THE LAND OF THE STALKING DEATH 



409 



Photograph by Melville Chater 



ARMENIAN ORPHANS AT ALEXANDROPOL : THEY RECEIVE ONE-HALE POUND OE BREAD 



AND A LUMP OE SUGAR PER DAY 



Alexandropol was once a famous frontier post. It is the junction point for the railway line 

 to Persia and the Kars branch, over which the Armenians fled from Erzerum. 



claimed their toll of 9,000, the death rate 

 fluctuating between fifty and eighty a day. 



There are eighty food stations scat- 

 tered throughout the Erivan republic, dis- 

 tributing those tiny doles that represent 

 Armenia's portion of the five thousand 

 tons of American Committee flour which 

 had entered the Transcaucasus up to 

 March I. 



When one learns that this famine-and- 

 plague-swept country has but forty-two 

 physicians, only a scant hundred of 

 women whom we would classify as 

 nurses' assistants, and practically no med- 

 ical supplies, one is not surprised to hear 

 of outlying villages which have lost half 

 of their population in ten days. 



CHILDREN IN THE WEAVING SHOPS 



Though the doctor and I were here to 

 observe the worst phases of the situation, 

 each of us waited for the other to sug- 

 gest a trip to the Tgdir region, where we 



were told 

 Meanwhile 



starvation was 

 we spent some 



most acute, 

 few davs in 



frequenting the American Committee's 

 workshops, where men and women weave 

 cloth from Georgian wool or build the 

 looms for this purpose, and where mere 

 children of fourteen are seen at their ap- 

 prenticeships of clothes - cutting", shoe- 

 making, braziery, and rug-weaving. 



They were but refugees, these serious- 

 eyed workers, whose families had been 

 massacred, whose homes had been 

 burned, and who had emerged from such 

 horrors as have come to no other nation 

 in the war; yet here they were, already 

 at the tasks which would rehabilitate the 

 Armenian nation of tomorrow. 



The pig-tailed little girls who bent in 

 pairs over the rug-weaving, their people's 

 ancient art, replying shyly to questions 

 which proved them to be survivors of the 

 great massacres of IQ15. were indeed a 

 type of Armenia's fortitude which is oven 

 now building her up from the blood- 

 soaked dust. 



Toward that end o\ town where the 

 refugees sleep ten on a floor, in mere eel- 



