out of my recent experience at X. in connection with these events,
how the work of this great mission station in Asia Minor, a work in
which I have been engaged as a missionary for ten years, a work in
which hundreds of our American people have a deep and personal
interest, and in which they have invested hundreds of thousands of
dollars of their hard-earned money and the life work of a score of
devoted missionaries, was suddenly and brutally interrupted by the
Turkish Government on the 10th and 12th August of this year. You
will see, incidentally, how this work of destruction illustrates the
deep laid and carefully executed plans of the Turkish Government for
the assassination and annihilation of the Armenian people. You will
see how that Government scorned and flouted all the efforts of the
missionaries and of the diplomatic representatives of our Government
to save the lives and the honour of innocent women and girls. You
will also see how it is possible for Christian men and women to bear
faithful witness to their faith in this twentieth Christian century
in a persecution not less in intensity, and greater in magnitude,
than any that was ever inflicted on the early Christian martyrs by
the most cruel of the pagan Roman emperors. It may astonish you to
hear it, but it is true nevertheless, that there are living in the
world to-day men who are the equals of Nero in cruelty.
On my way from X. to Constantinople,[107] I saw at least 50,000
people, three-fourths of whom were women and children, who had been
torn from their homes and all their earthly possessions, and driven
into the fields along the railway line without any shelter or any
adequate means of subsistence, hungry, sick and perishing, awaiting
the conveniences of the railway traffic to be crowded like sheep
into the goods trucks, to be carried away eastward to die in the
deserts, if they did not perish or disappear in Turkish harems on
the way. I saw hundreds of mothers whose hearts were being broken by
the cries of their hungry children, whom they had no hope of being
able to succour or to save. The officials of the German railway were
co-operating with the corrupt officials of the Turkish Government to
extort all the money they could from this doleful throng. The 50,000
whom I saw represented but a brief section of the procession which
has been passing along that way for months.[108] A very moderate
estimate of the number of people who have perished in this way
places the figure at 500,000; and still they go on!
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 side I have laboured for ten years in
the work of education in that land, while at their side stood brutal
gendarmes, sent there by the highest authorities of the Government
to drive them away with their wives and children from their homes,
from their work, and from all the associations which they held most
dear, into exile or to death, and some of them to a condition worse
than either. We had no better friends in this world than those
people were. 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 at any moment to be torn in 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 62 Armenian women and girls, between
the ages of 15 and 25, huddled together in the rooms of the
principal of our American girls’ school at X., while outside were
waiting men more cruel than beasts, ready to carry them off; and
these men were demanding, backed by the highest authorities of the
Government, that we should deliver these defenceless girls into
their brutal hands, for them to do with them what they would. I had
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 anyone else has devised and
executed this deportation of the Armenians, and who has boasted that
he has been able to destroy more Armenians in 30 days than
Abd-ul-Hamid was able to destroy in 30 years—when she made an appeal
to this Turkish Minister, begging him to stop this cruel persecution
of Armenian women and girls, the only answer she got from him was:
“All this amuses us!”
I will now narrate some of the more important events leading up to
this climax.
We were surprised on the morning of the last Wednesday in
April to learn that the professor of Armenian in our college
had been arrested during the previous night along with a
number[109] of the other leading Armenians of the city. We
found upon inquiry that all these men were or had been members
of one or the other of the Armenian nationalist societies, the
Hunchakists or the Dashnakists[110]. These societies had a
legal existence under the Turkish Government. They had up till
quite recently been on good terms with the Government of the
Young Turks. They co-operated with the party of Union and
Progress in overthrowing the tyranny of Abd-ul-Hamid in 1908.
They desired to co-operate with the Turks in establishing an
enlightened constitutional Government in Turkey. But recently,
when the policy of destroying the Armenians was determined
upon, it seems that the Government thought it advisable to hit
the leading members of the Armenian nationalist societies
first. A number of the prominent members of these societies
were hanged in Constantinople. Those arrested in our city were
held in prison for a few days. Then they were sent to the
capital of the province, where they were tortured and exposed
to the contagion of typhus fever. Within six weeks of their
arrest, their families received notice through the Government
officials that not any of them remained alive. The wife of our
professor was a cultured young woman, who had taught for years
in our girls’ school. She was left a widow with one child, a
little girl. She remained alone in her home, but not for long;
for, some weeks after, when all the people were deported from
her quarter of the city, she was carried away along with the
rest. I saw her, dressed in the costume of a Turkish woman,
leading her little girl by the hand as she passed by our
college gate on the morning she was driven out, with hundreds
of other women and children, on to the roads, to be captured
or to die.
During the month of May, the Government was active in enlisting into
the Army the Armenian young men whom they had not already enrolled.
The majority of them were already serving under the colours, having
been called out in the early months of the war. Some of our Armenian
students had already been advanced to the position of officers in
the Turkish Army because of their superior education and
intelligence. Those who remained were now being called out and sent
away. Some, who could afford it, paid the exemption tax of £44
(Turkish—about £40 sterling), and remained at home. Those who went
with these last contingents, as a rule, were not allowed to bear
arms, but were forced to do menial labour, such as building roads
and carrying baggage, most of the horses and donkeys which had been
requisitioned from the poor people in the early months of the war
having died from rough usage or neglect.
In the month of June the Government repeatedly published an edict,
by criers in the streets, ordering all the people to give up their
weapons of every kind to the police. It was not at all strange that
the Armenians should possess some weapons. It was the custom of the
country, because of the insecurity of life and property there, for
all who could afford it to possess some means of self-defence. It
was obvious that this order was intended only for the Armenians, as
they alone were compelled to obey it, whereas their Mohammedan
neighbours, who possessed at least as many weapons as they did, were
not compelled to obey it. This fact aroused the suspicions of the
Armenians, because they remembered that on previous occasions, when
the Turks contemplated a massacre of Armenians, they began by
disarming them. Many Armenians hesitated on this account to give up
their arms, and none of them would have done so if they had
suspected what plans the Turks had in store for them. However, the
Government took special pains on this occasion to reassure the
Armenians, promising them protection and security if they would give
up their arms. They were told that they could prove their loyalty
only by obeying the order, and they were threatened with the
severest punishment if they should refuse. In spite of many
misgivings, most of the Armenians gave up their arms; and some of
them, to prove their loyalty, actually assisted the Government in
disarming their own people. Only a very few held out against the
order and hid their weapons in their houses or in their gardens.
Persons suspected of doing this were arrested and taken to the
Government Building, where they were subjected to the cruellest
forms of torture. Usually they were bound and bastinadoed until they
became unconscious. Boiling water was often poured on the soles of
the feet, to increase the pain of the bastinadoing. The victim was
usually ordered to confess that he was guilty of conspiracy against
the Government. Often he was ordered to implicate others; and to
escape the terrible pain of the torture they would say almost
anything they were told to say. These declarations made under
torture were used as evidence against others. At least two men of
our city died under this torture. Two of our own employees were
subjected to it, the one a gate-keeper and the other a blacksmith,
who did general repair work about our premises. I saw two gendarmes
leading this man out of our front gate one afternoon in June. They
took him to the Government Building. There they bound him, and four
brutal men stuffed his mouth with filth and beat him with rods all
over the body until he became unconscious. As soon as he regained
consciousness, they repeated the process. Apparently their intention
was to kill him by torture, and they would have done so if it had
not been for the timely intervention of a friendly gendarme, a
Circassian, who had been in our employment and who knew the Armenian
who was being tortured. He intervened and rescued the man from his
tormentors, and carried him home on his own back after it was dark
enough to escape observation. He was saved, but not for long. When
he had recovered, a month after[111], he was carried away, with his
wife and two small children, in the general deportation. We learned
afterwards that the occasion for this man’s torture was that he was
seen casting a 16-pound shot, which we had ordered him to make for
our college field-day sports this year. The man who saw him reported
to the police that he had been making bombs!
After having weakened the Armenians to the extent of having sent
most of the young men into the Army, and of having terrorised the
rest, one night, toward the end of June,[112] suddenly, without any
warning, the houses of almost all the Armenians who still remained
in the city were forcibly entered by the police and gendarmes. The
men were arrested and held as prisoners in the soldiers’ barracks at
one side of the city. The whole number amounted to 1,213. Two more
of our leading Armenian professors were arrested on this
occasion.[113] After being held a few days, a very few, by paying
very large sums of money[114] as bribes to the officials, were
allowed to become Mohammedans, and were let out, to be sent away in
a few days in the opposite direction to the rest. The rest were told
that they were to be sent away into exile to Mosul, in the deserts
of Mesopotamia, six or seven hundred miles away.
Now the Government did not intend that any of these men should reach
that destination. Its purpose was extermination, not simply
deportation. While they were still held in the barracks, the
commander of gendarmerie, who had the business of their deportation
in charge, called at the mission compound, and talked freely about
the deportation of the Armenians in the presence of all the American
men in our station. He said that not one out of a thousand would
ever reach Mosul, and that if any of them did arrive there they
could not survive, because of the hostility of the nomads in those
regions, and because of the impossibility of gaining a livelihood
there when deprived of all their resources, as these Armenians had
been. “Orada Christiyanliq olmaz” was the Turkish expression which
he used, which means: “Over there Christianity is impossible.” The
Government’s purpose was to get rid of Christianity in the Ottoman
Empire by getting rid of the Christians. The mayor of our city told
our American Consular Agent[115] that the Government intended first
to get rid of the Armenians, and then of the Greeks, and finally of
the foreigners, and so to have Turkey for the Turks. Enver Pasha
said the same thing to our Ambassador. These 1,213 men of whom I
spoke, after being held for a few days, were bound together in small
batches of five or six men each and sent off at night, in companies
of from 50 to 150, under the escort of gendarmes. Some 15 miles from
the city[116] they were set upon by the gendarmes and by bandits
called _chettis_, and cruelly murdered with axes. These _chettis_
were criminals who had been turned loose from the prisons of
Constantinople and the cities of the interior, and set upon the
roads for the express purpose of preying upon the Armenians, as they
were being driven along the roads. One of the gendarmes who helped
to drive these 1,213 men away, boasted to our French teacher that he
had killed 50 Armenians with his own hands, and had obtained from
their persons £150 Turkish. The chief of the police at X. stated
that none of these 1,213 men remained alive. Our Consular Agent
visited the scene of this slaughter in August,[117] and brought back
with him Turkish “nufus teskeriés,” or identification papers, taken
from the bodies of the victims. I personally saw these papers. They
were all besmeared with blood.[118]
The motive which the Government claimed for all these cruelties was
military necessity. They said that the Armenians were a disloyal
element in the population, which it was necessary to weaken in order
that they might not hit them in the back while they were engaged in
war with the foreign foe. This was only a pretext. The real motive
was a compound of religious fanaticism, jealousy, greed for loot and
bestial lust. This was evident from what followed. If their motive
had been to weaken the Armenians in order to protect themselves from
attack, they had succeeded in doing this in a most thorough manner.
The Armenians were now quite helpless. All the strong men had been
sent into the Army, or killed, or sent into exile. All that now
remained were the women and children and old men. But when the
Government had reduced the Armenians to this helpless state, they
decided to exterminate the rest. Criers were sent through the
streets[119] announcing to the people that all the Armenians were to
be deported. 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.
This announcement produced great consternation among the people.
They came in great numbers to the mission compound, begging us to
advise them what to do, bringing their money, jewels and other
valuables and asking us to keep them for them. Some of them offered
to give us their children, knowing that it would be impossible to
keep them alive on that terrible journey. 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,
drive the women and children into the streets, and lock the doors of
their homes behind them and seal 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 to send the people away with. 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 five hundred to a thousand 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, 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 die miserably or to be captured by
Turks. By the end of July the city had been emptied in this manner
of its 12,000 Armenian inhabitants. Only the Armenians in the
mission compound remained. Fearing for their safety, we had tried to
get into communication with Constantinople. All our telegrams for
this purpose were intercepted by the Government. When we complained
to the Governor that he was cutting us off from communication with
our Ambassador, he frankly informed us that we would not be allowed
to communicate with our Ambassador. This had a sinister meaning to
us. It was a threat not only against the Armenians in our compound,
but also against us. The Governor had declared consistently from the
beginning that he would deport all the Armenians in our compound as
soon as it suited his convenience. All channels of communication
having failed, we sent off to Constantinople one of our Greek
tutors, and following him one of our English tutors, to carry
information of our situation to our Ambassador in Constantinople.
They reported the Governor’s threats to Mr. Morgenthau. He promptly
visited Talaat Bey, the Minister of the Interior, and Enver Pasha,
the Minister of War, and obtained from both these men their
unqualified assurance that they would send orders to the local
authorities at X. ordering them to exempt the Armenians in our
schools and hospital from the general deportation. He sent repeated
telegrams to this effect to our Consular Agent, whom he had ordered
to come to X. to look after our interests. In this matter these
ministers seem to have told a direct lie to our Ambassador, or else
their subordinate officers refused to obey their orders, in which
case the country would have been in a state of anarchy. But there
was no sign of any anarchy in all these transactions and dealings
with the Armenians. There were no mob outbreaks. Everything seemed
to be under perfect control and to be carried through with military
precision. When our Consular Agent showed the telegram from our
Ambassador to the local Governor, he stated that he had received the
exact contrary orders, and that furthermore he knew that he would
not receive any other orders. Our Consular Agent, desiring to make a
full report on the situation to the Ambassador, left for his post at
L. on the 9th August.
The next morning, the 10th August, there appeared at the front gate
of our mission compound the chief of the police of the city, with
the local police force and a company of gendarmes and ox-carts. They
demanded that we should admit them to the compound and should order
the Armenians in our premises to come out and get ready to leave.
The President of the college reminded them of the assurances we had
received from Constantinople, and said that we could not allow them
to enter our premises with our consent. If they wished to enter,
they would have to use force and accept the responsibility therefor.
They replied that if we dared to resist their authority in any way,
we would be hanged just like any Ottoman subject. The Capitulations
had now all been abolished, and we no longer had any rights or
special privileges. They hesitated, however, to use force for a
time, and sent one of their number to the Governor, asking for
instructions. We also sent our doctor at the same time to do what he
could in our behalf. They met in the Governor’s office. The
policeman reported to the Governor that the Americans were resisting
their authority. The Governor gave orders to enter the premises by
force and take out all the Armenians. They gathered up a squad of
some 25 more gendarmes, and returned and entered the compound by
force. They drove their ox-carts in and unyoked their oxen. It was a
group of nomads coming to destroy a more civilised community. The
gendarmes entered the college buildings and our own American
residences, and drove out at the end of their rifles all the
Armenians they could find. Our professors with their families were
taking refuge in our houses. In the college buildings were the
Armenian servants and employees connected with the institutions.
They drove out all these, with our own personal servants, some of
them young Armenian women, and assigned them to ox-carts just as
they had done to the people of the city in the days before. They
collected 71 people on our college premises in this way. When they
were ready to go, we took our last sad farewell of these people with
whom we had worked for years, and among whom were some of the best
friends we had in the world. They had no adequate food supply. We
reminded the Governor of their needs, and he promised to detain them
over-night at the Armenian monastery two miles out of the city, in
order that a food supply might be got ready. The college bakery was
kept busy over-night baking hard tack. Early in the morning a
wagon-load was taken to the monastery, but it was found that the
Governor had not kept his word. The professors and their families
had been hurried on as fast as possible. They had not been allowed
to stop at the monastery. They had been driven on without food. We
have never heard anything about that party from our college compound
from that day to this, except from some of the gendarmes who took
them away. They said that the men had been separated from the women
out on the road, taken to one side and killed. The women had been
sent on, to be disposed of as those who went before had been.