy except the infants in arms—but the women were massacred also. It depended on the whim of the moment whether a Kurd cut a woman down or carried her away into the hills. When they were carried away their babies were left on the ground or dashed against the stones. But while the convoy dwindled, the remnant had always to march on. The cruelty of the gendarmes towards the victims grew greater as their physical sufferings grew more intense; the gendarmes seemed impatient to make a hasty end of their task. Women who lagged behind were bayoneted on the road, or pushed over precipices, or over bridges. The passage of rivers, and especially of the Euphrates, was always an occasion of wholesale murder. Women and children were driven into the water, and were shot as they struggled, if they seemed likely to reach the further bank. The lust and covetousness of their tormentors had no limit. The last survivors often staggered into Aleppo naked; every shred of their clothing had been torn from them on the way. Witnesses who saw their arrival remark that there was not one young or pretty face to be seen among them, and there was assuredly none surviving that was truly old—except in so far as it had been aged by suffering. The only chance to survive was to be plain enough to escape their torturers’ lust, and vigorous enough to bear the fatigues of the road.

Those were the exiles that arrived on foot, but there were others, from the metropolitan districts and the north-west, who were transported to Aleppo by rail. These escaped the violence of the Kurds, but the sum of their suffering can hardly have been less. They were packed in cattle-trucks, often filthy and always overcrowded, and their journey was infinitely slow, for the line was congested by their multitude and by the passage of troops. At every stopping-place they were simply turned out into the open, without food or shelter, to wait for days, or even weeks, till the line was clear and rolling-stock available to carry them a further stage. The gendarmes in charge of them seem to have been as brutal as those with the convoys on foot, and when they came to the two breaks in the Baghdad Railway, where the route crosses the ranges of the Taurus and Amanus Mountains, they too had to traverse these, the most arduous stages of all, on foot. At Bozanti, the rail-head west of Taurus, and again at Osmania, Mamouret, Islohia and Kotmo, stations on either slope of the Amanus chain, vast and incredibly foul concentration camps grew up, where the exiles were delayed for months, and died literally by thousands of hunger, exposure, and epidemics. The portion of them that finally reached Aleppo were in as deplorable a condition as those that had made the journey on foot from beginning to end.

Aleppo was the focus upon which all the convoys converged. In April, it is true, half the Zeitounlis had been sent north-westward to Sultania, in the Konia district, one of the most unhealthy spots in the Anatolian Desert. But the authorities changed their mind, and despatched the exiles at Sultania south-east again, to join their fellow-townsmen in the Desert of Syria[250]. Thenceforward, the south-eastern desert was the destination of them all, and Aleppo, and in a secondary degree Ourfa and Ras-ul-Ain, were the natural centres of distribution.

Some of the exiles were planted in the immediate neighbourhood of Aleppo itself—at places like Moumbidj, Bab, Ma’ara, Idlib[251]—but these seem to have been comparatively few, and it is not certain whether their quarters there were intended to be permanent. Many more were deported southward from Aleppo along the Syrian Railway, and allowed to find a resting-place in the districts of Hama, Homs and Damascus. A still larger number were sent towards the east, and cantoned on the banks of the Euphrates, in the desert section of its course. There were some at Rakka; Der-el-Zor was the largest depôt of all, and is mentioned in this connection more frequently than any place after Aleppo itself; some were sent on to Mayadin[252], a day’s journey further down the river, and Moslem travellers reported meeting others within forty-eight hours’ journey of Baghdad[253]. No first-hand evidence has come in of their presence at or near Mosul, though they were frequently informed on their journey that their destination was to be there.

The dispersal of the exiles was thus extremely wide, as the authors of the scheme had intended that it should be, but certain features are common to all the places to which they were sent. They were all inhabited by Moslem populations alien to the Armenians in language and habits of life; they were all unhealthy—either malarious or sultry or in some other respect markedly unsuitable for the residence of people used to a temperate climate; and they were all remote from the exiles’ original homes—the remotest places, in fact, which the Government could find within the Ottoman frontiers, since Christians were debarred from setting foot on the sacred deserts of the Hidjaz, and a British expeditionary force was occupying the marshes of Irak. The Ottoman Government had to content itself with the worst districts at its disposal, and it did its utmost to heighten the climate’s natural effect by marooning the exiles there, after an exhausting journey, with neither food, nor shelter, nor clothing, and with no able-bodied men among them to supply these deficiencies by their labour and resource.

The transmission of the exiles to these distant destinations was naturally slow—indeed, the slowness of the journey was one of the most effective of its torments. The first convoy started from Zeitoun on the 8th April, 1915; fresh convoys followed it during the seven ensuing months from the different Armenian centres in the Empire, and there is no record of any stoppage until the 6th November. On that date an order from Constantinople reached the local authorities, at any rate in the Cilician plain[254], directing them to refrain from further deportations; but this only applied to the remnant of the local Armenian residents, and the masses of exiles from the north and north-west who were still painfully struggling across the barriers of Taurus and Amanus, were driven on remorselessly to their journey’s end, which cannot have been reached by them (or by such of them as survived) before the very close of the year. The congestion of the routes was partly responsible for this delay; but the congestion would have been still more pronounced if the scheme had not been carried out methodically, region by region, in an order which betrays more than anything else the directing hand of the Central Government. Cilicia was the first region to be cleared, just as it had been the principal region to suffer in the massacres of 1909. Strategically and economically, it was the most vital spot in Asiatic Turkey, and its large and increasing Armenian population must always have offended the sensibilities of the Young Turkish Nationalists. It was the natural starting-point for the execution of the Ottomanisation Scheme, and the deportations were in progress here fully six weeks before they were applied to the remainder of the Empire. Zeitoun was cleared on the 8th April; Geben, Furnus and Albustan within the next few days; Dört Yöl before the end of the month. At Hadjin, on the other hand, the clearance did not begin till the 3rd June, and dragged on into September; while at Adana, the city of the plain, there was only an abortive clearance in the third week of May, and the serious deportations were postponed till the first week in September.

The next region to be cleared was the zone bordering on Van and immediately threatened by the Russian advance, from the Black Sea to the Persian frontier. In the south-eastern districts of this zone—Bitlis, Moush, Sassoun and Hakkiari—the clearance, as has been remarked already, was not effected by deportation, but by wholesale massacre on the spot. Outlying villages of the Boulanik, Moush and Sassoun areas were destroyed in the latter part of May, and before the end of the same month Djevdet Bey retreated down the Bohtan Valley from Van, and massacred the Armenians of Sairt. The Armenians of Bitlis were next massacred by Djevdet, on the 25th June; and, in the first week of July, 20,000 fresh troops arrived from Harpout and exterminated the Armenians of Moush—first the villagers and then the people of the town, which was bombarded by artillery on the 10th June. After making an end of Moush these troops joined the Kurdish irregulars operating against Sassoun, and on the 5th August, after bitter fighting, the surviving Sassounlis—man, woman and child—were annihilated in their last mountain stronghold. At the end of July the Ottoman forces temporarily re-entered Van, and slaughtered all the Armenian inhabitants who had not escaped in the wake of the Russian retreat. In June and July the Nestorian (Syrian) communities of the district of Hakkiari, in the upper basin of the Greater Zab, were also attacked by the Kurds and destroyed, except for a remnant which crossed the watershed into the Urmia basin and found safety within the Russian lines.

In the north-western districts of the frontier zone the semblance of deportation was preserved, but the exiles—women and children as well as men—were invariably massacred in cold blood after a few days on the road. Before the end of May there was a massacre at Khnyss, and on the 6th June the deportations began (with the same consummation) in the villages of the Erzeroum plain. At Erzeroum itself the first deportation took place on the 16th June, and the last on the 28th July (or on the 3rd August, according to other reports). The Armenian Bishop of the city was deported with this last convoy, and never heard of again. At Baibourt, the surrounding villages were similarly cleared before the town, and the townspeople were despatched in three convoys, the last of which started on the 14th June. From the town of Erzindjan four convoys started on successive days, from the 7th June to the 10th. Practically none of the exiles from Erzindjan, Baibourt or Erzeroum seem to have outlived the first stages of the journey.

At Harpout, the clearance began on the 1st June, and continued throughout the month. On the 2nd, 3rd and 4th July the adjoining town of Mezré was emptied as well. The convoys from these two places and the neighbouring villages were terribly thinned by atrocities on the road.

At Trebizond the deportations were carried out from the 1st to the 6th July, and seem to have been simultaneous in the various coast towns of the Vilayet. Here, too, deportation was merely a cloak for immediate massacre. The exiles were either drowned at sea or cut down at the first resting-place on the road.

In the Vilayet of Sivas, again, the villages were dealt with first, but the city itself was not cleared till the 5th July. At X. the men were deported on the 26th June, the women on the 5th July, and the last remnant, who had found protection with the American Missionaries, were carried away on the 10th August. All the men, and many of the women, were massacred on the road.

The Armenian population in the provinces west of Sivas, and in the metropolitan districts surrounding Constantinople, was removed by train along the Anatolian Railway to Konia, and thence towards Aleppo along the several sections of the Baghdad line. In all this region the scheme was put into execution distinctly later. At Angora the deportations began towards the end of July, at Adapazar about the 11th August; at Broussa there seems to have been no clearance till the first weeks of September, but this is stated to have been one of the last places touched[255]. At Adrianople, however, the Armenians were not deported till the middle of October; and at K., in the Sandjak of Kaisaria, not till the 12th/15th November.

The south-eastern outposts of the Armenian Dispersion were left to the last, although their immediate neighbours in the Cilician highlands had been taken at the very beginning. The villagers of Djibal Mousa were not summoned till the 13th July; Aintab was not touched till the 1st August, and then only cleared gradually during the course of the month. The summons to Ourfa, which was answered, as at Djibal Mousa, by defiance, was not delivered till the last week in September.

Glancing back over this survey, we can discern the Central Government’s general plan. The months of April and May were assigned to the clearance of Cilicia; June and July were reserved for the east; the western centres along the Railway were given their turn in August and September; and at the same time the process was extended, for completeness’ sake, to the outlying Armenian communities in the extreme south-east. It was a deliberate, systematic attempt to eradicate the Armenian population throughout the Ottoman Empire, and it has certainly met with a very large measure of success; but it is not easy to present the results, even approximately, in a statistical form. The only people in a position to keep an accurate account of the numbers affected were the Ottoman authorities themselves; but it is unlikely that they have done so, and still more unlikely that they would ever divulge such figures to the civilised world. We are compelled to base our estimates on the statements of private persons, who were excluded from detailed investigation by the jealous suspicion of the Government officials and were seldom able to observe events in more than a limited section of the field. We must make our computations by piecing together these isolated data from private sources, and since Oriental arithmetic is notoriously inexact (and this is scarcely less true of the Nearer than of the Further East), we shall only make use of testimony from foreign witnesses of neutral nationality. Such witnesses may be assumed to be comparatively free from unconscious exaggeration and completely innocent of purposeful misrepresentation, and we can accept their statements with considerable assurance.

The first step is to establish the number of Armenians living within the Ottoman frontiers at the moment the deportations began. All the other figures ultimately depend upon this, but it is harder than any to obtain, for there are no independent foreign estimates of this on record, and the discrepancy between the native estimates is extreme[256]. The Armenian Patriarchate, after an enquiry conducted in 1912, placed the number as high as 2,100,000[257]; the Ottoman Government, in its latest official returns, puts it at 1,100,000 and no more. Both parties have an equal political interest in forcing their figures, but the Armenians are likely to have had a greater respect for exactitude, or at any rate a stronger sense of the futility of falsification. The most “neutral” course under the circumstances is to halve the difference, and to take the number provisionally as being 1,600,000, with the qualification that the true figure certainly lies between this and 2,000,000, and probably approaches more closely to the latter. The rest of the necessary figures can fortunately be drawn from foreign neutral testimony, in which such baffling discrepancies are rarer.

The second step is to estimate the number of those who have escaped deportation. There are the refugees who have escaped it by crossing the frontier—182,000 into the Russian Caucasus and 4,200 into Egypt, according to detailed and trustworthy returns[258]. There are also two important Armenian communities in Turkey where practically all but the leaders have been left unmolested—those of Smyrna and Constantinople. At Constantinople about 150,000 Armenians must still remain. Then there are the Catholic and Protestant Millets, which were nominally exempted from deportation, and the exempted converts to Islam. It is impossible to estimate the numbers in these categories with any plausibility, for the conduct of the authorities in respect of them was quite erratic. Many of the converts to Islam[259], as well as Armenians of the other denominations, were given the same treatment as the Gregorians, and the actual percentage of conversions is unascertainable, for they were encouraged in some places and discouraged in others. We must also allow for those who managed to elude the Government’s net. As a general rule, this category is more numerous in reality than it appears to be, and this is especially so in the Near East. But in the present case the Young Turks seem to have put a Prussian thoroughness into the execution of their scheme, and the margin of ineffectiveness was evidently narrow. In the towns, such as Zeitoun, Hadjin, Sivas, X., and Erzeroum, where we have sufficient testimony to cross-check the estimates presented, the clearance, by deportation or massacre, seems to have been practically complete. At Erzeroum, for instance, there were 20,000 Armenians before the clearance began, and when it was over there were not more than 100 left[260]. Concealment on any considerable scale can only have been practised in the villages, yet the number of those who have emerged from hiding since the Russian occupation is extraordinarily small. According to the investigations of the Patriarchate, there were 580,000 Armenians in 1912 in the Vilayets of Erzeroum, Bitlis and Van, which are now within the Russian lines[261]. The American Relief Committee has recently been informed by its agents on the spot that there are now only 12,100 left alive there[262]. Whatever arbitrary margin of reduction the absence of confirmatory statistics may make it necessary to subtract from the former figure, the proportion borne to it by the 12,100 survivors remains infinitesimal. Putting the communities at Constantinople and Smyrna and the refugees together at about 350,000, we shall certainly not be reckoning too low if we allow a quarter of a million for the Protestants, Catholics, converts and others who were spared, and estimate the total number of Armenians in Turkeywho escaped deportation at not more than 600,000.

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