AMBASSADOR MORGENTHAU'S STORY
CHAPTER XXIV
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already said, these discriminations were withdrawn when the revolutionists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 defense. The operations at Van once more disclosed that these men
could use their weapons to good advantage. It was thus apparent that an Armenian
massacre this time would generally assume more the character of warfare than
those wholesale butcheries of defenseless men and women which the Turks had
always found so congenial. If this plan of murdering a race were 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 defenseless.
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 country 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 50 or 100 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 or 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 butcher's 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
everybody to bring their arms to headquarters. Although this order applied to
all citizens, the Armenians well understood what the result would be, should
they be left defenseless 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
indignity, and even held mock ceremonies in imitation of the Christian
sacraments. They would beat the priests into insensibility, under the pretense
that they were the centres of sedition. When they could discover no weapons in
the churches, they would sometimes arm the bishops and priests with guns,
pistols, and swords, then try them before courts-martial 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 the men. 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 eaves.
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 endured these agonies and 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 a responsible Turkish official,
who was describing the tortures inflicted. He made no secret of the fact that
the Government had instigated them, and, like an Turks of the official classes,
he enthusiastically approved this treatment of the detested race. This official
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. He
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. He did not tell me who carried off the prize in this gruesome
competition, but common reputation throughout Armenia gave a preeminent infamy
to Djevdet Bey, the Vali of Van, whose activities in that section I have already
described. All through this country Djevdet was generally known as the "horseshoer
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 the 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 southeastern section of the Ottoman Empire lie the Syrian
desert and the Mesopotamian valley. Though part of this area was once the scene
of a flourishing civilization, for the last five centuries it has suffered the
blight 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 two million 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. As a matter
of fact, the Turks never had the slightest idea of reestablishing 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 the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations,
they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this
well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to
conceal the fact.
All through the spring and summer of 1915 the deportations took place. Of the
larger cities, Constantinople, Smyrna, and Aleppo 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 just as the eruption of Vesuvius fell upon Pompeii; women were taken
from the washtubs, children were snatched out of bed, the bread was left half
baked in the oven, the family meal was abandoned partly eaten, the children were
taken from the schoolroom, leaving their books open at the daily task, and the
men were forced to abandon their ploughs 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---were all that they could take of their household
belongings. To their frantic questions " 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 pretense 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 agonizing 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 offense 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 Caesarea. 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 agonizing 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 follow them 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. Any one 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 departing
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 southward; everywhere, as they moved
on, they raised a huge dust, and abandoned débris, chairs, blankets, bedclothes,
household utensils, and other impedimenta, 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 coin 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 any one 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 the victims 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 women and old
men 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. Frequently any one who dropped on the road was
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 their 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 privations, 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 of women dying 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 a consular 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 show 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 three thousand 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, a 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, violating and killing the
women, and the gendarmes themselves joined in the orgy. One by one the few men
who 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 violated and
killed 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 15 to 90
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 them 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 marchers, 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; and the larger part of the convoy
marched for five days almost 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 convoy
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 with 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
cold-blooded, calculating state policy.
The Armenians are not the only subject people in Turkey which 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 nationalizing 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 more than 100,000 Greeks were taken from their age-long homes in the
Mediterranean littoral and removed to the Greek Islands and the interior. 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 civilized 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 apply 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
chiefly the Greeks on the seacoast 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, and that they also looked forward to the day when the Greeks inside
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 keep 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 civilization will hold the Turk
responsible.
Continue >
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TABLE OF CONTENTS  Introduction
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
PLACE YOUR ORDER
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