were acutely sensible of the cold and damp. As soon as possible, I
set out on my way. About 200 families had been left behind at
Mamouret. They were unable to proceed through exhaustion or illness.
In this rain the soldiers, too, felt no inclination to rouse them up
and drive them on, so they were lying about in what might have been
a lake. There was not a single dry thread left in their ragged
bedding. Many women had their feet frost-bitten; they were quite
black and in a state for amputation. The wailing and groaning was
horrible. Everywhere there were dying people in their last agonies
or dead bodies lying in front of the tents. It was only by
“bakshish” that the soldiers could be persuaded to bury them. It
seemed a comfort to them when we came with dry clothes; they could
change their things and get some bread and small change. Then I
drove in a carriage along the whole route to Islohia. Though I had
seen much distress before, the objects and the scenes I saw here
defy description. A frailly-built woman was sitting by the roadside
with her bedding on her back, and a young baby strapped on at the
top of it; in her arms she had a two-year-old child—its eyes were
dim and it was at its last gasp. The woman had broken down in her
distress and was weeping in a heart-breaking way. I took her with me
to the next camp, where the child died; then I took care of her and
sent her on her way. She was so grateful. The whole carriage was
packed with bread. I kept on distributing all the time. We had three
or four opportunities of buying fresh supplies. These thousands of
loaves were a great help to us. I was also able to hire some
hundreds of animals to help the poor people forward. The camp at
Islohia itself is the saddest thing I have ever seen. Right at the
entrance a heap of dead bodies lay unburied. I counted 35, and in
another place 22, in the immediate neighbourhood of the tents of
those who were down with virulent dysentery. The filth in and around
these tents was something indescribable. On one single day the
burial committee buried as many as 580 people. Men were fighting for
bread like hungry wolves. One saw hideous scenes. With what timidity
and apathy these poor people often stared at me, as though they
wondered where this assistance came from! For some weeks now many
camps have been provided daily with bread. Of course, everything has
to be done as unobtrusively as possible. We are so thankful to God
that we may at least do something.
(=d=) =Letter from Fräulein M. to Mr. N., dated 13th December, 1915,
on the way to Aleppo.=
I should have written long before this, but during these last weeks
I have been more on the road than at home, and the work in the camps
was often so urgent that I could not find time for anything else. I
suppose you have had, in the meantime, the receipt for the 200 liras
you sent me. Many thanks for the quick response. I only wish you
could see these poor people yourself; you would get an impression of
the absolutely dreadful need and distress that these camps conceal.
It is simply indescribable; one has to have seen it oneself. So far
I have had no difficulty whatever; on the contrary, the officials
here are most obliging, and grateful for everything we are doing for
the poor people. You will find some reports enclosed which Miss O.
copied for you as well; they will give you an idea of what we are
doing here. Up to the present we have worked in four camps, twelve
hours distant. We were often able to distribute about 10 to 20
liras’ worth of bread a day; besides this, we gave flour, clothes
and nirra to many sick people, to help them on the long journey.
Sometimes it happened that in some places we did not have nearly
enough bread—in such cases we provided the people with money to buy
bread at the next bakery along the route.
Now we are on our way to Aleppo, and Miss O. will stay there some
weeks, D.V., to prepare everything for another journey to
Der-el-Zor. I intend to come back soon, since there is still much
work to do on the Mamouré-Islohia route, and it seems to me that we
ought not to give up the work among the distressed so long as any of
them are left in this place, for if we did they would absolutely die
of starvation. Judging by our recent experience, we shall need about
300 to 400 liras a month. Dr. L. told me to send you word about
this, because I should get the money from you. It would be better
not to stop the work for lack of money, because the poor people
would suffer by it. If, however, you think that less money ought to
be spent, or that the whole work should be given up, please send me
a telegram in time, so that we may stop doing it. If not, will you
please be so kind as to send me the amount. To-day I have asked you
by wire to send me 400 liras—200 for Mamouré and 200 for
Islohia-Hassan-Beyli.
I hope you are well. We got a message that Dr. L. is down with
typhus. I hope that God will soon give him new strength. Fräulein O.
and I both send you our best wishes.
118. SMYRNA—ALEPPO—DAMASCUS—ALEPPO—SMYRNA: ITINERARY OF A FOREIGN
TRAVELLER IN ASIATIC TURKEY; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN
COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.
I left here (Smyrna) on the 16th September, 1915, for Aleppo. I
first saw the Armenians at Afiun Kara Hissar, where there was a big
encampment of people—probably 10,000—who had come down from the
Black Sea. They were encamped in tents made of material of all
descriptions, and their condition was deplorable.
The next place where I saw them was at Konia, also a large
encampment. There I saw the first brutality. I saw a woman with her
baby separated from her husband. He was put on our train, while she
was forcibly held back and prevented from getting on to the train.
At the next place, where there were said to be about 50,000, their
condition was terrible. They were camped on both sides of the
railway track, extending fully half a mile on either side. Here they
had two wells from which they could get water, one of which was a
very long way from the encampment, the other at the railway station
platform. At daybreak the Armenians came in crowds—women and
children and old men—to the well to get water. They fought among
themselves for a place at the well, and the gendarmes, to keep them
in order, flogged several people. I saw women and children
repeatedly struck with the whips and sticks in the hands of the
gendarmes. Later, I had occasion to pass through the camp on the way
to the town of Osmania, and had an opportunity to see the condition
of the people there. They were living in tents, like those above
described, and their condition was miserable. The site of the
encampment had been used several times over by different convoys of
Armenians, and no attempt at sanitation had been made, either by the
Turks or by the Armenians themselves, with the result that the
ground was in a deplorable condition and the stench in the early
morning beyond description. At Osmania they were selling their
possessions in order to obtain money to buy food. One old man begged
me to buy his silver snuff-box for a piastre, in order that he might
be able to buy some bread.
From Osmania I travelled by carriage to Radjou, and passed thousands
of Armenians en route to Aleppo. They were travelling in ox-carts,
on horseback, on donkey-back and on foot—the majority of them
children, women and old men. I spoke to several of these people,
some of whom had been educated in the American Mission Schools. They
told me that they had travelled for two months. They were without
money and food, and several expressed their wish that they might die
rather than go on and endure the sufferings that they were
undergoing. The people on the road were carrying with them
practically all their household possessions, and those who had no
carts or animals were carrying their goods on their backs. It was
not unusual to see a woman with a big pack wrapped up in a mattress
and a little child of a few months old on the top of the pack. They
were mostly bare-headed, and their faces were swollen from the sun
and exposure. Many had no shoes on, and some had their feet wrapped
in old pieces of rag which they had torn from their clothing. At
Entilli there was an encampment of about 10,000, and at Kotmo a
large encampment of 150,000. At this place, adjacent to their
encampment, were Turkish troops, who exacted “bakshish” from them
before they would let them go on the road to Aleppo. Many who had no
money had had to stay in this camp since their arrival there about
two months before. I spoke with several Armenians here, and they
told me the same stories of brutal treatment and robbery at the
hands of the gendarmes in charge as I had heard all along the road.
They had to go at least half-a-mile for water from this encampment,
and the condition of the camp was filthy. From Kotmo on to Aleppo I
witnessed the worst sights of the whole journey. Here the people
began to give out in the intense heat and dearth of water, and I
passed several who were prostrate—actually dying of thirst. One
woman, whom I assisted, was in a deplorable condition, unconscious
from thirst and exhaustion; and further on I saw two young girls who
had become so exhausted that they had fallen on the road, and lay
with their already swollen faces exposed to the sun. The road for a
great distance was being repaired and paved with cracked stone; on
one side of the road was a footpath, but many of the Armenians were
so dazed from fatigue and exposure that they did not see this
footpath, and were walking—and many of them bare-footed—on this
cracked stone, with their feet bleeding as a result of it. The
destination of all these Armenians is Aleppo. Here they are kept
crowded together in all available vacant houses, hans, Armenian
churches, courtyards and open plots. Their condition in Aleppo is
beyond description. I personally visited several of the places where
they were kept and found them starving and dying by the hundred
every day. In one vacant house which I visited I saw women, children
and men all in the same room, lying on the floor, so close together
that it was impossible to walk between them. Here they had been for
months, such of them as had survived, and the condition of the floor
was filthy. Many were lying in their own excrement!
The British Consulate was filled with these exiles, and from this
place the dead were removed almost every hour. Coffin-makers
throughout the city were working late into the night making rough
boxes for the dead whose relatives or friends could afford to give
them decent burial. Most of the dead were simply thrown into
two-wheeled carts, which made a daily round to all the places where
the Armenians were confined. These carts were open at first, but
afterwards covers were made for them. An Armenian physician whom I
know, and who is treating hundreds of these suffering Armenians who
have become ill through exposure on the journey and through hunger
and thirst, told me that there are hundreds dying daily in Aleppo
from starvation and as a result of the brutal treatment and exposure
that they have undergone on the journey from their native places.
Many of these suffering Armenians refuse alms, saying that the
little money so obtained will only prolong their sufferings and that
they prefer to die. From Aleppo those who are able to pay are sent
by train to Damascus; those who have no money are sent by road to
the interior, towards Der-el-Zor. In Damascus I found conditions
practically the same as in Aleppo, and hundreds are dying every day.
From Damascus they are sent still further south into the Hauran,
where their fate is unknown. Several Turks whom I interviewed told
me that the motive of this exile was to exterminate the race, and in
no instance did I see any Moslem giving alms to Armenians, it being
considered a criminal offence for anyone to aid them.
I remained in Damascus and Aleppo about a month, leaving for Smyrna
on the 26th October. All along the road I met thousands of these
unfortunate exiles still coming into Aleppo. The sights I witnessed
on this return journey were more pitiful than those I had seen on my
outward journey to Aleppo. There seems to be no end to the convoy
which moves over the mountain range from Bozanti south. Throughout
the day, from sunrise to sunset, the road as far as one can see is
crowded with these exiles. Just outside Tarsus I saw a dead woman
lying by the roadside, and further on I passed two more dead women,
one of whom was being carried from the roadside to be buried by two
gendarmes. Her legs and arms were so emaciated that the bones were
nearly through her flesh, and her face was swollen and purple from
exposure. Further on I saw two gendarmes carrying a dead child
between them away from the road to where they had dug a grave. Many
of these soldiers and gendarmes who follow the convoy carry spades,
and as soon as an Armenian dies they take the corpse away from the
roadside and bury it.
The open spaces round the hans en route are used as camping-places
for the Armenians, and the ground is littered with refuse and human
excrement, the stench from which is unbearable. I saw many people
who had been in good circumstances forced to lie in this filth.
Their clothes were rags and many had no shoes. The mornings were
cold and many were dying from exposure. There are very few young men
in these convoys; the majority are women and children, accompanied
by a few old men over fifty years of age. At Bairamoglu I talked
with a woman who had become demented from the sufferings she had
undergone. She told me that her husband and father had both been
killed before her eyes and that she had been forced for three days
to walk without rest. She had with her two little children, and all
had been without bread for a day. I gave her some money, which she
told me would probably be taken from her before the day was over.
Turks and Kurds meet these caravans as they pass through the country
and sell them food at exorbitant prices. I saw a small boy about
seven years old riding on a donkey with his baby brother in his
arms. They were all that was left of his family. Many of these
people go for days without bread, and they become emaciated beyond
description. I saw several fall from starvation, and only at certain
places along this road is there any water. Many die of thirst. Some
of the Armenians who can afford it hire carriages. These are paid
for in advance, and the prices charged are exorbitant. At many
places, like Bozanti, for example, where there is an encampment of
Turkish soldiers, there is not enough bread for these Armenians, and
only two hours from Bozanti I met a woman who was crying for bread.
She told me that she had been in Bozanti for two days and was unable
to obtain anything to eat except what travellers like myself had
given her. Many of the beasts of burden belonging to the Armenians
die of starvation. It is not an unusual sight to see an Armenian
removing a pack from the dead animal and setting it on his own
shoulders. Many Armenians told me that, although they are allowed to
rest at night, they get no sleep because of the pangs of hunger and
cold. These people march all the day through at a shuffling gait,
and for hours do not speak to one another. At one place where I
stopped on the road for lunch I was surrounded by a crowd of little
children, all crying for bread. Many of these little tots are
obliged to walk barefoot along the road, and many of them carry a
little pack on their backs. They are all emaciated, their clothes
are in rags and their hair in a filthy condition. The filth has bred
millions of flies, and I saw several babies’ faces and eyes covered
with these insects, their mothers being too exhausted to brush them
away. Disease has broken out in several places along the road, and
in Aleppo several cases of typhus fever among the Armenians were
reported when I left.
Many families have been separated, the men being sent in one
direction and the women and children in another. I saw one woman who
was with child, lying in the middle of the road crying, and over her
stood a gendarme, threatening her if she did not get up and walk.
Many children are born on the way, and most of these die, as their
mothers have no nourishment for them.
None of these people have any idea where they are going or why they
are being exiled. They journey day after day along the road, with
the hope that they may somewhere reach a place where they may be
allowed to rest, and I saw several old men carrying on their backs
the tools of their trade, probably with the hope that they may some
day settle down somewhere. The road over the Taurus Mountains is, in
places, most difficult, and often the crude conveyances, drawn by
buffaloes, oxen and milch cows, are unable to take the grades, and
are abandoned and overturned by the gendarmes into the ravine below;
the animals are turned loose. I saw several carts, piled high with
baggage and with a number of Armenians on the top of that, break
down and throw their occupants on to the road. One of the drivers,
who was a Turk and who had collected his fare in advance from the
people he was driving, considered it a huge joke when one woman
broke her leg from such a fall.
There seems to be no cessation of the streams of these Armenians
pouring down from the north, from Angora and the region round the
Black Sea. Their condition grows worse every day. The sights that I
saw on my return journey were worse than those on my outward
journey, and now that the cold weather and winter rains are setting
in, deaths are more numerous. The roads in some places are almost
impassable.
XV.
CILICIA (VILAYET OF ADANA AND SANDJAK OF
MARASH).
_Cilicia occupies the south-eastern corner of Anatolia, overlooking
the Gulf of Iskanderoun (Alexandretta), and falls into two sharply
contrasted regions—the fertile, malarious coastal plain of Adana,
traversed by a section of the Baghdad Railway, and the hill-country
inland to the north-east of it, where the lines of Taurus are broken
by the upper courses of the Sarus and Pyramus (Sihoun and Djihoun)
and spread out fanwise into a maze of high valleys and mountain
blocks._
_Until the spring of 1915, Cilicia was one of the chief centres
of the Armenian race in Turkey, and there was no region, with
the possible exception of Van, which they succeeded in making
and keeping so thoroughly their own. The Armenian Dispersion in
north-eastern Anatolia and the suburban districts round the
coasts of Marmora, numerous and wealthy and influential though
it was, still constituted no more than an urban class, and even
in the towns was usually in a minority. The Cilician highlands,
on the other hand, were sown thick with Armenian peasant
communities—small but prosperous hill towns and villages, of
which the most important were Hadjin and Zeitoun in the north,
but which stretched in an unbroken chain from the Taurus to the
southern spurs of the Amanus, until, at Dört Yöl, they touched
the north-eastern corner of the Mediterranean._
_The Cilician Armenians were mainly shepherds and husbandmen, but
they were also one of the most civilised and progressive sections of
the Armenian race. Schools, both Armenian and American, had been
established in the mountains, and the mountaineers were in close
contact with Adana, Tarsus, Mersina and the other ports and cities
of the Adana plain, where commerce and industry were almost entirely
in the hands of the Armenian element—an element constantly
reinforced from the reservoir of Armenian population in the
highlands._
_The Cilician Armenians seemed destined to play an important part in
the future development of the Ottoman Empire. Their country was of
peculiar strategical and commercial importance, for it was to be
traversed by the main artery of the Empire, the Baghdad Railway, in
the most vital section of its course, where it has to negotiate two
mountain-barriers and approach most nearly to the Mediterranean
coast. And meanwhile the Armenian population itself was here
steadily increasing in numbers, while in almost every other part of
Turkey it had been receding under the continuous repression to which
it had been subjected since 1878. This increase was the more
remarkable because Cilicia had been especially visited by the last
outbreak of massacre, which occurred in 1909._
_All this, however, only rendered the Cilician Armenians more
obnoxious in the Ottoman Government’s eyes, and the war gave it the
opportunity it coveted for rooting them out. A universal deportation
of all the Armenians in the Empire may or may not have been
contemplated before the breach between the Turks and Armenians at
Van, in the middle of April, 1915; but, as far as Cilicia is
concerned, there is no doubt whatever that the scheme was devised
and put in train before any of the events at Van occurred. Fighting
began at Van on the 20th April; the first Armenians had been
deported from Zeitoun on the 8th April, twelve days before, and by
the 19th a convoy of them had already arrived in Syria (Doc. 138.
The Cilician deportations, at any rate, must therefore have been
planned at least as early as March, and probably earlier still._
_And there is one special feature about the execution of the scheme
in Cilicia which makes it evident that it was carried out
deliberately and thought out far ahead. Immediately the Armenians
were evicted from their villages, their houses were assigned to
Moslem refugees. We have occasional evidence of the same practice,
during June, in the Vilayets of Erzeroum and Trebizond; but in these
cases the Moslem intruders, where we can trace their origin,
generally prove to have been Turks or Kurds from the adjoining
districts on the east, who had just evacuated their own homes in
consequence of the first Russian occupation of Van. Their
installation in Armenian houses was apparently extempore and
conceivably only provisional. On the other hand, the “mouhadjirs”
brought by the Ottoman Government to Zeitoun, Hadjin and the other
towns and villages of the Cilician highlands, were all of them
Moslem refugees from Europe—from the Roumelian Vilayets ceded by
Turkey in 1913, as a result of the Balkan War. They had been on the
Government’s hands for over two years, and during all that time they
had remained stranded in Thrace or along the Aegean littoral. But
now they had been transported from these western fringes of the
Empire to the other extremity of the Anatolian Railway, and by the
8th April, 1915, they were in readiness to occupy the homes of the
Armenians in Cilicia immediately their rightful owners had started
on their road to exile. This is clear proof that, at any rate in
Cilicia, the deportation was not only planned systematically, but
planned a long time in advance._
_Its execution began at Zeitoun in April, and was extended to all
the highland villages in the course of May and June. In the cities
of the plain and the coast, on the other hand, it did not become
drastic till the first week in September—a tacit avowal that the
official pleas of Armenian disloyalty and strategical necessity were
a pretext hardly intended to be taken seriously even by their
authors._
_The Zeitounlis were deported in two directions—half of them to
Sultania (see Documents 123 and 125) in the Anatolian Desert, and
half to the Mesopotamian Sandjak of Der-el-Zor (see Document 145).
The exiles at Sultania were subsequently removed to Der-el-Zor to
join the rest, and the later convoys seem all to have taken the
south-eastward road. The deportation was conducted by the
gendarmerie with the same brutality as elsewhere, but the Cilician
country is free of nomadic Kurds, so that there was here less
wholesale massacre on the way. On the last stages of their journey
to Zor the exiles were harassed by the Arab nomads of the steppe,
but these are a milder race than their Kurdish neighbours. The chief
alleviation of the Cilicians’ fate was their geographical position.
The distance they had to traverse was comparatively short, and they
only began to die in large numbers after reaching their
destination._
119. CILICIA: ADDRESS (WITH ENCLOSURE), DATED 3rd JULY, 1915,
FROM THE ARMENIAN COLONY IN EGYPT TO HIS EXCELLENCY
LIEUTENANT-GENERAL SIR J.G. MAXWELL, COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF
HIS BRITANNIC MAJESTY’S FORCES IN EGYPT.
(=a=) =Address from the Armenian Colony.=