The second act was far more diabolical and hellish than the first,
because it was not an instant death by shooting or knocking on the
head with an axe, or sabring, or throwing boat-loads of human beings
into the sea. _It was death by starvation, by rape, by disease and
by a slavery far worse than all._ By what process was this to be
accomplished? By deportation.
By the help of the _sultan_, who marshaled his hosts against Heaven, of
whom John Milton wrote centuries ago, the arch fiends at Constantinople
hatched out this plan of deportation of the entire Armenian population
to Mesopotamia, a distance of from 300 to 700 miles away from the
Armenian communities. Orders came from the central government at
Constantinople to the local authorities in the provinces of Asia Minor
and Armenia. “These orders were explicit and detailed. No hamlet was
too insignificant to be missed. The news was given by town criers
that _every_ Armenian was to be ready to leave at a certain hour for
an unknown destination. There were no exceptions for the aged, the
ill, the women in pregnancy. Only rich merchants and bankers and
good-looking women and girls were allowed to escape by professing
Islam; and let it be said to their everlasting honor that few availed
themselves of this means of escape.”
There were several reasons for the scheme of deportation: one of them
was the helpless women, children, the ill and the aged men were still
menacing the safety of the empire! Another, and the most fundamental
reason was the government’s determination to get rid of the Armenians
so as to get rid of the Armenian question once for all. Still another
reason was that the homes of the Armenians were wanted in advance. The
Moslem refugees from Macedonia must be settled in the provinces which
were occupied by the Armenians. Another reason was to show how the
association of the Turk with the highly cultured and civilized nation,
the German, had mollified the brutal heart of the Turk, who did not,
and would not massacre the defenseless women, children, the ill, the
aged men--for such stories are “fabrications!”
We reproduce a few instances of these stories which the Turkish
Ambassador--it may be the German too--declares are “fabrications, no
women and children have been killed.”
“We are shocked at the cruelties perpetrated in these massacres.
Trenchant pens have portrayed the horrors. Even some Germans have been
found to denounce these massacres and to accuse the infamous ally
of the Teutonic kaisers of the most terrible cruelties. Witness the
following narrative which I quote from the November, 1915, issue of
the _Allegemeine Missione Zeitschrift_, published in Berlin.
“‘A gendarme related to us, in such details as to make us shudder,
how the Turks had maltreated a group of women and children, who
were driven into exile. They slaughtered the Armenians without any
hindrance. Each day ten or twelve men are hurled down into the
ravines. They crush the skulls of those children who are too weak to
walk.
“‘One day, early, we heard the procession of those doomed victims.
Their misfortune was indescribable. They were in absolute silence--the
young and old, even grandfathers advancing under such burdens as even
their asses could hardly carry. All were to be chained together and
then precipitated from the highest summit of a steep rock into the
torrent of the Euphrates river. This froze our hearts. Our gendarme
tells us that he had driven from Mama-Khatoun a similar group of
people, composed of 3000 women and children, _who were exterminated_.
“‘On the 30th day of May, 674 Armenians were embarked in 13 sloops on
the Tigris. Gendarmes were in each embarkation. These sloops departed
towards Mosul. On the way the gendarmes threw all the unfortunates
into the river, after having robbed them of their money and clothing.
They kept the money and sold the clothing in the markets.
“‘An employee of the Bagdad railway related that the Armenians were
imprisoned wholesale in the dungeons of Biredjik to be thrown into the
Euphrates river at night. The corpses washed on to the river banks
became a prey for dogs and vultures.’
“What law of retaliation could ever account for such abominable
crimes? And moreover, what price must be exacted for the crimes of
_Kultur_ in Belgium, France, Serbia and Armenia?”[168]
There was no possible excuse for such barbarities to be poured upon the
Armenians. Had there been any excuse the German, American, and Swiss
missionaries, and the consuls of the neutral nations who witnessed
these atrocities would have pointed it out. In fact, the whole
civilized world stood “with shuddering horror pale, and eyes aghast”
at the unparalleled savagery of the Turks, except those who were
intoxicated with Prussian militarism, the advocates and defenders of
the booty-loving and obscene Mohammedan fiends.
“It is hardly possible to imagine to oneself the implication of such
a decree [of deportation]. These [Armenians] were not savages, like
the Red Indians who retired before the White man across the American
continent. They were not nomadic shepherds like their barbarous
neighbors the Kurds. They were people living the same life as
ourselves, townspeople established in the town for generations and the
chief authors of its local prosperity. They were sedentary people,
doctors and lawyers and teachers, business men and artisans and
shopkeepers, and they had raised solid monuments to their intelligence
and industry. Costly churches and well-appointed schools. Their women
were as delicate, as refined, as unused to hardships and brutality
as women in Europe or the United States. In fact, they were in the
closest personal touch with Western civilization, for many of the
Armenian centers upon which the crime was perpetrated had been served
by the American missions and colleges for at least fifty years, and
were familiar with the fine men and women who directed them.”[169]
The government’s determination to exterminate the Armenian race was
not a sudden impulse. It was a deliberate scheme of long standing.
After the overthrow of the Hamidian despotism, the Young Turks
encouraged the Armenians to organize societies and even permitted them
to possess firearms. Their diabolical purpose was not suspected by
the trusting Armenians. But when war broke out, the Turks joined the
Teutons in hopes to share the rich booty of the war. When this was not
forthcoming, they bethought that the opportune moment had come to loot
the Armenians, and carry out the plan of annihilation. They had not
much difficulty in making out a case against these societies, saying
that they were of a revolutionary character; and their possession of
firearms was taken as a proof of the same.
Dr. Gibbons gives in his excellent little book, “The Blackest Page of
Modern History,” the following statement which was made by the Turkish
Consul General in New York: “‘However much to be deplored may be these
harrowing events, in the last analysis we can but say the Armenians
have only themselves to blame.’ Djelal Munif Bey went on to explain
that the Armenians had been planning a revolution, and were killed by
the Turkish soldiers only after they had been caught ‘red-handed with
arms in their hands, resisting lawful authority.’”
In Adabazar 500 leading Armenians were arrested and imprisoned in the
Armenian church. They had their daily tortures and beatings to induce
them to implicate one another, and to deliver their arms. Whether
they were all the members of a society or not it did not matter. For
ten days these men have been tortured, and the whole population of the
Armenians--some 20,000 or more--were terrorized and paralysed. Towards
the end of this time, the head of the society who had been an exile
suddenly returned. At the trial--or rather at the Inquisition--he
boldly answered: “Why do you punish these men? If there is any fault it
is mine, and yet I also am guiltless. _This society was organized with
the permission of the Government. You allowed us to obtain firearms._”
The eye-witness further states that soon after this the whole Armenian
population of Adabazar was “turned into the streets to wait their turn
to go. There they waited, with their baggage, for days by the roadside
near the station. As soon as they vacated their houses, refugees
(Mohammedans) from Macedonia took possession of them.”
“The people who had any money went to Konia by freight cars, being
allowed to take only a few possessions with them. They were told to
leave their possessions in the churches and they would be safeguarded,
but the same promise had been made in Sabandja, and the church
had been looted almost before the people were out of the city; so
nobody trusted this promise. The exiles were crowded on top of their
possessions, sixty to eighty people in a car marked forty people.
“From Konia they were to go by foot or carriage to a desert place
called Mosul (province) in Mesopotamia. Those who had no money must
take the entire journey (about 1000 miles) by foot.”
Here is a portion of the description of an eye-witness:
“Not a single person with an Armenian name, whether rich or poor,
old or young, sick or well, male or female, was to be left in the
city. They were to have three days to prepare to go.... The promise
of three days was not kept. The very next morning the local police
with gendarmes well armed with Mauser rifles began to enter the
Armenian houses and drive the women and children into the streets
and lock the doors of their houses behind them and sealed them with
the government’s seal, thus dispossessing them of all their worldly
possessions. They then assigned four or five persons to each of the
ox-carts which they had brought with them with which to send the
people away. But the carts were not intended to carry the people. They
had to walk beside them. The carts were for carrying a pillow and a
single bed covering for each person. When they had gotten from 500
to 1000 persons ready in this manner they were set moving, a doleful
procession, driven by gendarmes along the roads toward the east.
Morning after morning, during the month of July (1915) we saw groups
of this kind pass by the college compound, the women carrying their
babies in their arms and leading their little children by the hand,
without anything left in this world, starting on a hopeless journey
of a thousand miles into the wilderness, to miserably die or to be
captured by Turks. By the end of July, the city was emptied in this
manner of its 12,000 Armenian population.”
* * * * *
“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 barefooted 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 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 one place the people had been given notice
to depart on Wednesday; the carts appeared on Tuesday at 3.30 A.M.,
and the people were ordered to leave at once. ‘Some were dragged from
their beds without even sufficient clothing.’”
The kind-hearted eye-witness suffered almost as much as the exiles.
Here is a description:
“The weeping and wailing of the women and children was most
heartrending. Some of these people were from wealthy and refined
circles, some were accustomed to luxury and ease. There were
clergymen, merchants, bankers, mechanics, tailors, and men from every
walk of life. The whole Mohammedan population knew from the beginning
that these people were to be their prey, and they were treated as
animals.”
Here is one more from a different place:
“All the morning the ox-carts creaked out of the town, laden with
women and children, and here and there a man who had escaped the
previous deportation. The women and girls all wore the Turkish
costumes, that their faces might not be exposed to the gaze of the
drivers and gendarmes--a brutal lot of men brought in from other
regions....
“The panic in the city was terrible.... The people were sure that the
men were being killed and the women kidnapped. Many of the convicts in
the prisons had been released, and the mountains around were full of
bands of outlaws....
“Most of the Armenians in the district were absolutely hopeless. Many
said it was worse than a massacre. No one knew what was coming, but
all felt that it was the end. Even the pastors and leaders could offer
no word of encouragement or hope.... Under the severe strain many
individuals became demented, some of them permanently.”[170]
Thousands of boys and girls of assimilable age have been torn away from
the bleeding hearts of their parents, and sold and distributed among
the Mohammedans, and many thousands more have perished by disease, by
exhaustion, by starvation, and by cruel murder.
The following description was written from Malatia:
“Boys under ten and girls under fourteen are accepted here as orphans
(by the Mohammedans). More than 800, practically all from Sivas
province, are here.... Many have become sick, and they are dying off
pretty rapidly. It is evident that many will die on the way....”
Another report says that the _dervishes_, the fanatical Moslem
devotees, met the caravans of the deported Armenians on their road
and carried off children, shrieking with terror, to bring them up as
Moslems in their savage fraternity. Here another: “Many of the boys
appear to have been sent to another district, to be distributed among
the farmers. The best looking of the older girls are kept in houses
for the pleasure of members of the gang who seem to rule affairs
here....”
The Armenian journal _Horizon_, of Tiflis, reported in its issue of
Aug. 22d (old style), that:
“A telegram from Bukarest states that the Turks have sent from
Anatolia (Asia Minor) four railway-vans full of Armenian orphans from
the interior of the country, to distribute them among Moslem families.
“Some were sold into shame before the march began. ‘One Moslem
reported that gendarmes had offered to sell him two girls for a
medjikieh (about eighty cents).’ They sold the youngest and most
handsome at every village where they passed the night; and these girls
have been trafficked in hundreds through the brothels of the Ottoman
Empire. Abundant news has come from Constantinople itself of their
being sold for a few shillings in the open markets of the capital; and
one piece of evidence in Lord Bryce’s possession comes from a girl
no more than ten years old, who was carried with this object from a
town of North Eastern Anatolia to the shores of Bosphorus. These were
Christian women, as civilized and refined as the women of Western
Europe, and they were enslaved into degradation.”[171]
It was estimated that the exiles from three viliayets alone numbered
about 600,000.
“We believe there is imminent danger for the Sivas, Erzroom and
Harpoot viliayets to be 600,000 will starve to death on the road. They
took food for a few days, but did not dare take much money with them,
as, if they did so, it is doubtful whether they would be allowed to
keep it.”
We must now follow the exiles on the way to death and destruction. In
the following case the officers seem to think it not worth their while
to drive so few away; and they may have been very poor:
“Forty-five men and women were taken a short distance. The women were
first outraged by the officers of the gendarmerie, and then turned
over to the gendarmes to dispose of. According to this witness, a
child was killed by having its brains beaten out on a rock. The men
were all killed, and not a single person survived out of this group of
forty-five.
“The forced exodus of the last part of the Armenian population from
a certain district took place on June 1st, 1915. All the villages
as well as three-quarters of the town, had already been evacuated.
An escort of fifteen gendarmes followed the third convoy, which
included 4000 to 5000 persons. The prefect of the city had wished
them a pleasant journey. But at a few hours’ distance from the town,
the caravan was surrounded by bands of a brigand-tribe, and by a mob
of Turkish peasants armed with guns, axes, and clubs. They first
began plundering their victims, searching carefully even the very
young children. The gendarmes sold to the Turkish peasants what they
could not carry away with them. After they had taken even the food of
these unhappy people, the massacre of the males began, including two
priests, one of whom was ninety. In six or seven days all males above
fifteen years of age had been murdered.
“It was the beginning of the end. People on horseback raised the veils
of the women, and carried off the pretty ones.”
The following is a portion of a detailed description by an eye-witness,
who was in the company on the march, and saw the third batch, above
mentioned, of 5000 to melt out before they stopped in a halting place
after thirty-two days:
“... The rest of the population was sent off in three batches; I was
among the third batch.... Our party left on June 1st (old style),
fifteen gendarmes going with us.... Very many women and girls were
carried off to the mountains, among them my sister, whose one-year-old
baby they threw away. A Turk picked it up and carried it off. I know
not where. My mother walked till she could walk no further, and
dropped by the roadside, on a mountain top. We found on the road
many who had been in the previous batches; some women were among the
killed, with their husbands and sons. We also came across some old
people and infants still alive, but in a pitiful condition....
“We were not allowed to sleep at night in the villages, but lay down
outside. Under cover of the night indescribable deeds were committed
by the gendarmes, brigands and villagers. Many of us [the company]
died from hunger and strokes of apoplexy. Others were left by the
roadside too feeble to go on.
“The worst and most unimaginable horrors were reserved for us at
the banks of the (Western) Euphrates and the Erzindjan plain. The
mutilated bodies of women, girls and little children made everybody
shudder. The brigands were doing all sorts of awful deeds to the women
and girls who were with us, whose cries went up to heaven. At the
Euphrates, the brigands and gendarmes threw into the river all the
remaining children under fifteen years old. Those who could swim were
shot down as they struggled in the water.”
Miss Mary Louise Graffam secured the permission of the governor
of Sivas to accompany her school girls on their way to
exile--supposedly--to Mesopotamia, but actually to their destruction.
After about ten days’ journey she was not permitted to go any further.
At Malatia, where she had to give up her charge, she remained a few
days; from there she wrote a letter to a friend in Constantinople. We
reproduce a few excerpts from her letter.
“When we were ready to leave Sivas, the government gave forty-five
ox-carts for the Protestant townspeople and eighty horses, but had
none at all for our pupils and teachers; so we bought ten oxcarts, two
horses, arabas (wagons), and five or six donkeys, and started out.
In the company (of 2000) were all our teachers in the college, about
twenty boys from the college, and about thirty of the girls’ school.
It was a special favor to the Sivas people, who had not done anything
revolutionary (?) that the Vali allowed the men who were not yet in
prison[172] to go with their families.
“... We were so near Sivas (the first night) that the gendarmes
protected us and no special harm was done; but the second night we
began to see what was before us. The gendarmes would go ahead and
have long conversations with the villagers, and then stand back and
let them rob and trouble the people until we began to scream and then
they would come and drive them away. _Yorgans_ (blankets) and rugs and
all such things disappeared by the dozens and donkeys were sure to be
lost. Many had brought cows, but from the first day those were carried
off one by one until not a single one remained.
“We got accustomed to being robbed, but the third day a new fear took
possession of us, and that was that the men were to be separated from
us at Kangal.... At Kangal they said that a valley near there was full
of corpses. Here also we began to see exiles from Tocat. The sight was
one to strike horror to any heart. There were a company of old women
who had been robbed of absolutely everything. At Tocat the government
had first imprisoned the men, and from the prison had taken them on
the road.[173] The preacher’s wife was in the company and told us the
story. After the men were gone they arrested the old women and the
older brides. There were very few young women or children. All the
younger women and children were left in Tocat. Badvelli (Rev.) Avedis
has seven children. One was with our schoolgirls and the other six
remained in Tocat, without father or mother to look after them. For
three days these Tocat people had been without food, and after that
lived on the Sivas Company, who had not yet lost much.
“... The next day we heard that a special Kaimakam had come to Hassan
Chalebe to separate the men.... But we encamped and ate our supper in
peace, and even began to think that perhaps it was not so, when the
mudir came around with gendarmes and began to collect the men, saying
that the Kaimakam wanted to write their names and that they would be
back soon.
“The night passed, only one man came back to tell the story of how
every man was compelled to give up all his money, and that all were
taken to prison. The next morning they collected the men who had
escaped the night before and extorted forty-five lires....
“Broken-hearted, the women continued their journey. ... The mudir
said the men had gone back to Sivas. The villagers whom we saw all
declared that all those men were killed at once....
“As soon as the men left us the Turkish drivers began to rob the
women, saying, ‘You are all going to be thrown into the Tokma Su, so
you might as well give your things to us and then we will stay by you
and try to protect you.’ Every Turkish woman that we met said the same
thing. The worst were the gendarmes, who really did more or less bad
things. One of the schoolgirls was carried off by the Kurds twice, but
her companions made so much fuss that she was brought back. I was on
the run all the time from one end of the company to the other....
“As we approached the bridge over the Takma Su, it was certainly a
fearful sight. As far as the eye could see over the plain was this
slow-moving line of ox-carts. For hours there was not a drop of water
on the road and the sun poured down its very hottest. As we went on,
we began to see the dead from yesterday’s company and the weak began
to fall by the way. The Kurds working in the fields made attacks
continually and we were half-distracted. I piled as many as I could on
our wagons, our pupils, both boys and girls, worked like heroes. One
girl took a baby from its dead mother and carried it until evening.
Another carried a dying woman until she died. I counted forty-nine
deaths, but there must have been many more. One naked body of a woman
was covered with bruises. I saw the Kurds robbing the bodies of these
not yet entirely dead....
“The hills on each side were white with Kurds who were throwing stones
on the Armenians, who were slowly wending their way to the bridge. I
ran ahead and stood on the bridge in the midst of a crowd of Kurds
until I was used up.... After crossing the bridge, we found all the
Sivas people who had left before us, waiting by the river, as well as
companies from Samsoun (a city on the Black Sea), Amasia, and other
places.
“My friends here (in Malatia) are very glad to have me with them, for
they have a very difficult problem on their hands, and are nearly
crazy with the horrors they have been through here. The mutessarif and
other officials here and at Sivas have again and again read me orders
from Constantinople to the effect that the lives of these exiles are
to be protected, and from their actions I should judge that they must
have received such orders;[174] but they certainly have murdered a
great many in every city. Here there were great trenches dug by the
soldiers (for the purpose beforehand) for drilling purposes. Now
these trenches are all filled up, and our friends saw carts going
back from the city by night. A man I know told me that when he was
out to inspect some work he was having done, he saw a dead body which
had evidently been pulled out of one of these trenches, probably by
dogs.... The Beledieh Reiz here says that every male over ten years
old is being murdered, that not one is to live, and no woman over
fifteen.”[175]
Miss Graffam’s letter was dated Aug. 7, 1915, at Malatia; not a word
has been heard from the company of 2000 exiles, whom she so heroically
defended until her separation from them near Malatia. The author’s
sister and brothers, and their families were in this company. The
probability is that all have perished by this time, if not massacred
soon after their guardian angel left them.