We have been looking only at the physical sufferings of these people.
Terrible as they have been who could realize or imagine the spiritual,
the mental agony of those refined souls, who have seen day by day the
fiendish deeds more abominable than the tortures and massacres? “The
spiritual torment could perhaps only be fathomed by actual experience.”
We could not think that in the second decade of the 20th century a
small “gang of unscrupulous ruffians” could and did defy the laws of
humanity and decency; and still be permitted to continue to practice
such barbarities in the face of an outraged human conscience. Indeed,
if these were not well established facts, we would not believe them.
There are two reasons why the Young Turks still continue their practice
of barbarity and abominations: the first is that they are defended by
the greatest military powers, the Teutonic arms; the second is the
indifference of the neutral states. The United States was first “too
proud to fight” for the suffering humanity. And again, “With the causes
and issues of this war we have no concern.” Some American missionaries
have died as the result of their ill-treatment by the Turks. American
properties worth several millions were seized and occupied by the
Turkish government and the missionaries compelled to leave the country.
One of these missionaries writes:
“I have received the farewell kiss and parting embrace of men,
cultured Christian gentlemen, some of whom held university degrees
from our best American institutions in this country; men with whom I
have co-operated, and at whose sides I have labored for ten years in
the work of education in that land, while at their sides stood brutal
gendarmes, sent there by the highest authorities of the Government to
drive them with their wives and children away from their homes, from
their work, and from all the associations which they held most dear,
into exile or to death; some of them to a condition worse than either.
We had no better friends in this world than those people. To part with
them under such circumstances was harder than I can say, and yet but
few tears were shed on either side. Our feelings were too deep for
idle tears! I have often seen pictures of the early Christian martyrs
crouching together in the arena of the Coliseum expecting any moment
to be torn to pieces by the hungry lions which were being turned loose
upon them, while the eager spectators were watching from their safe
seats, and waiting to be amused by that spectacle. And I had supposed
that such cruelties and such amusements were impossible in this
twentieth Christian century; but I was mistaken. I have seen sixty-two
Armenian women and girls between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five,
huddled together in the rooms of the principal of our American Girls’
School at ----, while outside were waiting men more cruel than beast,
ready to carry them off; and who backed by the highest authorities
of the Government, were demanding that we should deliver these
defenseless girls into the hands of these brutal men to do with them
what they would. I have supposed that there was no man in the world
to-day who could be amused by such a spectacle as that. In this,
too, I was mistaken; for when the wife of our American Ambassador at
Constantinople made a personal appeal to Talaat Bey, the Minister of
the Interior in the Turkish cabinet, the man who more than any one
else has devised and executed this deportation of the Armenians, and
who has boasted that he has been able to destroy more Armenians in
thirty days than Abdul Hamid was able to destroy in thirty years--when
she made an appeal to this Turkish Minister, begging him to stop this
cruel persecution of Armenian women and girls, only answered, ‘All
this amuses us.’”[176]
The absurdity of the Turkish excuses that the Armenians were preparing,
or intending to revolt is plainly seen by the following instances:
In places where the people knew the object of the government was to
massacre them, they resisted the government and the authorities had
no difficulty in subduing them. The Turks had indeed a better excuse
for massacre and the people their choice of an immediate, instead of a
lingering, death.
When the people of Shabin Karahussar, a town about 100 miles southwest
of Trebizond, were ordered to prepare for deportation, they took
up arms, and defended themselves against the Turkish troops from
the middle of May to the end of June. Then the Turks, with more
reinforcements and artillery, had no difficulty in overwhelming them.
They massacred not only about 4000 people who had taken arms to defend
themselves, but also the entire population of the country districts,
“not excepting the bishop himself. Nothing could show better than this
how little the Turkish government had to fear from the Armenians, and
how eagerly it seized upon the quickest means to their extermination,
as soon as an opportunity appeared.”
The reader will remember the Reubenian Dynasty in Cilicia which came to
an end in 1375. From that time to the present many Armenians remained
in Cilicia. The Armenians who lived in the Cilician mountains were a
sort of semi-independent tribe. They were not rebellious, but they
exerted their rights often by the force of arms. This year of crimes
had included in its plans to crush this people also. The Turkish
government “without waiting to summon them for deportation, at once
attacked them nakedly with the sword.” It is, moreover, stated that
“they were disarmed, by the promise that, if they submitted, their
defenseless brethren in the lowland villages would be ransomed from
destruction by their act. The Turkish promise was broken, of course,
as soon as the Turkish object was secured; and taken at such a
disadvantage, the heroic mountaineers inevitably succumbed.”
“The bloody curtain has fallen over Zeitoun, and the fighting stock
of these brave mountaineers has been subdued in this memorable
year of crime! As the faithful followers and remnants of the
Reubenian dynasty, they had hitherto kept their homes intact and had
successfully withstood the Turkish inroads. They have at last been
overcome by heavy Turkish forces, and the stronghold of Zeitoun is now
in the hands of the enemy....”[177]
It was begun on the 8th of April and finished about the end of May,
1915. The Turks massacred some of the inhabitants.... And the rest,
with the old men and women, were deported to Mesopotamia.
The fate of the people of Sassoun was not quite known for some time.
But the Turks and Kurds have finally completely exterminated them also.
Both in Constantinople and in the districts nearby, the Armenians have
been thinned out, and in some towns they have been cleared out to make
room for the Mohammedan refugees from Thrace and Macedonia.
“The Turks are continuing their work of exterminating the Armenians.
From Constantinople they have deported the Armenian men. Ten thousand
deported men have already been massacred in the mountains of Ismid.
“Four districts have been cleared of Armenians: Bosnian Mouhadjirs
(refugees) replace the Armenians thus exiled....
“More than 20,000 Armenians that have been forced to emigrate from
a certain province, are being thrown into the deserts amid nomadic
tribes, leaving their houses, gardens and tilled lands to the Turkish
mouhadjirs....
“As soon as the Armenian refugees left their houses, mouhadjirs from
Thrace took possession of them. The former 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 in this town now,
and the name of the town seems to have been changed to a Turkish
one.”[178]
Four thousand and two hundred Armenians were almost miraculously
saved in the following manner: When the orders came to about half a
dozen villages near Antioch for them to prepare for deportation the
inhabitants, knowing the purpose of the government, held a meeting and
decided to resist the orders. One pastor dissented and with his flock
of about sixty families was deported; nothing has been heard from that
party since. The rest hastened to gather all available provisions,
ammunition and arms and drove their herds and cattle into the mountain
west of Antioch on the Mediterranean shore. Here they had the sea
behind them for protection. On the land side, they protected every
possible approach to the mountain, and with some modern weapons and old
flintlocks, they were ready to defend themselves. They had some good
swimmers on the shore watching for some friendly ship which they could
petition for help. They also set up two large white flags, one with a
red cross in the center, and the other with these words, “_Christians
in distress--Rescue!_” They were surrounded on the land side by 3000
regular soldiers of then Turkish army, and about 15,000 Turkish mobs
of Aleppo and Antioch slums. They had a very slim chance of escaping
annihilation, and this chance was in their heroic defense. On the
53d day of their siege, when their food and ammunition was almost
exhausted, the French cruiser _Guicher_ sighted the cross and drew
near; the swimmers hastened and bore the message to it. Other ships
were called by wireless, and the whole refugees were taken off and
transported to Port Said, Egypt. They thus saved their lives by their
bravery, and saved also the Turks from some more shame and sin.
The Young Turks’ plan to exterminate the Armenian race was cunningly
complete from the beginning to the end. The three different stages
or steps by which they hoped to finish the work are now clear. In
the first stage, knowing that the able-bodied men would survive the
horrors of deportation, or at least most of them would, so in order to
hasten the end, they were massacred; in the second stage, they were
sure that delicate women and children could not stand the horrors of
deportation on foot over the rugged mountains and deep valleys under
the burning sun, half naked, and without food and water, so they
consigned the largest number of the Armenians to such a process of
death and destruction. This procedure, moreover, would give to their
representatives, whether German or Turkish, at the courts of the
neutral powers, the right to say that the Turks are not killing the
women and children. Yet they were not unmindful of the possibility of
their disappointment by the survival of some even from this process
of death. Thus we have the third stage for the unfortunate survivors.
These survivors, mostly women and children, make up the “agricultural
colonies.”
The annihilation of the Armenian race being the aim of the government,
we must surely expect the selection of such places as will accomplish
their purpose. We, unfortunately, do not fail in this expectation. One
such called Sultanieh, in the province of Konia, is a veritable desert,
south of _Tuz Gul_ (Salt Lake). At this place, “a thousand families of
Armenian townspeople, assembled by weary marches from every quarter,
were given a taste of the wilderness, a thousand families, and only
fifty grown men among them to provide for the needs of this helpless
flock of women, children and invalids flung thus suddenly upon their
own resources, in an environment as abnormal to them as it would be to
the middle-class population of any town in England or France.” Having
established this “agricultural colony” on the waste, the government was
content, and troubled itself about its colonies no more.
“But Sultanieh was by no means the worst of the charnel-house to which
the remnant of the Armenian race was consigned.” The most of the
refugees were sent to Aleppo (Halep), the seat of Northern Syria. The
Armenians who were living in Asia Minor and Armenia were used to a
temperate climate, but the climate in lower Mesopotamia and Syria is
semi-tropical, and the places to which the survivors of the deportation
have been consigned are considered “some of the most sultry regions
on the face of the earth.” A day’s journey from Aleppo southeastward
the traveler reaches a swampy region. “These swamps were allotted to
the first comers; but they did not suffice for so great a company, and
the later batches were forwarded five days’ journey, on to the town
of Der-el-Zor, the capital of the next province down the course of
the Euphrates, where the river takes its way towards the Persian Gulf
through the scorching steppes of the Arabian amphitheater.
“This amphitheater has witnessed many ghastly dramas in its day, but
none, perhaps, more ghastly than the tragedy that is being enacted in
it now, when its torrid climate is being inflicted as a sentence of
death upon the Armenians deported thither from their temperate homes
in the north.”
There is one more thing to be noted, namely, that these survivors of
the deportation have not only a torrid climate as “a sentence of death”
to suffer and die thereby, but they have also a new set of tormentors,
the Arabs, who are more wicked and fanatical than the Turks and Kurds,
because they are, besides being Mohammed’s followers, akin to him in
blood and race. Moreover, these poor refugees are not even left at
Der-el-Zor. The latest information comes from there that the refugees
have to move further southeast. “The misery among the people is not
to be described. All are making things ready for the journey; all are
breaking up the tents; Der-el-Zor is as destroyed, by the general
upheaval. They say we will be sent to the bank of the river _Chebar_.
I pray God that--like he did for Ezekiel--so now He make this place a
blessing. Our joy will be to do His will.”
It may be sufficient to reproduce a few extracts from the reports
of eye-witnesses of the scenes in the refugee camps. In regard to
the condition of the refugees at Sultanieh, we have very little
information, the reason for this having been thus stated: “A sum of
money has been sent from Constantinople to the Catholikos of Cilicia
who is now at Aleppo, witnessing the misery and agony of his flock.
Here at least, authorities allow the distribution of succor to those
unfortunates. At Sultanieh it has so far proved impossible to bring
help within their reach, for the government refuses permission, in
spite the efforts of the American embassy.”
“I have just returned, November 16, 1915, from a ride on horseback
through Baghche Osmanie Plain, where thousands of exiles are lying
upon the fields and streets, without any shelter, exposed to the
depredations of all kinds of brigands. Last night, at about twelve
o’clock, a little camp of from fifty to sixty persons was suddenly
attacked. I found men and women badly wounded, with broken skulls,
their bodies cut upon, or in a terrible condition from knife stabs.
Fortunately, I was provided with linen, so that I could change their
bloody clothing. Then I brought them to the nearest inn where they
could be nursed. Many of them were so exhausted from the great loss of
blood that they died.
“In another camp we found from thirty to forty thousand Armenians.
I was able to distribute some bread among them. Desperate and half
starved, they fell upon it; several times I was almost unseated
from my horse. A great many dead were lying about unburied, and only
through bribes could the gendarmes be persuaded to permit their
burial. Generally the Armenians are not allowed to perform the last
offices of love for their relatives. Bad epidemics of typhoid fever
had broken out everywhere; a patient lay in almost every third tent.
“Nearly everything was transported on foot; men, women, and children
carried their few belongings on their backs. I often saw them collapse
under their burden, but the soldiers kept on driving them forward with
their bayonets. I have dressed bleeding wounds of women that resulted
from these bayonet thrusts. Many children lost their parents.... Three
hours from Osmanie, two dying men were there for days without any
food or even a drop of water.... They were as thin as skeletons....
Unburied women and children were lying in the ditches....
“I visited the camp of Islahié on the first of December, 1915. It had
rained for three days and three nights.... As soon as the weather
permitted, I set out on my way to the exiles’ camp. About 200 families
had been left behind at Mamouret, being unable to proceed on account
of misery and illness ... the rags of their beds did not have a single
dry thread in them. Many women had their feet frozen--they were
entirely black and ready to be amputated. The wailing and the groaning
was heart-rending. Everywhere the dead, and the dying in their last
agonies, lay about before the tents. Only by _baksheesh_ (bribes)
could the soldiers be persuaded to bury them.
“The whole carriage was packed with bread; I just kept on distributing
all the time. Three or four times there was an opportunity to buy some
fresh bread. These thousands of loaves were a great help to us.
“The camp Islahié itself is the saddest thing I have ever seen.
Right at the entrance a heap of dead bodies lay unburied. I counted
thirty-five; and in another place twenty-two; right close by were the
tents of those people who were down with bad dysentery. In one single
day the burial commission buried as many as 580 dead. For weeks many
camps have been daily supplied with bread. Of course, everything has
to be done as clandestinely as possible....”[179]
An eye-witness at Aleppo says:
“... On August 2 (1915), about eight hundred middle-aged and old
women, accompanied by children under the age of ten years, arrived
afoot from Diyarbekir, after forty-five days en route. They were 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 and scenes of starvation, or
privation, and hardship of every description. I am informed that 4500
persons were sent from Sughurt to Ras-el-Ain, over 2000 from Mezereh
to Diyarbekir, and that all the cities of Bitlis, Mardin, Mosul,
Severeh, Malatia, Besneh, etc., have been depopulated of Armenians;
the men and boys, and many of the women killed and the balance
scattered throughout the country.... The Governor of Der-el-Zor,
who is now at Aleppo, says there are 15,000 Armenians in his city.
Children are frequently sold to prevent starvation, as the government
furnished practically no subsistence.”