THE MURDER OF A NATION
The destruction of the Armenian race in 1915 involved certain
difficulties that had not impeded the operations of the Turks in the
massacres of 1895 and other years. In these earlier periods the Armenian
men had possessed little power or means of resistance. In those days
Armenians had not been permitted to have military training, to serve in
the Turkish Army, or to possess arms. As I have already said, these
discriminations were withdrawn when the revolutionists obtained the
upper hand in 1908. Not only were the Christians now permitted to bear
arms, but the authorities, in the full flush of their enthusiasm for
freedom and equality, encouraged them to do so. In the early part of
1915, therefore, every Turkish city contained thousands of Armenians who
had been trained as soldiers and who were supplied with rifles, pistols,
and other weapons of defence.
The operations at Van disclosed that these men could use their munitions
to good advantage. A similar “rebellion” at Zeitoun also proved that
these despised merchants and traders of the Empire possessed energetic
fighting power. It was thus apparent that an Armenian massacre this time
would generally assume more the character of warfare than those
wholesale butcheries of defenceless men and women which the Turks had
always found so congenial. If this plan of murdering a race was to
succeed, two preliminary steps would therefore have to be taken: it
would be necessary to render all Armenian soldiers powerless and to
deprive of their arms the Armenians in every city and town. Before
Armenia could be slaughtered, Armenia must be made defenceless.
In the early part of 1915 the Armenian soldiers in the Turkish Army were
reduced to a new status. Up to that time most of them had been
combatants, but now they were all stripped of their arms and transformed
into workmen. Instead of serving their countrymen as artillerymen and
cavalrymen, these former soldiers now discovered that they had been
transformed into road labourers and pack animals. Army supplies of all
kinds were loaded on their backs, and stumbling under the burdens, and
driven by the whips and bayonets of the Turks, they were forced to drag
their weary bodies into the mountains of the Caucasus. Sometimes they
would have to plough their way, burdened in this fashion, almost
waist-high through snow. They had to spend practically all their time in
the open, sleeping on the bare ground--whenever the ceaseless prodding
of their taskmasters gave them an occasional opportunity to sleep. They
were given only scraps of food; if they fell sick they were left where
they had dropped, their Turkish oppressors perhaps stopping long enough
to rob them of all their possessions--even of their clothes. If any
stragglers succeeded in reaching their destinations they were not
infrequently massacred. In many instances Armenian soldiers were
disposed of in even more summary fashion, for it now became almost the
general practice to shoot them in cold blood. In almost all cases the
procedure was the same. Here and there squads of fifty or a hundred men
would be taken, bound together in groups of four, and then marched out
to a secluded spot a short distance from the village. Suddenly the sound
of rifle-shots would fill the air, and the Turkish soldiers who had
acted as the escort would sullenly return to camp. Those sent to bury
the bodies would find them almost invariably stark naked, for, as usual,
the Turks had stolen all their clothes. In cases that came to my
attention, the murderers had added a refinement to their victims’
sufferings by compelling them to dig their graves before being shot.
Let me relate a single episode which is contained in one of the reports
of our Consuls and which now forms part of the records of the American
State department. Early in July 2,000 Armenian “amélés”--such is the
Turkish word for soldiers who have been reduced to workmen--were sent
from Harpoot to build roads. The Armenians in that town understood what
this meant and pleaded with the Governor for mercy. But this official
insisted that the men were not to be harmed, and he even called upon the
German missionary, Mr. Ehemann, to quiet the panic, giving that
gentleman his word of honour that the ex-soldiers would be protected.
Mr. Ehemann believed the Governor and assuaged the popular fear. Yet
practically every man of these 2,000 was massacred, and his body thrown
into a cave. A few escaped, and it was from these that news of the
massacre reached the world. A few days afterward another 2,000 soldiers
were sent to Diarbekir. The only purpose of sending these men out in the
open country was that they might be massacred.
In order that they might have no strength to resist and to escape by
flight, these poor creatures were systematically starved. Government
agents went ahead on the road, notifying the Kurds that the caravan was
approaching and ordering them to do their congenial duty. Not only did
the Kurdish tribesmen pour down from the mountains upon this starved and
weakened regiment, but the Kurdish women came with butchers’ knives in
order that they might gain that merit in Allah’s eyes that comes from
killing a Christian. These massacres were not isolated happenings; I
could detail many more episodes just as horrible as the one related
above. Throughout the Turkish Empire a systematic attempt was made to
kill all able-bodied men, not only for the purpose of removing all males
who might propagate a new generation of Armenians, but for the purpose
of rendering the weaker part of the population an easy prey.
Dreadful as were these massacres of unarmed soldiers, they were mercy
and justice themselves when compared with the treatment which was now
visited upon those Armenians who were suspected of concealing arms.
Naturally, the Christians became alarmed when placards were posted in
the villages and cities ordering them to bring all their arms to
headquarters. Since this order applied only to Christians, the Armenians
well understood what the result would be should they be left defenceless
while their Moslem neighbours were permitted to retain their arms. In
many cases, however, the persecuted people patiently obeyed the command,
and then the Turkish officials almost joyfully seized their rifles as
evidence that a “revolution” was being planned, and threw their victims
into prison on a charge of treason. Thousands failed to deliver arms
simply because they had none to deliver, while an even greater number
tenaciously refused to give them up, not because they were plotting an
uprising, but because they proposed to defend their own lives and their
women’s honour against the outrages which they knew were being planned.
The punishment inflicted upon these recalcitrants forms one of the most
hideous chapters of modern history. Most of us believe that torture has
long ceased to be an administrative and judicial measure, yet I do not
believe that the darkest ages ever presented scenes more horrible than
those which now took place all over Turkey. Nothing was sacred to the
Turkish gendarmes; under the plea of searching for hidden arms they
ransacked churches, treated the altars and sacred utensils with the
utmost indignities, and even held mock ceremonies in imitation of the
Christian sacraments. They would beat the priests into insensibility,
under the pretence that they were the centres of sedition. When they
could discover no munitions in the churches, they would sometimes arm
the bishops and priests with guns, pistols, and swords, then try them
before court-martials for possessing weapons against the law, and march
them in this condition through the streets, merely to arouse the
fanatical wrath of the mobs. The gendarmes treated women with the same
cruelty and indecency as their husbands. There are cases on record in
which women accused of concealing weapons were stripped naked and
whipped with branches freshly cut from trees, and these beatings were
even inflicted on women who were with child. Violations so commonly
accompanied these searches that Armenian women and girls, on the
approach of the gendarmes, would flee to the woods, the hills, or to
mountain caves.
As a preliminary to the searches everywhere, the strong men of the
villages and towns were arrested and taken to prison. Their tormentors
here would exercise the most diabolical ingenuity in their attempt to
make their victims declare themselves to be “revolutionists” and to tell
the hiding-places of their arms. A common practice was to place the
prisoner in a room, with two Turks stationed at each end and each side.
The examination would then begin with the bastinado. This is a form of
torture not uncommon in the Orient; it consists of beating the soles of
the feet with a thin rod. At first the pain is not marked, but as the
process goes slowly on it develops into the most terrible agony, the
feet swell and burst, and not infrequently, after being submitted to
this treatment, they have to be amputated. The gendarmes would bastinado
their Armenian victim until he fainted; they would then revive him by
sprinkling water on his face and begin again. If this did not succeed in
bringing their victim to terms, they had numerous other methods of
persuasion. They would pull out his eyebrows and beard almost hair by
hair; they would extract his finger-nails and toe-nails; they would
apply red-hot irons to his breast; tear off his flesh with red-hot
pincers, and then pour boiled butter into the wounds. In some cases the
gendarmes would nail hands and feet to pieces of wood--evidently in
imitation of the crucifixion, and then, while the sufferer writhed in
his agony, they would cry: “Now let your Christ come and help you!”
These cruelties--and many others which I forbear to describe--were
usually inflicted in the night time. Turks would be stationed around the
prisons, beating drums and blowing whistles, so that the screams of the
sufferers would not reach the villagers.
In thousands of cases the Armenians who endured these agonies had
refused to surrender their arms simply because they had none to
surrender. However, they could not persuade their tormentors that this
was the case. It therefore became customary, when news was received that
the searchers were approaching, for Armenians to purchase arms from
their Turkish neighbours so that they might be able to give them up and
escape these frightful punishments.
One day I was discussing these proceedings with Bedri Bey, the
Constantinople Prefect of Police. With a disgusting relish Bedri
described the tortures inflicted. He made no secret of the fact that the
Government had instigated them, and, like all Turks of the official
classes, he enthusiastically approved this treatment of the detested
race. Bedri told me that all these details were matters of nightly
discussion at the headquarters of the Union and Progress Committee. Each
new method of inflicting pain was hailed as a splendid discovery, and
the regular attendants were constantly ransacking their brains in the
effort to devise some new torment. Bedri told me that they even delved
into the records of the Spanish Inquisition and other historic
institutions of torture, and adopted all the suggestions found there.
Bedri did not tell me who carried off the prize in this gruesome
competition, but common reputation throughout Armenia gave a pre-eminent
infamy to Djevdet Bey, the Vali of Van, whose activities in that section
I have already described. All through this country Djevdet now became
known as the “marshall blacksmith of Bashkale,” for this connoisseur in
torture had invented what was perhaps the masterpiece of all--that of
nailing horseshoes to the feet of his Armenian victims.
Yet these happenings did not constitute what the newspapers of the time
commonly referred to as the Armenian atrocities; they were merely the
preparatory steps in the destruction of a race. The Young Turks
displayed greater ingenuity than their predecessor, Abdul Hamid. The
injunction of the deposed Sultan was merely “to kill, kill,” whereas the
Turkish democracy hit upon an entirely new plan. Instead of massacring
outright the Armenian race, they now decided to deport it. In the south
and south-eastern section of the Ottoman Empire lies the Syrian desert
and the Mesopotamian valley. Though part of this area was once the scene
of a flourishing civilisation, for the last five centuries it has
suffered the plight that becomes the lot of any country that is
subjected to Turkish rule; and it is now a dreary, desolate waste,
without cities and towns or life of any kind, populated only by a few
wild and fanatical Bedouin tribes. Only the most industrious labour,
expended through many years, could transform this desert into the
abiding-place of any considerable population. The Central Government now
announced its intention of gathering the 2,000,000 or more Armenians
living in the several sections of the Empire and transporting them to
this desolate and inhospitable region. Had they undertaken such a
deportation in good faith it would have represented the height of
cruelty and injustice. For a large part the Armenians are not
agriculturists; their talents are chiefly for business and commercial
life; though many of them do cultivate farms and engage in
sheep-herding, many lived in cities and large towns, and, as I have
already said, they represent the economic force of the country. To seize
such peoples by the million and send them into one of the most barren
parts of Asia would have been an act of the most inhuman spoliation. As
a matter of fact, the Turks never had the slightest idea of
re-establishing the Armenians in this new country. They knew that the
great majority would never reach their destination and that those who
did would either die of thirst and starvation, or be murdered by the
wild Mohammedan desert tribes. The real purpose of the deportation was
robbery and destruction; it really represented a new method of massacre.
When Talaat, as Minister of the Interior, gave the orders for these
deportations, he was merely giving the death-warrant to a whole race; he
understood this well, and in his conversations with me he made no
particular attempt to conceal the fact.
All through the spring and summer of 1915 the deportations took place.
Of the larger cities, only Constantinople, Smyrna, and Kutahia were
spared; practically all other places where a single Armenian family
lived now became the scenes of these unspeakable tragedies. Scarcely a
single Armenian, whatever his education or wealth, or whatever the
social class to which he belonged, was exempted from the order. In some
villages placards were posted ordering the whole Armenian population to
present itself in a public place at an appointed time--usually a day or
two ahead, and in other places the town-crier would go through the
streets delivering the order vocally. In still others not the slightest
warning was given. The gendarmes would appear before an Armenian house
and order all the inmates to follow them. They would take women engaged
in their domestic tasks without giving them the chance to change their
clothes. The police fell upon them first as the eruption of Vesuvius
fell upon Pompeii; women were taken from the wash-tubs, children were
snatched out of bed, the bread would be left half-baked in the oven, the
family meal would be abandoned partly eaten, the children would be taken
from the schoolroom, leaving their books open at the daily task, the men
would be forced to abandon their plough in the fields and their cattle
on the mountain-side. Even women who had just given birth to children
would be forced to leave their beds and join the panic-stricken throng,
their sleeping babies in their arms. Such things as they hurriedly
snatched up--a shawl, a blanket, perhaps a few scraps of food--was all
that they could take of their household belongings. To their frantic
question, “Where are we going?” the gendarmes would vouchsafe only one
reply: “To the interior.”
In some cases the refugees were given a few hours, in exceptional
instances a few days, to dispose of their property and household
effects. But the proceeding, of course, amounted simply to robbery. They
could sell only to Turks, and since both buyers and sellers knew that
they had only a day or two to market the accumulations of a lifetime,
the prices obtained represented a small fraction of their value.
Sewing-machines would bring one or two dollars--a cow would go for a
dollar, a houseful of furniture would be sold for a pittance. In many
cases Armenians were prohibited from selling or Turks from buying even
at these ridiculous prices; under pretence that the Government intended
to sell their effects to pay the creditors whom they would inevitably
leave behind, their household furniture would be placed in stores or
heaped up in public places, where it was usually pillaged by Turkish men
and women. The Government officials would also inform the Armenians
that, since their deportation was only temporary, the intention being to
bring them back after the war was over, they would not be permitted to
sell their houses. Scarcely had the former possessors left the village,
when Mohammedan Mohadjirs--immigrants from other parts of Turkey--would
be moved into the Armenian quarters. Similarly all their valuables,
money, rings, watches, and jewellery, would be taken to the
police-stations for “safe keeping” pending their return, and then
parcelled out among the Turks. Yet these robberies gave the refugees
little anguish, for far more terrible and agonising scenes were taking
place under their eyes. The systematic extermination of the men
continued; such males as the persecutions which I have already described
had left, were now violently dealt with. Before the caravans were
started, it became the regular practice to separate the young men from
the families, tie them together in groups of four, lead them to the
outskirts, and shoot them. Public hangings without trial--the only
offence being that the victims were Armenians--were taking place
constantly. The gendarmes showed a particular desire to annihilate the
educated and the influential. From American Consuls and missionaries I
was constantly receiving reports of such executions, and many of the
events which they described will never fade from my memory. At Angora
all Armenian men from fifteen to seventy were arrested, bound together
in groups of four, and sent on the road in the direction of Cæsaria.
When they had travelled five or six hours and had reached a secluded
valley, a mob of Turkish peasants fell upon them with clubs, hammers,
axes, scythes, spades, and saws. Such instruments not only caused more
agonising deaths than guns and pistols, but, as the Turks themselves
boasted, they were more economical, since they did not involve the waste
of powder and shell. In this way they exterminated the whole male
population of Angora, including all its men of wealth and breeding, and
their bodies, horribly mutilated, were left in the valley, where they
were devoured by wild beasts. After completing this destruction, the
peasants and gendarmes gathered in the local tavern, comparing notes and
boasting of the number of “giaours” that each had slain. In Trebizond
the men were placed in boats and sent out on the Black Sea; gendarmes
would then come up in boats, shoot them down, and throw their bodies
into the water.
When the signal was given for the caravans to move, therefore, they
almost invariably consisted of women, children, and old men. Anyone who
could possibly have protected them from the fate that awaited them had
been destroyed. Not infrequently the prefect of the city, as the mass
started on its way, would wish them a derisive “pleasant journey.”
Before the caravan moved the women were sometimes offered the
alternative of becoming Mohammedans. Even though they accepted the new
faith, which few of them did, their earthly troubles did not end. The
converts were compelled to surrender their children to a so-called
“Moslem Orphanage,” with the agreement that they should be trained as
devout followers of the Prophet. They themselves must then show the
sincerity of their conversion by abandoning their Christian husbands and
marrying Moslems. If no good Mohammedan offered himself as a husband,
then the new convert was deported, however strongly she might protest
her devotion to Islam.
At first the Government showed some inclination to protect these
deporting throngs. The officers usually divided them into convoys, in
some cases numbering several hundred, in others several thousand. The
civil authorities occasionally furnished ox-carts which carried such
household furniture as the exiles had succeeded in scrambling together.
A guard of gendarmerie accompanied each convoy, ostensibly to guide and
protect it. Women, scantily clad, carrying babies in their arms or on
their backs, marched side by side with old men hobbling along with
canes. Children would run along, evidently regarding the procedure, in
the early stages, as some new lark. A more prosperous member would
perhaps have a horse or a donkey, occasionally a farmer had rescued a
cow or a sheep, which would trudge along at his side, and the usual
assortment of family pets, dogs, cats, and birds, became parts of the
variegated procession. From thousands of Armenian cities and villages
these despairing caravans now set forth; they filled all the roads
leading south; everywhere, as they moved on, they raised a huge dust,
and abandoned débris, chairs, blankets, bedclothes, household utensils,
and other impediments, marked the course of the processions. When the
caravans first started, the individuals bore some resemblance to human
beings; in a few hours, however, the dust of the road plastered their
faces and clothes, the mud caked their lower members, and the
slowly-advancing mobs, frequently bent with fatigue and crazed by the
brutality of their “protectors,” resembled some new and strange animal
species. Yet for the better part of six months, from April to October,
1915, practically all the highways in Asia Minor were crowded with these
unearthly bands of exiles. They could be seen winding in and out of
every valley and climbing up the sides of nearly every mountain--moving
on and on, they scarcely knew whither, except that every road led to
death. Village after village and town after town was evacuated of its
Armenian population, under the distressing circumstances already
detailed. In these six months, as far as can be ascertained, about
1,200,000 people started on this journey to the Syrian desert.
“Pray for us,” they would say as they left their homes--the homes in
which their ancestors had lived for 2,500 years. “We shall not see you
in this world again, but sometime we shall meet. Pray for us!”
The Armenians had hardly left their native villages when the
persecutions began. The roads over which they travelled were little more
than donkey-paths; and what had started a few hours before as an orderly
procession soon became a dishevelled and scrambling mob. Women were
separated from their children and husbands from their wives. The old
people soon lost contact with their families and became exhausted and
footsore. The Turkish drivers of the ox-carts, after extorting the last
penny from their charges, would suddenly dump them and their belongings
into the road, turn around and return to the village for other victims.
Thus in a short time practically everybody, young and old, was compelled
to travel on foot. The gendarmes whom the Government had sent supposedly
to protect the exiles, in a very few hours became their tormentors. They
followed their charges with fixed bayonets, prodding anyone who showed
any tendency to slacken the pace. Those who attempted to stop for rest,
or who fell exhausted on the road, were compelled, with the utmost
brutality, to rejoin the moving throng. They even prodded pregnant women
with bayonets; if one, as frequently happened, gave birth along the
road, she was immediately forced to get up and rejoin the marchers. The
whole course of the journey became a perpetual struggle with the Moslem
inhabitants. Detachments of gendarmes would go ahead notifying the
Kurdish tribes that their victims were approaching, and Turkish peasants
were also informed that their long-waited opportunity had arrived. The
Government even opened the prisons and set free the convicts, on the
understanding that they should behave like good Moslems to the
approaching Armenians. Thus every caravan had a continuous battle for
existence with several classes of enemies--their accompanying gendarmes,
the Turkish peasants and villagers, the Kurdish tribes and bands of
_Chétés_ or brigands. And we must always keep in mind that the men who
might have defended these wayfarers had nearly all been killed or forced
into the army as workmen, and that the exiles themselves had been
systematically deprived of all weapons before the journey began.
When they had travelled a few hours from their starting-place, the Kurds
would sweep down from their mountain homes. Rushing up to the young
girls, they would lift their veils and carry the pretty ones off to the
hills. They would steal such children as pleased their fancy and
mercilessly rob all the rest of the throng. If the exiles had started
with any money or food, their assailants would appropriate it, thus
leaving them a hopeless prey to starvation. They would steal their
clothing, and sometimes even leave both men and women in a state of
complete nudity. All the time that they were committing these
depradations the Kurds would freely massacre, and the screams of old men
and women would add to the general horror. Such as escaped these attacks
in the open would find new terrors awaiting them in the Moslem villages.
Here the Turkish roughs would fall upon the women, leaving them
sometimes dead from their experiences or sometimes ravingly insane.
After spending a night in a hideous encampment of this kind, the exiles,
or such as had survived, would start again the next morning. The
ferocity of the gendarmes apparently increased as the journey
lengthened, for they seemed almost to resent the fact that part of their
charges continued to live. Anyone who dropped on the road was frequently
bayoneted on the spot. The Armenians began to die by hundreds from
hunger and thirst. Even when they came to rivers, the gendarmes, merely
to torment them, would sometimes not let them drink. The hot sun of the
desert burned their scantily-clothed bodies, and the bare feet, treading
the hot sand of the desert, became so sore that thousands fell and died
or were killed where they lay. Thus, in a few days, what had been a
procession of normal human beings became a stumbling horde of
dust-covered skeletons, ravenously looking for scraps of food, eating
any offal that came their way, crazed by the hideous sights that filled
every hour of their existence, sick with all the diseases that accompany
such hardships and deprivations, but still prodded on and on by the
whips and clubs and bayonets of their executioners.
And thus, as the exiles moved they left behind them another
caravan--that of dead and unburied bodies, of old men and women in the
last stages of typhus, dysentery, and cholera, of little children lying
on their backs and setting up their last piteous wails for food and
water. There were women who held up their babies to strangers, begging
them to take them and save them from their tormentors, and failing this,
they would throw them into wells or leave them behind bushes, that at
least they might die undisturbed. Behind was left a small army of girls
who had been sold as slaves--frequently for a medjidie, or about eighty
cents--and who, after serving the brutal purposes of their purchasers,
were forced to lead lives of prostitution. A string of encampments
filled by the sick and the dying, mingled with the unburied or
half-buried bodies of the dead, marked the course of the advancing
throngs. Flocks of vultures followed them in the air, and ravenous dogs,
fighting one another for the bodies of the dead, constantly pursued
them. The most terrible scenes took place at the rivers, especially the
Euphrates. Sometimes, when crossing this stream, the gendarmes would
push the women into the water, shooting all who attempted to save
themselves by swimming. Frequently the women themselves would save their
honour by jumping into the river, their children in their arms. “In the
last week in June,” I quote from an authentic report, “several parties
of Erzeroum Armenians were deported on successive days and most of them
massacred on the way, either by shooting or drowning. One, Madame
Zarouhi, an elderly lady of means, who was thrown into the Euphrates,
saved herself by clinging to a boulder in the river. She succeeded in
approaching the bank and returned to Erzeroum to hide herself in a
Turkish friend’s house. She told Prince Argoutinsky, the representative
of the ‘All-Russian Urban Union’ in Erzeroum, that she shuddered to
recall how hundreds of children were bayoneted by the Turks and thrown
into the Euphrates, and how men and women were stripped naked, tied
together in hundreds, shot, and then hurled into the river. In a loop of
the river near Erzinghan, she said, the thousands of dead bodies created
such a barrage that the Euphrates changed its course for about a hundred
yards.”
It is absurd for the Turkish Government to assert that it ever seriously
intended to “deport the Armenians to new homes”; the treatment which was
given the convoys clearly shows that extermination was the real purpose
of Enver and Talaat. How many exiled to the south under these revolting
conditions ever reached their destinations? The experiences of a single
caravan shows how completely this plan of deportation developed into one
of annihilation. The details in question were furnished me directly by
the American Consul at Aleppo, and are now on file in the State
Department at Washington. On the first of June a convoy of 3,000
Armenians, mostly women, girls, and children, left Harpoot. Following
the usual custom the Government provided them an escort of seventy
gendarmes, under the command of a Turkish leader--Bey. In accordance
with the common experience these gendarmes proved to be not their
protectors, but their tormentors and their executioners. Hardly had they
got well started on the road when ... Bey took 400 liras from the
caravan, on the plea that he was keeping it safely until their arrival
at Malatia; no sooner had he robbed them of the only thing that might
have provided them with food than he ran away, leaving them all to the
tender mercies of the gendarmes.
All the way to Ras-ul-Ain, the first station on the Bagdad line, the
existence of these wretched travellers was one prolonged horror. The
gendarmes went ahead, informing the half-savage tribes of the mountains
that several thousand Armenian women and girls were approaching. The
Arabs and Kurds began to carry off the girls, the mountaineers fell upon
them repeatedly, killing and violating the women, and the gendarmes
themselves joined in the orgy. One by one the few men that accompanied
the convoy were killed. The women had succeeded in secreting money from
their persecutors, keeping it in their mouths and hair; with this they
would buy horses, only to have them repeatedly stolen by the Kurdish
tribesmen. Finally the gendarmes, having robbed and beaten and killed
and violated their charges for thirteen days, abandoned them altogether.
Two days afterward the Kurds went through the party and rounded up all
the males who still remained alive. They found about 150, their ages
varying from fifteen to ninety years, and these they promptly took away
and butchered to the last man. But that same day another convoy from
Sivas joined this one from Harpoot, increasing the numbers of the whole
caravan to 18,000 people.
Another Kurdish Bey now took command, and to him, as to all men placed
in the same position, the opportunity was regarded merely as one for
pillage, outrage, and murder. This chieftain summoned all his followers
from the mountains and invited these to work their complete will upon
this great mass of Armenians. Day after day and night after night the
prettiest girls were carried away; sometimes they returned in a pitiable
condition that told the full story of their sufferings. Any stragglers,
those who were so old and infirm and sick that they could not keep up
with the marches, were promptly killed. Whenever they reached a Turkish
village all the local vagabonds were permitted to prey upon the Armenian
girls. When the diminishing band reached the Euphrates they saw the
bodies of 200 men floating upon the surface. By this time they had all
been so repeatedly robbed that they had practically nothing left except
a few ragged clothes, and even these the Kurds now took, the consequence
being that the whole convoy marched for five days completely naked under
the scorching desert sun. For another five days they did not have a
morsel of bread or a drop of water. “Hundreds fell dead on the way,” the
report reads; “their tongues were turned to charcoal, and when, at the
end of five days, they reached a fountain, the whole convoy naturally
rushed toward it. But here the policemen barred the way and forebade
them to take a single drop of water. Their purpose was to sell it at
from one to three liras a cup, and sometimes they actually withheld the
water after getting the money. At another place, where there were wells,
some women threw themselves into them, as there was no rope or pail to
draw up the water. These women were drowned and, in spite of that, the
rest of the people drank from that well, the dead bodies still remaining
there and polluting the water. Sometimes when the wells were shallow
and the women could go down into them and come out again, the other
people would rush to lick or suck their wet, dirty clothes, in the
effort to quench their thirst. When they passed an Arab village in their
naked condition the Arabs pitied them and gave them old pieces of cloth
to cover themselves with. Some of the exiles who still had money bought
some clothes; but some still remained who travelled thus naked all the
way to the city of Aleppo. The poor women could hardly walk for shame;
they all walked bent double.”
On the seventieth day a few creatures reached Aleppo. Out of the
combined convey of 18,000 souls just 150 women and children reached
their destination. A few of the rest, the most attractive, were still
living as captives of the Kurds and Turks; all the rest were dead.
My only reason for relating such dreadful things as this is that,
without the details, the English-speaking public cannot understand
precisely what this nation is which we call Turkey. I have by no means
told the most terrible details, for a complete narration of the sadistic
orgies of which these Armenian men and women were the victims can never
be printed in an American publication. Whatever crimes the most
perverted instincts of the human mind can devise, and whatever
refinements of persecution and injustice the most debased imagination
can conceive, became the daily misfortunes of this devoted people. I am
confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such
horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the
past seem almost insignificant when compared to the sufferings of the
Armenian race in 1915. The slaughter of the Albigenses in the early part
of the thirteenth century has always been regarded as one of the most
pitiful events in history. In these outbursts of fanaticism about 60,000
people were killed. In the massacre of St. Bartholomew about 30,000
human beings lost their lives. The Sicilian Vespers, which has always
figured as one of the most fiendish outbursts of this kind, caused the
destruction of 8,000. Volumes have been written about the Spanish
Inquisition under Torquemada, yet in the eighteen years of his
administration only a little more than 8,000 heretics were done to
death. Perhaps the one event in history that most resembles the Armenian
deportations was the expulsion of the Jews from Spain by Ferdinand and
Isabella. According to Prescott 160,000 were uprooted from their homes
and scattered broadcast over Africa and Europe. Yet all these previous
persecutions seem almost trivial when we compare them with the
sufferings of the Armenians, in which at least 600,000 people were
destroyed and perhaps as many as 1,000,000. And these earlier massacres,
when we compare them with the spirit that directed the Armenian
atrocities, have one feature that we can almost describe as an excuse:
they were the product of religious fanaticism, and most of the men and
women who instigated them sincerely believed that they were devoutly
serving their Maker. Undoubtedly religious fanaticism was an impelling
motive with the Turkish and Kurdish rabble who slew Armenians as a
service to Allah, but the men who really conceived the crime had no such
motive. Practically all of them were atheists, with no more respect for
Mohammedanism than for Christianity, and with them the one motive was a
cold-blooded, calculating state policy.
The Armenians are not the only subject people in Turkey who have
suffered from this policy of making Turkey exclusively the country of
the Turks. The story which I have told about the Armenians I could also
tell with certain modifications about the Greeks and the Syrians.
Indeed, the Greeks were the first victims of this nationalising idea. I
have already described how, in the few months preceding the European
war, the Ottoman Government began deporting its Greek subjects along the
coast of Asia Minor. These outrages aroused little interest in Europe or
the United States, yet in the space of three or four months about
400,000 Greeks were taken from their age-long homes in the Mediterranean
littoral and removed to the Greek Islands in the Ægean Sea. For the
larger part these were _bona fide_ deportations; that is, the Greek
inhabitants were actually removed to new places and were not subjected
to wholesale massacre. It was probably for the reason that the civilised
world did not protest against these deportations that the Turks
afterward decided to apply the same methods on a larger scale not only
to the Greeks but to the Armenians, Syrians, Nestorians, and others of
its subject peoples. In fact, Bedri Bey, the Prefect of Police at
Constantinople, himself told one of my secretaries that the Turks had
expelled the Greeks so successfully that they had decided to adopt the
same method to all the other races in the empire.
The martyrdom of the Greeks therefore comprised two periods, that
antedating the war, and that which began in the early part of 1915. The
first affected the Greeks living on the sea-coast of Asia Minor. The
second affected those living in Thrace and in the territories
surrounding the Sea of Marmora, the Dardanelles, the Bosphorus, and the
coast of the Black Sea. These latter, to the extent of several hundred
thousand, were sent to the interior of Asia Minor. The Turks adopted
almost identically the same procedure against the Greeks as that which
they had adopted against the Armenians. They began by incorporating the
Greeks into the Ottoman Army and then transforming them into labour
battalions, using them to build roads in the Caucasus and other scenes
of action. These Greek soldiers, just like the Armenians, died by
thousands from cold, hunger, and other privations. The same
house-to-house searches for hidden weapons took place in the Greek
villages, and Greek men and women were beaten and tortured just as were
their fellow Armenians. The Greeks had to submit to the same forced
requisitions, which amounted in their case, as in the case of the
Armenians, merely to plundering on a wholesale scale. The Turks
attempted to force the Greek subjects to become Mohammedans; Greek
girls, just like Armenian girls, were stolen and taken to Turkish
harems, and Greek boys were kidnapped and placed in Moslem households.
The Greeks, just like the Armenians, were accused of disloyalty to the
Ottoman Government; the Turks accused them of furnishing supplies to the
English submarines in the Marmora and also of acting as spies. The Turks
also declared that the Greeks were not loyal to the Ottoman Government,
but that they also looked forward to the day when the Greeks outside of
Turkey would become part of Greece. These latter charges were
unquestionably true; that the Greeks, after suffering for five centuries
the most unspeakable outrages at the hands of the Turks, should look
longingly to the day when their territory should be part of the
Fatherland, was to be expected. The Turks, as in the case of the
Armenians, seized upon this as an excuse for a violent onslaught on the
whole race. Everywhere the Greeks were gathered in groups and, under the
so-called protection of Turkish gendarmes, they were transported, the
larger part on foot, into the interior. Just how many were scattered in
this fashion is not definitely known, the estimates varying anywhere
from 200,000 up to 1,000,000. These caravans suffered great privations,
but they were not submitted to general massacre as were the Armenians,
and this is probably the reason why the outside world has not heard so
much about them. The Turks showed them this greater consideration not
from any motive of pity. The Greeks, unlike the Armenians, had a
Government which was vitally interested in their welfare. At this time
there was a general apprehension among the Teutonic Allies that Greece
would enter the war on the side of the Entente, and a wholesale massacre
of Greeks in Asia Minor would unquestionably have produced such a state
of mind in Greece that its pro-German king would have been unable longer
to have kept his country out of the war. It was only a matter of state
policy, therefore, that saved these Greek subjects of Turkey from all
the horrors that befell the Armenians. But their sufferings are still
terrible, and constitute another chapter in the long story of crimes for
which civilisation will hold the Turk responsible.