November 28, 1918 
LAND 6? WATER 
15 
the Kurdish tribesmen. Finally the gendarmes, having 
robbed and beaten and killed and violated their charges for 
thirteen days, abandoned them altogether. Two days after- 
wards 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, liy 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. Por 
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 towards it. But here the police- 
men biarred the way and forbade 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 w^ter. 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 \'illage 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." 
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. 
The Fiendish Turk 
ily 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. Wliatever 
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. 
\'olumes have been written about the Spanish Inquisition 
under Torquemada, yet in the eighteen years of his adminis- 
tration only a little more than 8,000 heretics were done to death. 
All these previous persecutions seem almost trivial when we 
compare them with the sufferings of the Armerrians. in which 
at least 600,000 people were destroyed, and perhaps as many 
as 1,000,000. And these earlier massacres, wheh 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 instigj.ted 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 reallyconceived the crime had no such motive. 
Greek and Syrian Victims 
The Armenians are not the only subject people in Turkey 
who have suffered from this policy of making Turkey exclu- 
sively 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, j.-et in the space of three or four months about 400,000 
Greeks were taken from thejr age-long homes on the Mediter- 
ranean littoral and removed to the Greek Islands in the 
/Egean Sea. For the larger part, these were bona fide deporta- 
tions ; 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 after- 
wards decided to apply the same methods on a large scale 
not only to the Greeks, but to the Armenians, Syrians, 
Nestorians, and others of its subject peoples. 
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 their Greek subjects 
to become Mohammedans ; Greek girls, just like Armenian 
girls, were stolen and taken to Turkish harems, and Greek 
boys were kiilnapped and placed in Moslem households. The 
Greeks, just like the Armenians, were accused of disloyalty 
to the Ottoman Government ; the Turks declared that they 
had furnished 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 a part of Greece. These 
latter charges were unquestionably true ; that the, Greeks, 
after suffering for five centuries the most unspeakable out- 
rages at the hands of the Turks, should look longingly jto the 
day when their territory should be part of the father- 
land, was to be expected. 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 pro- 
bably 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. 
