14 
LAND &» WATER 
November 28, 1918 
The Armenian Massacres: By H. Morgenthau 
THE Armenians had 
hardly left their na- 
tive 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 be- 
came a dishevelled and scramb- 
ling mob. Women were separat- 
ed from their children and husbands from their wives. The 
old people soon lost contact with their families and became 
exhausted and fooitsore. The Turkish drivers of the ox-carts, 
after extorting the last penny from their charges, would 
suddenlv dump them and their belongings into the road, 
turn round and return to the villages 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 brutalitj', to rejoin 
tlie moving throng. They even assailed pregnant women 
with bavonets ; 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-awaited 
opportunity had arrived.! The Government even opened the 
prisons and set free the convicts, on the understanding that 
they should behave like good Aloslems 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 ChSlh or brigjinds. 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 the\' were committing these depredations 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 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 deprivations, but still prodded on and 
on by the whips and clubs and bayonets of the executioners. 
And thus, as the exiles moved, they left behind them 
This section of Mr. Morgenthau's story 
comprises a detailed account of what is, 
most probably, the most awful tragedy in 
the world's history — the deliberate massacre 
of a nation. No such authentic a story 
of the murder of Armenians as this has 
yet appeared in any British publication. 
another caravan — that of dead 
and unburied bodies, of old men 
and 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 purchases, were 
forced to lead lives of prostitution. A string of encamp- 
ments, 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 Eu- 
phrajtes. 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 Erzerum Arrnenians were deported on successive days 
and most of them massacfed 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 approach- 
ing the bank, and returned to Erzerum to hide herself in a 
Turkish friend's house. She told Prince Argoutinsky, the 
representative of the 'All-Russian Urban Union' in Erzerum, 
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 Erzingan, she said, the thousands of dead 
bodies created such a barrage that the Euphrates changed 
its course for about a hundred yards." 
Extermination the real motive 
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 deporta- 
tion 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, Bey. In accordance with the common 
experience, these gendarmes proved to be not their pro- 
tectors, but their tormentors and their executioners. Hardh 
had they got well started on the road when — as before — Be\ 
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 pro- 
vided 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 pro- 
longed 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 giris, 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 perse- 
cutors, keeping it in their mouths and hair \ with this they 
would buy horses, only to have them repeatedly stolen \>y 
