having a good Vali. However, he is much handicapped by some powerful
men of the Committee,[150] who are opposed to him and accuse him of
undue clemency. Even a prominent Armenian of this city warned him
not to be too kind lest he be sent away (the above was an Armenian
connected with the railway, and therefore not deported). The
Protestants here are very grateful to you for securing them
exemption from deportation. However, they are in much distress, for
the Government has sealed up all their shops and will not let them
conduct any business, so that what little cash they have is rapidly
being exhausted.
All of the above and much that I might add is as nothing, however,
to what the railway employees report as going on at the end of the
line, where the people leave the railway and set out on foot, only
to be set upon by brigands, who rob, outrage and kill all the way
from Bozanti to Adana and beyond. At Angora also there has been
great slaughter, according to all reports.
Whether these unfortunate people are sent on towards the east or
whether they remain where they are along the road, their future is
very dark, and it means annihilation for the whole race unless they
can be quickly reinstated in their homes with permission to carry on
their business, or else taken out of the country altogether. Even if
they are left just as they are, two or three months will probably
see the end of most of them. The climate of the interior is very
different from that of Constantinople, and the nights are already
cold. We shall do the best we can here, but can hardly touch the
outer edge of the national wretchedness and misery, which is written
so clearly on the despairing faces of the people, especially of the
women and girls, that enquiry and investigation are almost
unnecessary to confirm the horrible truth. We are using every means
we can, however, to see as much as possible ourselves and get
reliable information of the rest....
P.S.—I have had to wait several days to find a suitable messenger,
and the delay has enabled me to get a pretty comprehensive view of
the situation. There are at present in Q. about 5,000 to 10,000
Armenian refugees, mostly from the Broussa, Ismid and Bardezag
regions; a few hundreds come from Eski Shehr, Ak Shehr and other
places nearer by. The people are, for the most part, encamped in the
fields near the railway station, much as they are at the places
above described. The protection is, for the most part, very flimsy,
and there is a considerable proportion of the people whose things
have been stolen from them and who are simply lying out in the open
with no protection from the scorching sun by day or from the dew and
dampness by night. This state of affairs produces a vast number of
cases of malaria and dysentery, and also of heat prostration, and
one cannot walk a few paces through the camp without seeing sick
lying everywhere, especially children. There are, of course, no
sanitary arrangements at all, and last night the stench that came
from the camp was overpowering. Conditions are ripe for an epidemic
at any time, especially as these people have not, like the soldiers,
received any prophylactic treatment. Until very recently the
Government had done absolutely nothing for the refugees; during the
last few days they have been giving the adults one piastre[151] and
the children twenty paras[152] a day, which is, of course,
insufficient to feed them adequately. The people have no occupation
and stand and lie about listlessly; a steady stream of them passes
up and down the main street, begging or peddling their small
remaining stock of clothing, rugs, embroidery, &c. At night the
people are not molested as much as they were at first, but this is
probably due chiefly to the fact that the best of everything has
been taken away from them by this time and that a vast assemblage of
sickly and half-starved people is naturally comparatively safe from
molestation. There are a fair proportion of the Armenians who have
managed to keep some money and goods, and who are fairly comfortable
for the time being in houses and rooms that they rent. These,
however, have troubles of their own, for the police try to get money
out of them by frightening them, saying that they are next on the
list to be sent off to Bozanti, that their papers are made out
wrong, &c. Numbers of anxious parents have been to us, beseeching us
to take their daughters as nurses or servants in order to protect
them from the Turks. We have employed as many as we dared—not that
we are afraid for ourselves, but that we have to think of our own
regular nurses and employees, who would be in danger if we
overstepped the mark. But it is terrible to refuse asylum to girls
whom we know to be in danger. Yesterday an unusually pretty and
refined young girl of fifteen was brought to us by her parents; she
had been pursued all the way from Broussa by an Army officer, but
they had been able to elude him and the police as well. Our hospital
is too public to shelter her, and we are still looking for a place
for her. Most of the people in town are scared to do anything at
all, foreigners included, but we do not propose to show the white
feather, and are only waiting for certain official persons to return
from P., where they went a few days ago in order to get larger
liberties for Red Cross activities. At present our hospital has
taken in all the soldiers and refugees that it can, and we are
seeing sick refugees in the clinic all day long. To-day I counted 21
women and children in one of our waiting-rooms, mostly lying on the
floor from sheer exhaustion, one child moribund, two others nearly
so, and half the rest of the group quite likely to die in a few
days, if they are allowed to remain where they are in the camp. Many
of the villagers are mountaineers, and, lying out on the hot dusty
plain by day and exposed to the cold of night, they quickly succumb.
To-day I took a little girl into the hospital who had been perfectly
well until four days ago, when everything was stolen from the mother
and she had no place to lay her except on the ground, so that she
quickly got up a dysentery and died a few hours after admission to
the ward. The family were respectable Protestant people from Ismid.
Hardly had the little girl died and the sheets been changed than
another child, this time a boy, was put into the same bed; his leg
had been cut off by a railway-truck and apparently there was nobody
to take care of him. We found that the mother had been forcibly
separated from her children further back on the road. In that same
ward lies a young girl who has recently had her leg amputated for
the same accident, and who to-day was crying and screaming because
some friends had told her that her parents had suddenly been
deported to P. without having been given a chance to see her. It is
all horrible, horrible—no mere description can adequately portray
the awful suffering of these unfortunate people, whose only crime is
that they are Armenians.
If a few of the men have had revolutionary ideas, I am convinced
that the vast majority of them have had no more idea of rising
against the Government than have their helpless wives and children.
The suffering we see is utterly unlike anything confronting the
Americans in Constantinople. Sad as is the lot of many of the poor
soldiers, they at least have the comfort of kindness and sympathy,
and the realisation that the enemy is sharing the same lot. But
these people are being deliberately done to death at a sufficiently
slow pace to allow their oppressors the opportunity of choosing out
such of their women and their goods as they care for and getting all
their money away from them before they die. Dr. and Mrs. D. went
through the massacres of ’94 and ’96, and they and Miss H. and I
have been through two revolutions, one massacre and two wars since
then, but we all agree that we have never seen anything like this.
Another outrageous side of it is that many of the fathers and
brothers of these women and children are in the Army, fighting the
country’s battles. Such was the case with the dying child that was
brought to the clinic this afternoon, and with another who will
probably be in the same condition soon.
In addition to the medical work, we have begun distributing bread
and fruit at the hospital twice a day, and a few quilts to those who
are most needy. But this is very inadequate, and we hope to get the
Government’s permission to keep a large number of the sick in the
city under our supervision with a couple of Armenian physicians to
assist us. Many of the people had heard of the offer of
transportation to America some time before I came here, and sigh
that it might be realised. Unless political circumstances allow of
their speedy restoration to their homes or their _bona fide_
establishment in new places, transportation to America seems their
only hope, or else the nation will be annihilated, and that very
soon....
-----
Footnote 150:
Of Union and Progress.
Footnote 151:
Slightly more than twopence.
Footnote 152:
Slightly more than a penny.
111. Q.: LETTER FROM DR. E., DATED 27th OCTOBER, 1915; COMMUNICATED
BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.
Since my writing to you last the situation has changed considerably,
although the general need and suffering remain. The whole encampment
near the railway has been cleared out and sent on, with the
exception of some tents belonging to families with contagious cases,
such as diphtheria, scarlet fever, etc., which are being attended to
by the Beledié physician. There remain, however, a very large number
of people in the city, some say as many as 20,000, who are still
permitted to stay here—probably through bribes to the police,
friends in the Government, etc. Although the above number may be an
exaggeration, one sees crowds of Armenians everywhere in town, and
we have the same crowd of about 500 every day to feed, and more
patients coming to the clinic than we have time to see.
Soon after the great deportation that preceded the arrival of the
new Vali, Miss H. and I drove out to PP. Han, the first station on
the railway towards P., just to follow up the crowd, as a large
number had been driven off on foot with the expectation of taking
the railway later on. PP. Han is about three hours from here by
carriage, and, even so near to Q. as this, we found 100 people
sitting and lying about the station in utter destitution. They had
been there three days; most of them had eaten up all the provisions
they had and looked haggard and emaciated—veritable famine victims
such as one sees in pictures of what occurs in India. On leaving Q.
they had been promised food along the way, and the gendarmes there
left, saying “geledjek,” but the fact was that they had had no
provision whatsoever made for them. The train from Q. came along
while we were there, and most of the people dragged themselves to
the carriages and endeavoured to get on, but were pushed back by the
gendarmes, partly because they had no tickets and partly because
there was no room; so the poor people turned back bitterly and
hopelessly to where they had been sitting or lying about the
station. There is a village an hour or two away from the station,
and a Turkish baker had driven to the station to sell bread, but as
there was no money to buy, the grown-up people looked at it from the
distance, while the little gaunt children drew near to stare at it
wistfully. I bought enough to give each person there a loaf, and
many declared that it was the first food they had had for three
days. Some of the people there were intelligent and educated—their
sufferings were even greater than those of the villagers, who were
more accustomed to hardship. There were two women there desperately
sick, with puny babies tugging away at the breast and getting
nothing, their pathetic cries mingled with the groans of the mothers
in physical and mental anguish. Among the hundred people there were
not half-a-dozen tents, and these improvised and of the flimsiest
description. All the rest of the people were lying out in the open,
day and night, many without even a blanket or quilt. Half-a-mile
from the station I found two old women who were crawling about on
hands and knees, too weak to walk; they had been carried off on a
wagon, ostensibly to go to a village, but, once out of sight of the
gendarmes, the driver had dropped them in the field and hurried
away. All without exception looked forward to certain death by
starvation, nor could we see any other future for them. A few miles
further on, we found a little heap of clods that had been apparently
piled together and then scattered, and near it a bundle of rags full
of a child’s bones. The skull, with the scalp still clinging to it,
was lying a yard or two away. Evidently there had been a hasty
burial, and the dogs had come and torn the grave to pieces and
devoured the body. That same day we found another dead body by the
roadside—an old woman wrapped in a torn quilt; also a woman about 40
years old sitting alone by the road, miles away from any city or
village, with feet bare and swollen, almost pulseless, and evidently
crazed from terror and exposure, muttering something about Turks who
were coming to cut her throat, about her people who had left her
behind, and so forth. A little further on, lying beside an empty
wayside stable, we found an old woman, half-naked, pulseless,
muttering in low delirium and with only a few hours to live. We
lifted her into the old stable, covered her with an old quilt that
we found near her, and drove back to the city, weighed down with the
thought of the awful suffering that is going on all over the
country, especially to the south-east of us, of which we see such
terrible examples at our very doors.
Our new executive is affable and pleasant enough, but is hand and
glove with the clique here and impresses me as insincere. After
pushing the deportation vigorously for a few days, things have
quieted down again, and the Armenians in town are having their hopes
revived, although we see nothing to ground them upon. The hunger and
want in the city are increasing; to-day we fed over 600. It is
blessed work, even if it seems to have no future for the recipients.
A lot of the exiles are well qualified to earn a living, but the
police will not allow them to work.
Next time you write, I should be interested to know if the case of
Vartouhi, whose sisters from Gumuldjina were abducted, was taken up
by the Bulgarian Ministry.
A side-light on the rate of extermination of the Armenians is thrown
by a glance at mortality statistics in our hospital, which I have
been studying lately. In ordinary years the average mortality from
all causes is about 4 per cent. This year, among 500 to 600 soldiers
we have taken in, it has been about 6 per cent., the increase being
doubtless due to the lowered vitality of the soldiers in general.
The mortality among Armenians—exiles—who have been admitted to our
wards has been over 30 per cent., and this in spite of the fact that
we have taken in only the ordinary run of maladies and that there
has been no epidemic! The nation is being systematically done to
death by a cruel and crafty method, and their extermination is only
a question of time.
112. Q.: LETTER, DATED Q., 25th NOVEMBER, 1915, FROM DR. E. TO MR.
N. AT CONSTANTINOPLE; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR
ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.
Profiting by a medical call to Bozanti to see the family of a
railway employee, I have at last had a chance which I have been
waiting for for some time, namely, to investigate the conditions to
the south-east of us. The journey there and back was very tedious
and disagreeable; the locomotives burn only wood, and the trains
take just about twice the ordinary time to cover the distance. About
every three or four hours the train has to stop to load wood on the
tender, and when it comes to a steep grade the train has to be
divided into two, the locomotive taking up half of it and then
returning for the other half. There is still transportation of
Armenians going on, but most of the movement is in the other
direction, great numbers of raw Arab recruits being brought from
Syria and the Hauran and sent on to Eski Shehr and Constantinople.
The men are of the wildest type, thinly clad, many of them having
neither shoes nor stockings. They suffer greatly from the cold,
which is already becoming severe, and are treated with great
brutality by their officers, whom I saw beating and stoning and
cursing them all along the way.
Leaving on Sunday, the 21st, I spent the next day at P. There were
about 2,000 exiles there, of whom about a third had permission from
the Government to remain on account of being artizans or, in the
cases of women and children, of being members of soldiers’ families.
The remainder were more or less under the ban, and were dragging out
a wretched existence dodging the police, but preferring such a life
to the fate of being sent on into the mountains to starve. The
artizans above-mentioned were receiving a loaf of bread a day from
the Government and being forced to work for nothing; also the
soldiers’ families were receiving rations, but in no case
sufficient. I heard many stories of how the Armenians had been
refused transportation by train, and had been forced to hire wagons
at exorbitant rates, ten liras and more from P. to Tarsus, or else
had been driven off on foot, leaving most of their belongings behind
them. I saw great piles of baggage heaped up at the station, at
least five or six hundred pieces, that had been abandoned, and was
told that probably there had been three thousand in all. Most of
this property had been confiscated as “metrouk” (abandoned) and had
been partitioned among the officials or sold, while a good deal had
been stolen by the Turks in the town. About a hundred children had
been abandoned on account of sickness or of their being too young to
walk. The Turks had taken all but about twenty of these and adopted
them as Moslems, and I found the remainder of them in the care of a
poor Armenian woman, who with the help of some of the Armenians in
the town was trying to look after them. They were all in a dark,
wretched room, about nine by twelve feet—miserable specimens of
humanity they were. Seven of them in that room actually looked sick,
and all of them pinched and pale and insufficiently clothed. The
kind-hearted woman in charge was not only nursing a baby of her own
but actually trying to make her small supply of milk suffice for two
of the littlest refugees as well, who were sick and for whom there
was no cow’s milk to be had. Being in such wretched condition they
were not much in demand, but from time to time, she told me, the
Turks would come round to see if there were any worth taking off,
especially girls. The Government was doing absolutely nothing for
these children.
Deportation in P. was still in progress, about a hundred wagon-loads
of people having been driven off a few days before I arrived. One of
the parties, consisting of husband, wife, two boys and one girl, had
been set upon near BE. by robbers. Upon some resistance being
offered by the man, the whole party was stabbed to death, the little
girl of six years having first been foully outraged. This story is
authentic, and the Government is now making investigation and
promises to punish the “guilty” when they are found.
Near the station I found about two hundred people who had been
driven out of the town, and were crowded into a couple of abandoned
and tumble-down houses, in filth and misery indescribable. I started
to look at the sick, but gave it up as a bad job, as almost all were
sick and no medicine would make them well as long as they were
obliged to live under such conditions. There were a few tents spread
outside on the frozen ground, and the condition of the people in
them was about the same as that of those in the houses. In the
evening, when I took the train, some of the people were trying to
buy tickets, when I saw an officer deliberately pulling them away
from the window and beckoning to Turks to take their places and to
their friends to crowd about the window, apparently with the
intention of delaying the Armenians so that they should miss the
train, which now takes passengers only once a week. I managed to
crowd in and buy tickets for four of them, the officer meanwhile
telling the rest of them that there were no tickets for them that
night. Fortunately the train was so late that I think all must have
eventually gotten tickets. This in itself is a small incident, but
is a sample of the continual nagging and harassing that is going on
when there is no opportunity to do something worse. The regular
resident Armenians of P. have for the most part been allowed to
remain, through the goodwill of the Kaimakam, but are, of course,
subjected to constant nagging. They are frequently invited to become
Moslems, and even J. Effendi, who is a Protestant, is nagged by one
of the Turkish officials, who is trying to get his youngest daughter
to marry him. All Armenians there are in great anxiety and fear, and
I could see that they were nervous about being seen with me, so that
I had some difficulty in seeing and hearing what I wanted. In Q.
they seem to take a great deal of comfort in our presence in the
city and in being able to apply to us in a way that does not excite
suspicion. Also, some of the police are our friends and refrain from
making trouble.
Going on to Bozanti, I found only about 250 refugees. These were
scattered along the long valley that leads towards Tarsus, and were
altogether the most wretched of the exiles that I have yet seen.
They are the remnants of the vast encampment that has been there
during the past months, and are all too poor to hire any conveyance
to Tarsus, eighteen hours away, while their women and children are
too feeble to attempt the journey on foot. About two-thirds of the
people had wretched tents of some description, and the rest had no
shelter at all. They had sold what had not been stolen from them,
and many were half-naked. All were famished and wretched, with
despair written on their pinched and haggard faces; a large number
were sick, and I counted five corpses in half-an-hour. Of the
latter, two were still stretched out in the tents, one was being
buried, and two had been thrown out by the roadside. There is no
available shelter for these people in Bozanti, even if they had
permission to use it. The Government sends some bread to them from
time to time, but with no regularity. Most of them were villagers,
but some from good families. I found a pretty young girl with her
mother in one of the tents, whom I recognised as having seen in Q.
The girl had been in danger of being abducted by the police while
here, so her mother had hurried her on to Bozanti; but there the
money gave out, and they had nothing left but some scanty bedding, a
few dishes, a little clothing and three medjidias. Beside their tent
were two others, whose occupants, like them, were people of some
breeding and refinement, but in similar destitution, and with only
women and children in all the three tents. In another tent I found a
young girl who had been carried off by the gendarmes but rescued by
the station employees at Bozanti. I was told that she had been a
bright and attractive girl, but when I saw her she was thin and
emaciated and had become idiotic. The valley was strewn with graves,
and many of them had been torn open by dogs and the bodies eaten. I
was told that considerably over a thousand people had died at
Bozanti, and about the same number at P.—how many thousands all
along the way from Constantinople to Mesopotamia, no one can tell.
People coming from that region say that not one person in ten ever
reached Zor, and that those people who have gotten there have
nothing but starvation before them. From the statements of railway
officials and others I should think that not less than 500,000
people must have passed through Bozanti.