CHAPTER XXIII

THE “REVOLUTION” AT VAN

The attempt at general disarmament that took place also aroused their apprehensions, which were increased by the brutal treatment visited upon Armenian soldiers in the Caucasus. On the other hand, the Turks made many charges against the Christian population, and, in fact, they attributed to them the larger share of the blame for the reverses which the Turkish Armies had suffered in the Caucasus. The fact that a considerable element in the Russian forces was composed of Armenians aroused their unbridled wrath. Since about half the Armenians in the world inhabit the Russian provinces in the Caucasus, and are liable, like all Russians, to military service, there was certainly no legitimate grounds for complaint, so far as these Armenian levies were bona fide subjects of the Tsar. But the Turks asserted that large numbers of Armenian soldiers in Van and other of their Armenian provinces deserted, crossed the border, and joined the Russian Army, where their knowledge of roads and the terrain was an important factor in the Russian victories. Though the exact facts are not yet ascertained, it seems not unlikely that such desertions, perhaps a few hundred, did take place.

At the beginning of the war Turkish officials appeared in this neighbourhood and appealed to the Armenian leaders to go into Russian Armenia and attempt to start revolutions against the Russian Government, and the fact that the Ottoman Armenians refused to do this contributed further to the prevailing irritation. The Turkish Government has made much of the “treasonable” behaviour of the Armenians of Van, and have even urged it as an excuse for their subsequent treatment of the whole race. Their attitude illustrates once more the perversity of the Turkish mind. After massacring hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the course of thirty years, outraging the women and girls, and robbing and maltreating them in every conceivable way, the Turks still apparently believed that they had the right to expect from them the most enthusiastic “loyalty.” That the Armenians all over Turkey sympathised with the Entente was no secret. “If you want to know how the war is going,” remarked a humorous Turkish newspaper, “all you need to do is to look in the face of an Armenian. If he is smiling, then the Allies are winning; if he is downcast, then the Germans are successful.” If an Ottoman Armenian soldier should desert and join the Russians that would unquestionably constitute a technical crime against the State, and might be punished without violating the rules of all civilised countries. Only the Turkish mind, however—and possibly the German—could regard it as furnishing an excuse for the terrible barbarities that now took place.

Though the air all during the autumn and winter of 1914-15 was filled with premonitions of trouble, the Armenians behaved with remarkable self-restraint. For years it had been the Turkish policy to provoke the Christian population into committing overt acts, and then seizing upon such misbehaviour as an excuse for massacres. The Armenian clergy and political leaders saw many evidences that the Turks were now up to their old tactics, and they therefore went among the people, cautioning them to keep quiet, to bear all insults, and even outrages, patiently, so as not to give the Moslems the opening which they were seeking. “Even though they burn a few of our villages,” these leaders would say, “do not retaliate, for it is better that a few be destroyed than that the whole nation be massacred.”

When the war started, the Central Government recalled Tahsin Pasha, the conciliatory Governor of Van, and replaced him with Djevdet Bey, a brother-in-law of Enver Pasha. This act in itself was most disquieting. Turkish officialdom has always contained a minority of men who do not believe in massacres as a State policy and who cannot be depended upon to carry out strictly the most bloody orders of the Central Government. Whenever massacres have been planned, therefore, it has been customary first to remove such “untrustworthy” public servants and replace them with men who are regarded as more reliable. The character of Tahsin’s successor made his displacement still more alarming. Djevdet had spent the larger part of his life at Van; he was a man of unstable character, friendly to non-Moslems one moment, hostile the next, hypocritical, treacherous, and ferocious according to the worst traditions of his race. He hated the Armenians and cordially sympathised with the long-established Turkish plan of solving the Armenian problem. There is little question that he came to Van with definite instructions to exterminate all Armenians in this province, but for the first few months conditions did not facilitate such operations. Djevdet himself was absent fighting the Russians in the Caucasus, and the near approach of the enemy made it a wise policy for the Turks to refrain from maltreating the Armenians of Van. But early in the spring the Russians temporarily retreated.

It is generally recognised as good military tactics for a victorious army to follow up the retreating enemy. In the eyes of the Turkish generals, however, the withdrawal of the Russians was a happy turn of war mainly because it deprived the Armenians of their protectors and left them at the mercies of the Turkish Army. Instead of following the retreating foe, therefore, the Turks’ Army turned aside and invaded their own territory of Van. Instead of fighting the trained Russian Army of men, they turned their rifles, machine guns, and other weapons upon the Armenian women, children, and old men in the villages of Van. Following their usual custom, they distributed the most beautiful Armenian women among the Moslems, sacked and burned the Armenian villages, and massacred uninterruptedly for days. On April 15th about 500 young Armenian men of Akantz were mustered to hear an order of the Sultan; at sunset they were marched outside the town and every man shot in cold blood. This procedure was repeated in about eighty Armenian villages in the district north of Lake Van, and in three days 24,000 Armenians were murdered in this atrocious fashion.

A single episode illustrates the unspeakable depravity of Turkish methods. A conflict having broken out at Shadak, Djevdet Bey, who had meanwhile returned to Van, asked four of the leading Armenian citizens to go to this town and attempt to quiet the multitude. These men made the trip, stopping at all Armenian villages along the way, urging everybody to keep public order. After completing their work these four Armenians were murdered in a Kurdish village.

And so when Djevdet Bey, on his return to his official post, demanded that Van furnish him immediately 4,000 soldiers, the people were naturally in no mood to accede to his request. When we consider what had happened before, and what happened subsequently, there remains little doubt concerning the purpose which underlay this demand. Djevdet, acting in obedience to orders from Constantinople, was preparing to wipe out the whole population, and his purpose in calling for 4,000 able-bodied men was merely to massacre them, so that the rest of the Armenians might have no defenders. The Armenians, parleying to gain time, offered to furnish 500 soldiers and to pay exemption money for the rest. Now, however, Djevdet began to talk aloud about “rebellion,” and his determination to “crush” it at any cost. “If the rebels fire a single shot,” he declared, “I shall kill every Christian man, woman, and child up to here,” pointing to his knee.

For some time the Turks had been constructing entrenchments around the Armenian quarter and filling them with soldiers, and, in response to this provocation, the Armenians began to make preparations for a defence. On April 20th a band of Turkish soldiers seized several Armenian women who were entering the city; a couple of Armenians ran to their assistance and were shot dead. The Turks now opened fire on the Armenian quarters with rifles and artillery; soon a large part of the town was in flames and a regular siege had started. The whole Armenian fighting force consisted of only 1,500 men; they had only 300 rifles and a most inadequate supply of ammunition, while Djevdet had an army of 5,000 men, completely equipped and supplied; yet the Armenians fought with the utmost heroism and skill. They had little chance of holding off their enemies indefinitely, yet they knew that a Russian Army was fighting its way to Van, and their utmost hope was that they would be able to defy the besiegers until these Russians arrived.

As I am not writing the story of sieges and battles, I cannot describe in detail the numerous acts of individual heroism, the co-operation of the Armenian women, the ardour and energy of the Armenian children, the self-sacrificing zeal of the American missionaries—especially Dr. Usher and his wife and Miss Grace H. Knapp—and the thousand other circumstances that make this terrible month one of the most glorious pages in modern Armenian history. The wonderful thing about it is that the Armenians triumphed. After nearly five weeks of sleepless fighting, the Russian Army suddenly appeared, and the Turks fled into the surrounding country, where they found appeasement for their anger by again massacring unprotected Armenian villages. Dr. Usher, the American medical missionary, whose hospital at Van was destroyed by bombardment, is authority for the statement that, after driving off the Turks, the Russians began to collect and to cremate the bodies of Armenians who had been murdered in the province, with the result that 55,000 bodies were burned.

I have told this story of the “revolution” in Van not only because it marked the first stage in this organised attempt to wipe out a whole nation, but because these events are always brought forward by the Turks as a justification of their subsequent crimes. As I shall relate, Enver, Talaat, and the rest, when I appealed to them on behalf of the Armenians, invariably instanced the “revolutionists” of Van as a sample of Armenian treachery. The famous “revolution,” as this recital shows, was merely the determination of the Armenians to save their women’s honour and their own lives, after the Turks, by massacring thousands of their neighbours, had shown them the fate that awaited them.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE MURDER OF A NATION

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 countrymen 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 fifty or a hundred 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 and 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 butchers’ 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 them to bring all their arms to headquarters. Since this order applied only to Christians, the Armenians well understood what the result would be should they be left defenceless 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 indignities, and even held mock ceremonies in imitation of the Christian sacraments. They would beat the priests into insensibility, under the pretence that they were the centres of sedition. When they could discover no munitions in the churches, they would sometimes arm the bishops and priests with guns, pistols, and swords, then try them before court-martials 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 their husbands. 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 caves.

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 who endured these agonies had 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 Bedri Bey, the Constantinople Prefect of Police. With a disgusting relish Bedri described the tortures inflicted. He made no secret of the fact that the Government had instigated them, and, like all Turks of the official classes, he enthusiastically approved this treatment of the detested race. Bedri 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. Bedri 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. Bedri did not tell me who carried off the prize in this gruesome competition, but common reputation throughout Armenia gave a pre-eminent infamy to Djevdet Bey, the Vali of Van, whose activities in that section I have already described. All through this country Djevdet now became known as the “marshall blacksmith 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 a 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 south-eastern section of the Ottoman Empire lies the Syrian desert and the Mesopotamian valley. Though part of this area was once the scene of a flourishing civilisation, for the last five centuries it has suffered the plight 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 2,000,000 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. For a large part the Armenians are not agriculturists; their talents are chiefly for business and commercial life; though many of them do cultivate farms and engage in sheep-herding, many lived in cities and large towns, and, as I have already said, they represent the economic force of the country. To seize such peoples by the million and send them into one of the most barren parts of Asia would have been an act of the most inhuman spoliation. As a matter of fact, the Turks never had the slightest idea of re-establishing 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 Talaat, as Minister of the Interior, gave the orders for these deportations, he was merely giving the death-warrant to a whole race; he understood this well, and in his conversations with me he made no particular attempt to conceal the fact.

All through the spring and summer of 1915 the deportations took place. Of the larger cities, only Constantinople, Smyrna, and Kutahia 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 first as the eruption of Vesuvius fell upon Pompeii; women were taken from the wash-tubs, children were snatched out of bed, the bread would be left half-baked in the oven, the family meal would be abandoned partly eaten, the children would be taken from the schoolroom, leaving their books open at the daily task, the men would be forced to abandon their plough 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—was all that they could take of their household belongings. To their frantic question, “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 pretence 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 agonising 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 offence 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 Cæsaria. 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 agonising 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 then come up 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. Anyone 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 deporting 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 south; everywhere, as they moved on, they raised a huge dust, and abandoned débris, chairs, blankets, bedclothes, household utensils, and other impediments, 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 penny 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 anyone 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 they 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 old men and women 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. Anyone who dropped on the road was frequently 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 the 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 deprivations, 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 women 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 an authentic 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 shows 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 3,000 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—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, killing and violating the women, and the gendarmes themselves joined in the orgy. One by one the few men that 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 killed and violated 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 fifteen to ninety 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 these 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 marches, 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, the consequence being that the whole convoy marched for five days 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 convey 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 to 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 a cold-blooded, calculating state policy.

The Armenians are not the only subject people in Turkey who 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 nationalising 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 about 400,000 Greeks were taken from their age-long homes in the Mediterranean littoral and removed to the Greek Islands in the Ægean Sea. 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 civilised 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 adopt 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 the Greeks living on the sea-coast 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, but that they also looked forward to the day when the Greeks outside 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 have kept 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 civilisation will hold the Turk responsible.

CHAPTER XXV

TALAAT TELLS WHY HE “ANNIHILATES” THE ARMENIANS

In early April the authorities arrested about two hundred Armenians in Constantinople and sent them into the interior. Many of those who were then deported were educational and social leaders and men who were prominent in industry and in finance. I knew many of these men and therefore felt a personal interest in their misfortunes. But when I spoke to Talaat about their expulsion, he replied that the Government was acting in self-defence. The Armenians at Van, he said, had already shown their abilities as revolutionists; he knew that these leaders in Constantinople were corresponding with the Russians, and he had every reason to fear that they would start an insurrection against the Central Government. The safest plan, therefore, was to send them to Angora and other interior towns. Talaat denied that this was part of any general concerted scheme to rid the city of its Armenian population, and insisted that the Armenian masses in Constantinople would not be disturbed.

But soon the accounts from the interior became more specific and more disquieting. The withdrawal of the Allied fleet from the Dardanelles produced a distinct change in the atmosphere. Until then there were numerous indications that all was not going well in the Armenian provinces; when it at last became definitely established, however, that the traditional friends of Armenia, Great Britain, France, and Russia, could do nothing to help that suffering people, the mask began to disappear. In April I was suddenly deprived of the privilege of using the cipher for communicating with American Consuls. The most rigorous censorship also was applied to letters. Such measures could mean only that things were happening in Asia Minor which the authorities were determined to conceal. But they did not succeed. Though all sorts of impediments were placed to travelling, certain Americans, chiefly missionaries, succeeded in getting through. For hours they would sit in my office and, with tears streaming down their faces, tell me of the horrors through which they had passed. Many of these, both men and women, were almost broken in health from the scenes which they had witnessed. In many cases they brought me letters from American Consuls, confirming the most dreadful of their narrations and adding many unprintable details. The general purport of all these first-hand reports was that the utter depravity and fiendishness of the Turkish nature, already sufficiently celebrated through the centuries, had now surpassed itself. There was only one hope of saving nearly 2,000,000 people from massacre, starvation, and even worse, I was told—that was the moral power of the United States. These spokesmen of a condemned nation declared that, unless the American Ambassador could persuade the Turk to stay his destroying arm, the whole Armenian nation must disappear. It was not only American and Canadian missionaries who made this personal appeal. Several of their German associates begged me to intercede. These men and women confirmed all the worst things which I had heard, and they were unsparing in denouncing their own Fatherland. They did net conceal the humiliation which they felt as Germans in the fact that their own nation was allied with a people that could perpetrate such infamies, but they understood German policy well enough to know that Germany would not intercede. There was no use in expecting aid from the Kaiser, they said—America must stop the massacres, or they would go on.

Technically, of course, I had no right to interfere. According to the cold-blooded legalities of the situation, the treatment of Turkish subjects by the Turkish Government was purely a domestic affair; unless it directly affected American lives and American interests it was outside the concern of the American Government. When I first approached Talaat on the subject he called my attention to this fact in no uncertain terms. This interview was one of the most exciting which I had had up to that time. Two missionaries had just called upon me, giving the full details of the frightful happenings at Konia. After listening to their stories I could not restrain myself, and went immediately to the Sublime Porte. I saw at once that Talaat was in one of his most ferocious states of mind. For months he had been attempting to secure the release of two of his closest friends, Ayoub Sabri and Zinnoun, who were held as prisoners by the English at Malta. His failure in this matter was a constant grievance and irritation; he was always talking about it, always making new suggestions for getting his friends back to Turkey, and always appealing to me for help. So furious did the Turkish Boss become when thinking about his absent friends that we usually referred to these manifestations as Talaat in his “Ayoub Sabri moods.” This particular morning the Minister of the Interior was in one of his worst “Ayoub Sabri moods.” Once more he had been working for the release of the exiles, and once more he had failed. As usual, he attempted to preserve outer calm and courtesy to me, but his short, snappy phrases, his bull-dog rigidity, and his wrists planted on the table showed that it was an unfavourable moment to stir him to any sense of pity or remorse. I first spoke to him about a Canadian missionary, Dr. McNaughton, who was receiving harsh treatment in Asia Minor.

“The man is an English agent,” he replied, “and we have the evidence for it.”

“Let me see it,” I asked.

“We’ll do nothing for any Englishman or any Canadian,” he replied, “until they release Ayoub and Zinnoun.”

“But you promised to treat English in the employ of Americans as Americans,” I replied.

“That may be,” rejoined the Minister, “but a promise is not made to be kept for ever. I withdraw that promise now. There is a time limit on a promise.”

“But if a promise is not binding, what is?” I asked.

“A guarantee,” Talaat answered quickly.

This fine Turkish distinction had a certain metaphysical interest, but I had more practical matters to discuss at that time. So I began to talk about the Armenians at Konia. I had started, when Talaat’s attitude became even more belligerent. His eyes lighted up, he brought his jaws together, leaned over toward me, and snapped out:

“Are they Americans?”

The implications of this question were hardly diplomatic; it was merely a way of telling me that the matter was none of my business. In a moment Talaat said this in so many words.

“The Armenians are not to be trusted,” he said; “besides, what we do with them does not concern the United States.”

I replied that I regarded myself as the friend of the Armenians and was shocked at the way that they were being treated. But he shook his head and refused to discuss the matter. I saw that nothing could be gained by forcing the issue at that time. I spoke on behalf of another British subject who was not being treated properly.

“He’s English, isn’t he?” answered Talaat. “Then I shall do as I like with him!”

“Eat him, if you wish!” I replied.

“Oh,” said Talaat, “he would go against my digestion.” He was altogether in a reckless mood. “Gott strafe England!” he shouted, using one of the few German phrases that he knew. “As to your Armenians, we don’t give a rap for the future! We live only in the present! As to the English, I wish you would telegraph Washington that we shall not do a thing for them until they let out Ayoub Sabri and Zinnoun!”

Then, leaning over, he struck a pose, pressed his hand to his head, and said in English—I think this must have been almost all the English he knew:

“Ayoub Sabri—he—my—brudder!”

Despite this, I made another plea for Dr. McNaughton.

“He’s not American,” said Talaat, “he’s a Canadian.”

“It’s almost the same thing,” I said.

“Well,” replied Talaat, “if I let him go will you promise that the United States will annex Canada?”

“I promise,” said I, and we both laughed at this little joke.

“Every time you come here,” Talaat finally said, “you always steal something from me. All right, you can have your McNaughton!”

Certainly this interview was not an encouraging beginning, so far as the Armenians were concerned. But Talaat was not always in an “Ayoub Sabri mood.” He went from one emotion to another as lightly as a child; I would find him fierce and unyielding one day, and uproariously good-natured and accommodating the next. Prudence indicated, therefore, that I should await one of his more congenial moments before approaching him on the subject that aroused all the barbarity in his nature. Such an opportunity soon presented itself. One day, soon after the interview chronicled above, I called on Talaat again. The first thing he did was to open his desk and pull out a handful of yellow cablegrams.

“Why don’t you give this money to us?” he said, with a grin.

“What money?” I asked.

“Here is a cablegram for you from America, sending you a lot of money for the Armenians. You ought not to use it that way; give it to us Turks, we need it as badly as they do.”

“I have not received any such cablegram,” I replied.

“Oh no, but you will,” he answered. “I always get all your cablegrams first, you know. After I have finished reading them I send them around to you.”

This statement was the literal truth. Every morning all the open cablegrams received in Constantinople were forwarded to Talaat, who read them all before consenting to their being forwarded to their destination. Even the cablegrams of the Ambassadors were apparently not exempt, though, of course, the ciphered messages were not interfered with. Ordinarily I might have protested against this infringement of my rights, but Talaat’s engaging frankness in pilfering my correspondence, and in even waving my own cablegrams in my face, gave me an excellent opening to introduce the forbidden subject.

I thought I would be a little tactful, and so began by suggesting that the Central Government was probably not to blame for the massacres.

But on this occasion, as on many others, Talaat was evasive and non-committal, and showed much hostility to the interest which the American people were manifesting in the Armenians. He explained his policy on the ground that the Armenians were in constant correspondence with the Russians. The definite impression which these conversations left upon me was that Talaat was the most implacable enemy of this persecuted race. “He gave me the impression,” such is the entry which I find in my diary on August 3rd, “that Talaat is the one who desires to crush the poor Armenians.” He told me that the Union and Progress Committee had carefully considered the matter in all its details, and that the policy which was being pursued was that which they had officially adopted. He said that I must not get the idea that the deportations had been decided upon hastily; in reality they were the result of prolonged and careful deliberation. To my repeated appeals that he should show mercy to these people he sometimes responded seriously, sometimes angrily, and sometimes flippantly.

“Some day,” he once said, “I will come and discuss the whole Armenian subject with you,” and then he added in a low tone in Turkish, “But that day will never come.”

“Why are you interested in the Armenians, anyway?” he said on another occasion. “You are a Jew; these people are Christians. The Mohammedans and the Jews always get on harmoniously. We are treating the Jews here all right. What have you to complain of? Why can’t you let us do with these Christians as we please?”

I had always remarked that the Turks regard practically every question as a personal matter, yet this point of view rather stunned me. It was, however, a complete revelation of Turkish mentality; the fact that, above all considerations of race and religion, there are such things as humanity and civilisation never for a moment enters their mind. They can understand a Christian fighting for a Christian and a Jew fighting for a Jew, but such abstractions as justice and decency form no part of their conception of things.

“You don’t seem to realise,” I replied, “that I am not here as a Jew, but as American Ambassador. My county contains something more than 97,000,000 Christians and something less than 3,000,000 Jews. So, at least in my ambassadorial capacity, I am 97 per cent. Christian. But, after all, that is not the point. I do not appeal to you in the name of any race or any religion, but merely as a human being. You have told me many times that you want to make Turkey a part of the modern progressive world. The way you are treating the Armenians will not help you to realise that ambition; it puts you in the class of backward, reactionary peoples.”

“We treat the Americans all right, too,” said Talaat, “I don’t see why you should complain.”

“But Americans are outraged at your persecutions of the Armenians,” I replied. “You must base your principles on humanitarianism, not racial discrimination, or the United States will not regard you as a friend and an equal. And you should understand the great changes that are taking place among Christians all over the world. They are forgetting their differences and all sects are coming together as one. You look down on American missionaries, but don’t forget that it is the best element in America that supports their work, especially their educational institutions. Americans are not mere materialists, always chasing money—they are broadly humanitarian, and interested in the spread of justice and civilisation throughout the world. After this war is over you will face a new situation. You say that if victorious you can defy the world, but you are wrong. You will have to meet public opinion everywhere, especially in the United States. Our people will never forget these massacres. They will always resent the wilful destruction of Christians in Turkey. They will look upon it as nothing but wilful murder, and will seriously condemn all the men who are responsible for it. You will not be able to protect yourself under your political status and say that you acted as Minister of the Interior and not as Talaat. You are defying all ideas of justice as we understand the term in our country.”

Strangely enough, these remarks did not offend Talaat, but they did not shake his determination. I might as well have been talking to a stone wall. From my abstractions he immediately came down to something definite.

“These people,” he said, “refused to disarm when we told them to. They opposed us at Van and at Zeitoun, and they helped the Russians. There is only one way in which we can defend ourselves against them in the future, and that is just to deport them.”

“Suppose a few Armenians did betray you,” I said. “Is that a reason for destroying a whole race? Is that an excuse for making innocent women and children suffer?”

“Those things are inevitable,” he replied.

This remark to me was not quite so illuminating as one which he made subsequently to a reporter of the Berliner Tageblatt, who asked him the same question. “We have been reproached,” he said, according to this interviewer, “for making no distinction between the innocent Armenians and the guilty; but that was utterly impossible in view of the fact that those who were innocent to-day might be guilty to-morrow”!

My repeated protestations evidently persuaded Talaat that at least I was entitled to an explanation of the official attitude of the Ottoman Government. In the early part of August, therefore, he sent a personal messenger to me, asking me if I could not see him alone, as he wished to go over the whole Armenian situation. This was the first time that Talaat had admitted that his treatment of the Armenians was a matter with which I had any concern. The interview took place two days afterwards. It so happened that since the last time I had visited Talaat I had shaved my beard. As soon as I came in the burly Minister began talking in his customary bantering fashion. “You have become a young man again,” he said; “you are so young now that I cannot come to you for advice any more.”

“I have shaved my beard,” I replied, “because it had become very grey—made grey by your treatment of the Armenians.”

After this exchange of compliments we settled down to the business in hand. “Whenever you have any Armenian matters to discuss,” Talaat began, “I should always prefer that you see me alone. I have asked you to come to-day so that I can explain our position on the whole Armenian subject. We base our objections to the Armenians on three distinct grounds. In the first place, they have enriched themselves at the expense of the Turks. In the second place, they are determined to domineer over us and to establish a separate State. In the third place, they have openly encouraged our enemies. They have assisted the Russians in the Caucasus, and our failure there is largely explained by their actions. We have therefore come to the irrevocable decision that we shall make them powerless before this war is ended.”

On every one of these points I had plenty of arguments and rebuttal. Talaat’s first objection was merely an admission that the Armenians were more industrious and more able than the thick-witted and lazy Turk. Massacre as a means of destroying business competition was certainly an original conception! His general charge that the Armenians were “conspiring” against Turkey, and that they openly sympathised with Turkey’s enemies, merely meant, when reduced to its original elements, that the Armenians were constantly appealing to the European Powers to protect them against robbery, murder, and outrage. The Armenian problem, like all race problems, was the result of centuries of ill-treatment and injustice. There could be only one solution for it, the creation of an orderly system of government, in which all citizens were to be treated upon an equality, and in which all offences were to be punished as the acts of individuals, and not as of peoples. I argued for a long time along these and similar lines.