November 21, 1918 
LAND ^ WATER 
13 
The Armenian Massacres: By H. Morgenthau 
Civilisation of the present is stained by no greater horror than the Armenian 
massacres, which Germany, as Turkey's Ally, could easily have prevented. 
Mr. Morgenthau presents an authentic account of this destruction 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, fn these earlier periods 
the Armenian men had possessed little power 
•r 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these discriminations were withdrawn when the revolutionists 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 igo8. 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, there- 
fore, every Turkish city contained thousands of Armenians 
who had been trained as soldiers, and who were supplied with 
rifles, pistols, and other weapons of defence. The operations 
at Van once more disclosed that these men could use their 
munitions 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 
defenceless men and women which the Turks had always 
found so congenial. 
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 prac- 
tically 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. 
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 "ameles" — 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 mas- 
sacred, 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 mas- 
sacred. 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 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. 
The Dark Ages Revived 
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 all their 
arms to headquarters. Although this order applied to all 
citizens, the Armenians well understood what the result 
would be should the\' 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 thpy proposed to defend 
their own lives and their women's honour against the out- 
rages 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 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 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 with 
which they treated their husbands. There were 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 gen- 
darmes, 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 ampu- 
tated. 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 boiling butter into the wounds. In 
some cases the gendarmes would nail hands and feet to 
