The great war gave the Young Turk leaders their long-desired
opportunity to crush the Armenians. Henry Morgenthau, the United States
Ambassador at Constantinople at that time, says in a recent statement:
During the Spring of 1915 they evolved their plan to destroy the
Armenian race. They criticised their ancestors for neglecting
to destroy or convert the Christian races to Mohammedanism at
the time when they first subjugated them. Now, as four of the
great powers were at war with them and the two others were their
allies, they thought the time opportune to make good the oversight
of their ancestors in the fifteenth century. They drafted the
able-bodied Armenians into the army without, however, giving
them arms; they used them simply to build roads or do similar
work. Then, under the pretext of searching the houses for arms,
they pillaged the belongings of the villagers. * * * The final
and worst measure was the wholesale deportation of the entire
population from their homes and their exile to the desert, with
all the accompanying horrors on the way. * * * The facts contained
in the reports received at the embassy from absolutely trustworthy
eyewitnesses surpass the most beastly and diabolical cruelties
ever perpetrated or imagined in the history of the world.