Take, for instance, the evidence (Section VIII.) regarding the particularly terrible events at Trebizond. We have a statement from the Italian Consul-General (Doc. 73), from the Kavass of the local branch of the Ottoman Bank, a Montenegrin under Italian protection (Doc. 74), and from an Armenian girl whose family live in the neighbourhood of the Italian Consulate, and who was brought out of Turkey by the Italian Consul-General as his maid servant. The testimony of these three witnesses exactly tallies not only as to the public crimes committed in the city before they left it, but also as to their personal relations with one another (for they each mention the others explicitly in their several statements). Yet they were in no touch whatever with one another when their respective testimonies were given. The Consul-General gave his at Rome, in an interview with an Italian journalist; the Kavass gave his in an interview with an Armenian gentleman in Egypt; and the girl hers in Roumania to a compatriot resident in that country. The three statements had certainly never been collated till they came, by different channels, into the hands of the editor of this book. In addition to this, there is a statement from another foreign resident at Trebizond Doc. 72), which reached us through America.

Or take the case of the convoys of exiles deported from the Vilayet of Erzeroum, and, in particular, from the towns of Erzeroum and Baibourt. We have a second-hand account of their fate in Doc. 2, a despatch from a well-informed source at Constantinople; we have a first-hand account, which completely bears out the former, from a lady who was herself deported in the third convoy of exiles (Doc. 59); we have the narrative of two Danish nurses in the service of the German Red Cross at Erzindjan, who witnessed the passage of the Baibourt exiles through that place (Doc. 62); and finally there are three witnesses from the town of H., several days' journey further along the exiles' route, who refer independently to the arrival of convoys from Erzeroum and the neighbourhood. One of these latter witnesses is a (third) Danish Red Cross nurse (Doc. 64), one a neutral resident at H. of different nationality, and one an Armenian inhabitant of the town.

These are two typical instances in which broad groups of events are independently and consistently recorded, but there are innumerable instances of the same kind in the case of particular occurrences. The hanging of the Armenian Bishop of Baibourt, for example, is mentioned, at second-hand, in Doc. 7 (written at Constantinople) and Doc. 12 (a selection of evidence published in Germany); but it is also witnessed to by the author of Doc. 69, an actual resident at Baibourt who was present there at the time of the murder. Again, the disappearance of the Bishop of Erzeroum on the road to exile is not only recorded in Doc. 11, a memorandum from a competent source at Bukarest, but is confirmed, in Docs. 67 and 76, by testimony obtained from eye-witnesses on the spot after the Russian occupation of Erzeroum had left them free to speak out.

Thus, the two Danish Red Cross nurses (Doc. 62) state that they twice witnessed the massacre, in cold blood, of gangs ofunarmed Armenian soldiers employed on navvy work, along the road from Erzindjan to Sivas. In Doc. 7 (written at Constantinople) we find a statement that other gangs of unarmed Armenian soldiers were similarly murdered on the roads betwez Ourfa and Diyarbekir, and Diyarbekir and Harpout; and the massacre on this latter section of road is confirmed by a German lady resident, at the time, at Harpout. (Doc. 23).

Again, there is frequent mention of roads being lined, littered, with the corpses of Armenian exiles who had died of exhaustion or been murdered on the way. If these allusions were merely made in general terms, they might conceivably be explained away as amplifications of some isolated case, or even as rhetorical embellishments of the exiles' story without found tion in fact. But when we find such statements made with regard to particular stretches of road in widely different localities and often by more than one witness with regard to a given stretch we are led to infer that this wholesale mortality by the wayside was in very deed a frequent concomitant of the Deportations, and an inevitable consequence of the method on which the general scheme of Deportation was organised from headquarters. We hear in Doc. 7, for instance, of corpses on the road from Malatia to Sivas, on the testimony of a Moslem traveller; we hear of them on the road from Diyarbekir to Ourfa in Doc. 12 (a German cavalry captain), and on the road from Ourfa to Aleppo in Doc. 9 (an Armenian witness), in Doc. 135 (an interned Englishwoman and also in Doc. 64 (a Danish Red Cross nurse). The latter gives the detail of the corpses being mangled by wild beasts, a detail also mentioned by the German authors of Docs. 12 and 23. Similar testimony from German officers regarding the road between Baghdad and Aleppo is reported independently in Docs. 108 and 121.

Docs. 7 and 9, for instance, both of which are native reports at second-hand, refer in somewhat rhetorical terms to the corpses of murdered Armenians washed down by the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates. Yet their words are more than justified by many concrete and independent pieces of evidence. The description in Doc. 12 (German material) of how barge-loads of Armenians were drowned in the Tigris below Diyarbekir, renders more fully credible the accounts of how the Armenians of Trebizond were drowned wholesale in the Black Sea. Doc. 12 also contains the statement, from a German employee of the Baghdad Railway, that the Armenian exiles who reached Biredjik were drowned in batches every night in the Euphrates; and similar horrors are reported from almost every section of the Euphrates' course. Docs. 56, 57, 59 and 62 describe how the convoys of exiles from the Vilayet of Erzeroum were cast into the Kara Su (western branch of the Euphrates) at the gorge called Kamakh Boghaz, and were then either shot in the water or left to drown. The author of Doc. 59 was present at such a scene, though she was herself spared, and the information in Docs. 56 and 57 was obtained direct from a lady who was actually cast in, but managed to struggle to the bank and escape. The authors of Doc. 62 received their information from a gendarme who had been attached to a convoy and had himself participated in the massacre. Doc. 24 records the experiences of an Armenian woman deported from Moush, who was driven with her fellow-exiles into the Mourad Su (eastern branch of the Euphrates), but also managed to escape, though the rest were drowned. Doc. 66 describes corpses fioating in the river in the neighbourhood of Kiakhta, and Doc. 137 the drowning of exiles in the tributaries of the Euphrates between Harpout and Aleppo. These are evidently instances of a regular practice, and when we find the exiles from Trebizond and Kerasond being disposed of in the same fashion in a comparatively distant part of the Turkish Empire, we are almost compelled to infer that the drowning of the exiles en masse was a definite part of the general scheme drawn out by the Young Turk leaders at Constantinople.

Perhaps the most terrible feature of all was the suffering of the women with child, who were made to march with the convoys and gave birth to their babies on the road. This is alluded to in Doc. 12, from a German source, at second-hand, but in Docs. 129 and 137 we have the testimony of neutral witnesses who actually succoured these victims, so far as the extremity of their plight and the brutality of their escort madesuccour possible. It should be mentioned that in Doc. 68 a Armenian exile testifies to the kindness of an individual Turkish gendarme to one of her fellow-victims who was in these straits.

The evidence is cumulative. Each part of it supports the rest because each part is independent of the others. The main facts are the same, and reveal the same plans and intention at work. Even the varieties are instructive because they show those diversities of temper and feeling which appear in human nature everywhere.

The Turkish officials are usually heartless and callous. Bu here and there we see one of a finer temper, who refuses to carry out the orders given him and is sometimes dismissed for his refusal. The Moslem rabble is usually pitiless. It pillages the houses and robs the persons of the hapless exiles. But now and then there appear pious and compassionate Moslems who try to save the lives or alleviate the miseries of their Christian neighbours. We have a vivid picture of human life, where wickedness in high places deliberately lets loose the passions of racial or religious hatred, as well-as the commoner passion of rapacity yet cannot extinguish those better feelings which show as points of light in the gloom.

It is, however, for the reader to form his own judgment of these documents as he peruses them. They do not, and by the nature of the case cannot, constitute what is called judicial evidences such as a Court of Justice obtains when it puts witnesses on oath and subjects them to cross-examination. But by far the larger part (almost all, indeed, of what is here published) does constitute historical evidence of the best kind, inasmuch as the statements come from those who saw the events they describe and recorded them in writing immediately afterwards. They collaborate one another, the narratives given by different observers showing a substantial agreement, which becomes conclusive when we find the salient facts repeated with no more variations in detail than the various opportunities of the independent observers made natural. The gravest facts are those for which the evidence is most complete, and it all tallies fatally with that which twenty years ago established the guilt of Abd-ul-Hamid for the deeds that have made his name infamous. In this case there are, moreover, what was wanting then, admissions which add weight to the testimony here presented, I mean the admissions of the Turkish Government and of their German apologists.* The attempts made to find excuses for wholesale slaughter and for the removal of a whole people from its homes leave no room for doubt as to the slaughter and the removal. The main facts are established by the confession of the criminals themselves. What the evidence here presented does is to show in detail how these things were effected, what cruelties accompanied them, and how inexcusable they were. The disproval of the palliations which the Turks have put forward is as complete as the proof of the atrocities themselves.

---------------------

In order to test the soundness of my own conclusions as to the value of the evidenece, I have submitted it to the judgment of three friends, men for whose opinion everyone who knows them will have the highest respect a distinguished historian, Sir. H. A. L. Fisher (Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sheffield); a distinguished scholar, Mr. Gilbert Murray (Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford); and a distinguished American lawyer of long experience and high authority, Mr. Moorfield Storey, of Boston, Mass. men accustomed in their respective walks of life to examine and appraise evidence; and I append the letters which convey their several views.

This preface is intended to deal only with the credibility of the evidence here presented, so I will refrain from comment on the facts. A single observation, or rather a single question may, however, be permitted from one who has closely followed th history of the Turkish East for more than forty years. European travellers have often commended the honesty and the kindliness of the Turkish peasantry, and our soldiers have said that they are fair fighters. Against them I have nothing to say, and will even add that I have known individual Turkish officials who impressed me as men of honesty and good-will. But the record of the rulers of Turkey for the last two or three centuries, from the Sultan on his throne down to the district Mutessarif, is, taken as a whole, an almost unbroken record of corruption, of injustice, of an oppression which often rises into hideous cruelty. The Young Turks, when they deposed Abd-ul-Hamid, came forward as the apostles of freedom, promising equal rights and equal treatment to all Ottoman subjects. The facts here recorded show how that promise was kept. Can any one still continue to hope that the evils of such a government are curable? Or does the evidence contained in this volume furnish the most terrible and convincing proof that it can no longer be permitted to rule over subjects of a different faith?

BRYCE.

LETTER FROM MR. H. A. L. FISHER, VICE-CHANCELLOR OF SHEFFIELD UNIVERSITY, TO VISCOUNT BRYCE.

The University,
Sheffield,
August 2nd, 1916.

MY DEAR LORD BRYCE,
The evidence here collected with respect to the sufferings of the Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire during the present war will carry conviction wherever and whenever it is studied by honest enquirers. It bears upon the face of it all the marks of credibility. In the first place, the transactions were recorded soon after they took place and while the memory of them was still fresh and poignant. Then the greater part of the story rests upon the word of eye-witnesses, and the remainder upon the evidence of persons who had special opportunities for obtaining correct information. It is true that some of the witnesses are Armenians, whose testimony, if otherwise unconfirmed, might be regarded as liable to be over-coloured or distorted, but the Armenian evidence does not stand alone. It is corroborated by reports received from Americans, Danes, Swiss, Germans, Italians and other foreigners. Again, this foreign testimony comes for the most part from men and women whose calling alone entitles them to be heard with respect, that is to say, from witnesses who may fairly be expected to exceed the average level of character and intelligence and to view the transactions which they record with as much detachment as is compatible with human feeling. Indeed, the foreign witnesses who happened to be spectators of the deportation, dispersion, and massacre of the Armenian nation, do not strike me as being, in any one case, blind and indiscriminate haters of the Turk. They are prompt to notice facts which strike them as creditable to individual members of the Moslem community.

I am also impressed with the cumulative effect of the evidence. Whoever speaks, and from whatever quarter in the wide region covered by these reports the voice may proceed, the story is one and the same. There are no discrepancies or contradictions of importances but, on the contrary, countless scattered pieces of mutual corroboration. There is no contrariety as to the broad fact that the Armenian population has been uprooted from its homes dispersed, and, to a large though not exactly calculable extent exterminated in consequence of general orders issued from Constantinople. It is clear that a catastrophe, conceived upon a scale quite unparalleled in modern history, has been contrived for the Armenian inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire. It is found that the original responsibility rests with the Ottoman Government at Constantinople, whose policy was actively seconded by the members of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Provinees And in view of the fact that the representations of the Austrian Ambassador with the Porte were effectual in procuring a partial measure of exemption for the Armenian Catholics, we are led to surmise that the unspeakable horrors which this volume records might have been mitigated, if not wholly checked, had active and energetic remonstrances been from the first moment addressed to the Ottoman Government by the two Powers who had acquired a predominant influence in Constantinople. The evidence, on the contrary, tends to suggest that these two Powers were, in a general way, favourable to the policy of deportation.

Yours sincerely,
HERBERT FISHER.

LETTER FROM PROFESSOR GILBERT MURRAY, REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, TO VISCOUNT BRYCE.

82, Woodstock Road,
Oxford,
June 27th, 1916.

DEAR LORD BRYCE,
I have spent some time studying the documents you are about to publish relative to the deportations and massacres of Armenians in the Turkish Empire during the spring and summer of 1916. I know, of course, how carefully a historian should scrutinize the evidence for events so startling in character, reported to have occurred in regions so far removed from the eyes of civilized Europe. I realize that in times of persecution passions run high, that oriental races tend to use hyperbolical language, and that. the victims of oppression cannot be expected to speak with strict fairness of their oppressors. But the evidence of these letters and reports will bear any scrutiny and overpower any skepticism. Their genuineness is established beyond question, though obviously you are right in withholding certain of the names of persons and places. The statements of the Armenian refugees themselves are fully confirmed by residents of American, Scandinavian and even of German nationality; and the undesigned agreement between so many credible witnesses from widely separate districts puts all the main lines of the story beyond the possibility of doubt.

I remain,
Yours sincerely,
GILBERT MURRAY .

LETTER FROM MR. MOORFIELD STOREY, EX-PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION, TO VISCOUNT BRYCE.

735, Exchange Building,
Boston, U.S.,
7th August, 1916

. MY DEAR SIR,
I have examined considerable portions of the volume which contains the statements regarding the treatment of the Armenians by the Turks, in order to determine the value of these statements as evidence.

I have no doubt that, while there may be inaccuracies of detail, these statements establish without any question the essential facts. It must be borne in mind that in such a case the evidence of eye-witnesses is not easily obtained; the victims with few exceptions, are dead; the perpetrators will not confess; any casual spectators cannot be reached, and in most cases are either in sympathy with what was done or afraid to speak There are no tribunals before which witnesses can be summoned and compelled to testify, and a rigid censorship is maintained by the authorities responsible for the crimes, which prevents the truth from coming out freely, and no investigation by impartial persons will be permitted.

Such statements as you print are the best evidence which, in the circumstances, it is possible to obtain. They come from persons holding positions which give weight to their words, and from other persons with no motive to falsify, and it is impossible that such a body of concurring evidence should have been manufactured. Moreover, it is confirmed by evidence from German sources which has with difficulty escaped the rigid censorship maintained by the German authorities a censorship which is in itself a confession, since there is no reason why the Germans should not give full currency to such evidence unless the authorities felt themselves in some way responsible for what it discloses.

In my opinion, the evidence which you print is as reliable as that upon which rests our belief in many of the universally admitted facts of history, and I think it establishes beyond any reasonable doubt the deliberate purpose of the Turkish authorities practically to exterminate the Armenians, and their responsibility for the hideous atrocities which have been perpetrated upon that unhappy people.

Yours truly,
MOORFIELD STOREY.

LETTER, DATED ALEPPO, 8th OCTOBER, 1915, FROM FOUR MEMBERS OF THE GERMAN MISSIONS STAFF IN TURKEY TO THE IMPERIAL GERMAN MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS AT BERLIN.*

We think it our duty to draw the attention of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the fact that our school work will be deprived, for the future, of its moral basis and will lose all authority in the eyes of the natives, if it is really beyond the power of the German Government to mitigate the brutality of the treatment which the exiled women and children of the massacred Armenians are receiving.

In face of the scenes of horror which are being unfolded daily before our eyes in the neighbourhood of our school, our educational activity becomes a mockery of humanity. How can we make our pupils listen to the Tales of the Seven Dwarfs, how can we teach them conjugations and declensions, when, in the compounds next door to our school, death is carrying off their starving compatriots when there are girls and women and children, practically naked, some lying on the ground, others stretched between the dead or the coffins made ready for them beforehand, and breathing their last breath!

Out of 2,000 to 3,000 peasant women from the Armenian Plateau who were brought here in good health, only forty or fifty skeletons are left. The prettier ones are the victims of their gaolers' lust; the plain ones succumb to blows, hunger and thirst (they lie by the water's edge, but are not allowed to quench their thirst). The Europeans are forbidden to distribute bread to the starving. Every day more than a hundred corpses are carried out of Aleppo.

All this happens under the eyes of high Turkish officials. There are forty or fifty emaciated phantoms crowded into the compound opposite our school. They are women out of their mind; they have forgotten how to eat; when one offers them bread, they throw it aside with indifference. They only groan and wait for death.

"See," say the natives: "Taâlim el Alman (the teaching of the Germans)."

The German scutcheon is in danger of being smirched for ever in the memory of the Near Eastern peoples. There are natives of Aleppo, more enlightened than the rest, who say: "The Germans do not want these horrors. Perhaps the German nation does not know about them. If it did, how could the German Press, which is attached to the truth, talk about the humanity of the treatment accorded to the Armenians who are guilty of High Treason? Perhaps, too, the German Government has hands tied by some contract defining the powers of the German and Turkish States in regard to one another's affairs?"

No, when it is a question of giving over thousands of women and children to death by starvation, the words "Opportunism" and "definition of powers " lose their meaning. Every civil human being is "empowered " in this case to interfere, and it his bounden duty to do so. Our prestige in the East is the thing at stake. There are even Turks and Arabs who have remained human, and who shake their heads in sorrow when they see, the exile convoys that pass through the town, how the brute soldiers shower blows on women with child who can march no farther.

We may expect further and still more dreadful hecatombs after the order published by Djemal Pasha. (The engineers of the Baghdad Railway are forbidden, by this order, to photograph the Armenian convoys; any plates they have already used for this must be given up within twenty-four hours, under penalty of prosecution before the Council of War.) It is a proof that responsible authorities fear the light, but have no intention putting an end to scenes which are a disgrace to humanity.

We know that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has already from other sources, received detailed descriptions of what is happening here. But as no change has occurred in the system of the deportations, we feel ourselves under a double obligation to make this report, all the more because the fact of our living abroad enables us to see more clearly the immense danger which the German name is threatened here.

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MEMORANDUM BY THE EDITOR.

As far as their contents are concerned, the documents collected in this volume explain themselves, and if any reader wishes for an Outline of the events they describe, as a guide to their detail, he will find it in the "Historical Summary " at the end of the book, especially in Section V. In this preliminary memorandum the Editor has simply to state the sources, character and value of the documents, and to explain the system on which they have been edited

The sources of the documents are very varied. Some of them were communicated to the Editor directly by the writers themselves) or, in the case of private letters, by the persons to whom the letters were addressed. Several of those relating to the distribution of relief in Russian Caucasia have been placed in his hands by the courtesy of the British Foreign Office. Others, again, he owes to the courtesy of individuals, including Lord Bryce, who has superintended the work throughout, and given most generously of his time and thought towards making it as accurate and complete as possible; several members of the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief*; the Rev. G. T. Scott, Assistant Secretary of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.; M. Arshag Tchobanian; Dr. Herbert Adams Gibbons; Dr. William Walter Rockwell, of the Union Theological Seminary of New York; the Rev. Stephen Trowbridge, Secretary of the American Red Cross Committee at Cairo; the Rev. I. N. Camp, a missionary in the service of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, at present stationed at Cairo; Aneurin Williams, Esq., M.P.; the Rev. Harold Buxton, Treasurer of the Armenian Refugees (Lord Mayor's) Fund; Mr. J. D. Bourchier, correspondent of the London Times newspaper in the Balkans Mrs. D. S. Margoliouth, of Oxford; the Rev. F. N. Heazel Organising Secretary of the Archbishop of Canterbury's Assyria Mission; Mr. G. H. Paelian, an American citizen resident in London; Mr. A. S. Safrastian, of Tiflis; and Mr. H. N. Mosdichian, of London.

Another source of material has been the Press. Despatches, letters and statements have been reprinted in this volume from the columns of English, American, Swiss, French Russian, Italian and also German newspapers, and from Armenia journals published at Tiflis, London and New York. The editor of Ararat, Gotchnag and the New Armenia have shown the Editor of this volume every possible kindness, and have courteously presented him with free copies of their current issues.

The documents are all rendered here in English, but they reached the Editor's hands in various languages not only English but French, Italian, German and Armenian. The translation from the French, German and Italian have been made by the Editor with the assistance of his wife. For the translation of documents from the Armenian he is indebted to Mr. Paelian, who has devoted a large part of his scanty leisure to doing the Editor this most valuable service. But for Mr. Paelian's promptness and good will, the work might have been considerably delayed.

The character of the documents varies with the writers. Some of the witnesses are native Armenian or Nestorian inhabitants of the Near East, who were either victims of the atrocities themselves or were intimately connected with others who played a direct part in the scenes described. A majority of the witnesses, however. are foreign residents in the Ottoman Empire or the Persian Province of Azerbaijan, and nearly all these, again, are citizens of neutral countries, either European or American missionaries, teachers, doctors, Red Cross nurses or officials. A few witnessess (and these are the weightiest of all) are subjects of states allied to Turkey in the present war.

The value of the documents of course depends upon the witnesses' standing and character, and upon the opportunities they possessed of knowing the facts. The Editor is certain in his own mind that all the documents published here are genuine statements of the truth, and he presents them in this assurance. Errors will, doubtless, be here and there discovered, but he believes that any errors there may be have been made in good faith, and that they will prove to touch only points of detail which do not affect the truth of the whole. At the same time he realises that, considered as legal evidence before a court, the documents differ considerably in probative value. From the legal point of view, they can be tabulated in several classes:

The total body of evidence is large, as the considerable bulk of the volume shows, and this is the more satisfactory because the Ottoman Government has taken every possible precaution to prevent any knowledge of its proceedings from reaching the outer world. Private postal and telegraphic communications were suspended between Constantinople and the provinces, and between one province and another. There was a stringent censorship of outgoing mails, even the consuls of neutral countries were forbidden to telegraph in cypher, and travellers leaving Turkey were searched and divested of every scrap of paper, whether written upon or blank, in their possession. A quotation from a letter, written by the author of one of our documents** just after she had safely passed beyond the Ottoman frontier, will give some idea of the severity of this official embargo upon news of every sort: "As I was coming out from under the hands of the censor, I was asked to write to you, telling you something of the real situation in our part of the world. In my opinion the censorship now is worse than it was in the olden days, for now they have such highly trained men. One of our censors had a five years' training in the New York Post Office. If our letters seem to tell you httle, please remember that there are the strictest orders, against the censor's passing anything on politics, war or even poverty. Any sentences that even touch on these subjects are either cut out or marked or blotted out with ink. A German lady even wrote to a friend of hers in Germany, telling her of poverty in BM, and asking her to send relief funds. She purposely mentioned no causes for this poverty, but only said there was such a condition. The only parts of the letter that reached her friend were the opening and closing sentences. The knife had claimed the rest. So, as Mrs. E. said: 'Please tell our friends in America that when we write about concerts and field meets and such things, that does not show that the country is safe or that work is as usual. We write about that simply because there is nothing else about which we are allowed to write.' "

Nearly all our evidence, therefore, comes from residents in Turkey who witnessed, like this lady, the events that occurred in some particular district or districts, and subsequently left Turkey for some other country, where they could record what they had seen without endangering their lives. Yet, even or neutral ground, these witnesses are not beyond the reach of Turkish resentment. Many of them are anxious to take up their work again in Turkey at the earliest opportunity, and nearly all of them still have interests in the country, or fellow-workers or friends, who are so many gages in the Ottoman Government' hands. That Government is known to have agents in Europe and possibly in America as well, whose business it is to inform against anyone who exposes its misdeeds; and the Young Turkish gang, by whom the Ottoman Government is controlled have no shame and no scruple about wreaking vengeance by ant and every means upon accusers whose indictments they are wholly unable to answer before the judgment seat of the civilises world. It is, therefore, absolutely essential to withhold in many cases the names of the witnesses themselves and of people, of even of places, mentioned in their testimony. In fact, some of the documents have only been communicated to the Editor on this express condition for instance, the document enclosed with the letter quoted a few lines above. "May I ask you, however,' continues this very letter, " not to publish my name or that of any missionary from BAI, not even the name of BM. itself or any of the places which I shall mention, as the censorship is so strict and terrible now that the mention of names brings us undo suspicion at once. May I instance? Dr. E. and Dr. L. have been under such suspicion or ill-will that they have not been able to get a simple family letter through to members of their family in America for months, and the whole station of AC. is under sufficient suspicion to prevent most of the letters they wnte to you and Mr. N. from reaching their destination. The reason, we feel quite certain, is a report on Moslem words which was sent to you."

And the same considerations are urged even more emphatically by Miss A., the author of Doc. 137, who is our chief witness for the occurrences at AC itself:

"For the sake of the people left in Turkey and_especially the orphan children, I hope nothing will be published as from me. If any word of it should get into Turkey it might have very serious consequences for them.

" Although very few magazines or papers were allowed into the interior, yet occasionally we saw one in the coast town pieces are being cut from the papers, and sold at high prices to Turks. I left my post just because I thought my presence there might make it hard for those under my charge; but if anything that I am supposed to have told gets back into Turkey, I fear the whole of my community may have to suffer. I do not think that those outside Turkey fully realise what danger there is, even in letters, to those left in the country. The local authorities seemed to be always on the watch for something to find as a cause of complaint against both missionaries and Armenians.

" The poor refugees that we saw in BF. as we passed through begged us to help them, but, when we got to BJ., the missionaries there said they had been forbidden to give aid. One woman had been taken to the Government Building because she had been found helping some poor families in her own district that she had been visiting for years. There were many sick at BF., and the pastor and others sent post-cards, begging us to send help quickly. ()ne man asked me to lend him some money, saying I could get it back from his brother in America. It was the danger to him that made me hesitate. The money was finally sent, but one feared to think what it might be an excuse for. And so over all the country.

"All the time when people were in great need, the question was in one's mind: ' Will relief endanger their lives? New rules were constantly being sprung upon us. A person would write a letter, but before it reached its destination it would be ' against the regulation.'

"All money in banks and all property belonging to the exiles was confiscated by the Government. The people who were deported from AC. did not know it, but when they had used up all that they had taken with them, they would write to us. It was in this way that we found out that they had neither money nor property left; but we were powerless to let them know what the difficulty was, so they would write again and again.

"All the time, we felt we were in a trap. The most courageous Armenians dared not come to see me, nor could I go to their homes. We had to meet at some public building if they wanted to see me about anything. '

"No one living in freedom can understand what it feels like to be in Turkey these days."

In face of this, the reader will see for himself that the public tion of names, under present circumstances, would often be grave and perilous breach of trust, and the Editor has, therefore (though only where absolutely necessary, and without making any change whatever affecting the substance of the document, substituted arbitrary symbols for the names of persons and places in the text, in the manner shown in the preceding quotation A complete key to these symbols has been prepared and communicated, in confidence, to the British Foreign Office, Lord Bryce, Dr. Barton, and the Rev. G. T. Scott; and this key will published as soon as circumstances permit, or, in other words as soon as the dangers which would threaten the persons referred to have ceased to exist.

The Ottoman Government and its allies, whose good name is almost as seriously compromised as the Ottoman name by the facts, may be expected to make what capital they can of of the precautions imposed by their own treatment of the Christian subjects, and to impugn the genuineness of the documents that have been edited in the way here described. That was the course they adopted in the case of the evidence relating to to conduct of the German Army in Belgium, which was published with the same, equally necessary, reservations. The Editor can best forestall such disingenuous criticism by stating clearly the principles on which this suppression of names has been made:

The Editor wishes to state, once more, that these documents in which names are represented by symbols are not a whit less valid as evidence, than the documents in which no such substitutions have had to be made. If the reader desires confirmation of this the Editor would refer him to the gentlemen mentioned above, who have been placed in posession of the confidential key.

There are other documents, however, where the names have, on similar grounds, been withheld from the Editor himself, either by the authors of the documents or by those through whose hands the Editor obtained them, or where the ultimate source of the testimony is for some reason obscure. The Editor has been careful to indicate these cases as conspicuously as possible. Where there is any name, either of a place or of a person, unknown to him in the text, he has represented it by a blank (__________). Where the name of the author of the document is unknown to him, he has stated this in a footnote to the title by which the document is headed.***

The Editor is, of course, aware that these documents which he only possesses in a defective form cannot be presented as evidence in the strict sense by himself, and can plausibly be repudiated by the parties whose crimes they describe. He is the more content to admit this legal objection to them because they merely confirm what is established by the other evidence independently of them. They constitute no more than twenty-two out of the 150 documents in the whole collection, and, if they are passed over, the picture presented by the far larger mass of documents that cannot be impugned remains perfectly precise and complete. The Editor has chosen to publish them, in their natural order, with the rest, because he has no more doubt about their genuineness than about the genuineness of the others and with good reason, for, out of the twenty-two documents in question, not less then eleven have been communicated to him by the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief citizens of high standing in a neutral country and gentlemen of unimpeachable good faith. He repeats, however, that these twenty-two documents are in no way essential to the presentation of the case as a whole.

The documents are arranged in groups, in a geographical order, which is adjusted as far as possible to the general chronological order in which the different regions were affected by the Ottoman Government's scheme. The first group or section contains documents that do not confine themselves to any one region, but give general descriptions of events occurring throughout the Ottoman Empire. These documents are for the most part earlier in date than those relating to particular districts, and are therefore placed at the beginning.

The second section opens the geographical series with the documents relating to Van, the north-easternmost province of the Ottoman Empire in the direction of the Caucasus and Azerbaijan. The third section deals with Bitlis, the province adjoining Van on the west, which suffered next in order; the fourth with Azerbaijan, the Persian province on the eastern side of Van, which suffered during the Turkish offensive in the winter of 1915; the fifth with Russian Trans-Caucasia, where the refugees from Van and Azerbaijan sought refuge in August, 1915. The succeeding sections follow one another in geographical order from east to west, beginning with Erzeroum, the border province adjoining Van on the north-west along the RussoTurkish frontier. Erzeroum constitutes the sixth section, Mamouret-ul-Aziz the seventh, Trebizond the eighth, Sivas the ninth, Eaisaria the tenth, the town of X. the eleventh, Angora the twelfth, Constantinople and the adjacent districts the thirteenth. From this point the sections run in reverse order from north-west to south-east, following the track of the Baghdad Railway. The fourteenth section deals with places along this route between (but excluding) Adapazar and Aleppo; the fifteenth deals with Cilicia, the region through which the Baghdad Railway passes half-way along its course, and this is the only case in which the chronological and geographical arrangements seriously conflict, for the Cilicians were the first to suffer they were already being deported twelve days before fighting broke out at Van. The sixteenth section is Jibal Mousa, a group of villages adjoining Cilicia on the south; the seventeenth the Armenian colonies at urfa and AC., two cities on the Mesopotamian fringe; the eighteenth Aleppo, upon which nearly all the convoys of exiles converged;­ and the nineteenth Damascus and Der-el-Zor, the two districts where the greater part of the survivors were finally deposited. A twentieth section has also been added for documents received while the volume was in the press.

Wherever a date is given without further indication, it may be assumed to be in " New Style." Where two alternative dates are given (e.g., 26th September/9th October), the first is " Old Style " and the second "New." Dates are never given in "Old Style" alone. Where sums of money are given in Turkish or Persian units, the English equivalent is usually added in brackets. Sums given in dollars have always been translated into English pounds sterling.

The names of places have not been spelt on any consistent system, there being no recognized system in general use. The Editor has merely endeavoured to standardize the spelling of each particular name wherever it occurs.

An index of all places referred to by name in the documents that are in the Editor's possession, whether the name has been withheld in the text or loot, has been compiled for him most accurately by Miss Margaret Toynbee, to whom he is grateful for this important addition to the usefulness of the book. This index is printed at the end of the volume. The map which accompanies it has been compiled by the Editor himself from various sources, chiefly from Kiepert's excellent sheets of Asia Minor, in the Map Room of the Royal Geographical Society, wherehe has received most kind and valuable assistance from the staff.

	James L. Barton         Samuel T. Dutton        Walter H. Mallory.

	Chairman                Secretary               Field Secretary.

	Charles R. Crane, Treasurer.


	     Arthur J. Brown.                   John Moffat.
	     Edwin M. Buckley.                  John R. Mott.
	     John B Calvert.                    Frank Mason North.
	     John D. Crimmins.                  Harry V. Osborne.
	     Cleveland H. Dodge.                George A. Plimpton.
	     Charles W. Eliot.                  Rt. Rev. P. Rhinelander.
	     William T. Ellis.                  Karl Davis Robinson.
	     James Cardinal Gibbons.            William W. RockwelL
	     Rt. Rev. David H. Greer.           George T. Scott.
	     Norman Hapgood.                    Isaac N. Seligman.
	     Maurice H. Harris.                 William Sloane.
	     William I. Haven.                  Edward Lincoln Smith.
	     Hamilton Holt.                     James M. Speers.
	     Arthur Curtiss James               Oscar M. Straus.
	     Frederick Lynch.                   Stanley White.
	     Chas. S. MacEarland.               Talcott Williams
	     H. Pereira Mendes.                 Stephen S. Wise.

I. GENERAL DESCRIPTIONS. The Ottoman Government did its utmost to prevent the news of what it was doing to the Armenians from leaking through to the outer world. A stringent censorship was established at all the frontiers, private communication was severed between Constantinople and the provinces, and the provinces themselves were isolated from one another. Nearly all our information has been obtained from witnesses who succeeded in making their way out of Turkey after the massacres and deportations had occurred, and who wrote down their experiences after reaching America or Europe. The evidence of these witnesses is first-hand, but it is mostly confined to the particular region in which each witness happened to reside, and it has therefore been grouped in this collection province by province, in geographical order. We possess, however, certain general accounts which reached Europe and America at an earlier date, for the most part, than the individual narratives, and they are printed here in advance of the rest partly for the chronological reason, and partly because they give a broad survey of what happened, which may impress the general features upon the reader before he approaches the detailed testimony of the sections that follow.

In contrast to the bulk of our evidence, the majority of these preliminary documents give their information at second-hand; but practically every statement they make is more than borne out in detail by thefirst-hand witnesses, and this is particularly the case with the more startling and appalling of the facts they record.

The most interesting document in this section is No. 12, which was compiled from German sources, published in a German journal, and immediately suppressed by the German Censorship.

1. DESPATCH* FROM MR. HENRY WOOD, CORRESPONDENT OF THE AMERICAN "UNITED PRESS" AT CONSTANTINOPLE; PUBLISHED IN THE AMERICAN PRESS, 14th AUGUST, 1915.

So critical is the situation that Ambassador Morgenthau, who alone is fighting to prevent wholesale slaughter, has felt obliged to ask the co-operation of the Ambassadors of Turkey's two Allies. They have been successful to the extent of securing definite promises from the leading members of the Young Turk Government that no orders will be given for massacres. The critical moment for the Armenians, however, will come, it is feared, when the Turks may meet with serious reverses in the Dardanelles or when the Armenians themselves, who not only are in open revolt but are actually in possession of Van and several other important towns, may meet with fresh successes. It is this uprising of the Armenians who are seeking to establish an independent government that the Turks declare is alone responsible for the terrible measures now being taken agairst them. In the meantime, the position of the Armenians and the system of deportation, dispersion, and extermination that is being carried out against them beggars all description.

Although the present renewal of the Armenian atrocities has been under way for three months, it is only just now that reports creeping into Constantinople from the remotest points of the interior show that absolutely no portion of the Armenian population has been spared. It now appears that the order for the present cruelties was issued in the early part of May, and was at once put into execution with all the extreme genius of the Turkish police system the one department of government for which the Turks have ever shown the greatest aptitude, both in organisation and administration. At that time sealed orders were sent to the police of the entire Empire. These were to be opened on a specified date that would ensure the orders being in the hands of every department at the moment they were to be opened. Once opened, they provided for a simultaneous descent at practically the same moment on the Armenian population of the entire Empire.

At Broussa, in Asiatic Turkey, the city which it is expected the Turks will select for their capital in the event of Constantiinople falling, I investigated personally the manner in which these orders were carried out . From eye-witnesses in other towns from the interior I found that the execution of them was everywhere identical. At midnight, the police authorities swooped down on the homes of all Armenians whose names had been put on the proscribed list sent out from Constantinople. The men were at once placed under arrest, and then the houses were searched for papers which might implicate them either in the present revolutionary movement of the Armenians on the frontier or in plots against the Government which the Turks declare exist In this search, carpets were torn from the floors, draperies stripped from the walls, and even the children turned out of their beds and cradles in order that the mattresses and coverings might be searched.

Following this search, the men were then carried away, and at once there began the carrying out of the system of deportation and dispersion which has been the cruellest feature of the present anti-Armenian wave. The younger men for the most part were at once drafted into the Army. On the authority of men whose names would be known in both America and Europe if I dared mention them, I am told that hundreds if not thousands of these were sent at once to the front ranks at the Dardanelles, where death in a very short space of time is almost a certainty. The older men were then deported into the interior, while the women and children, when not carried off in an opposite direction, were left to shift for themselves as best they could. The terrible feature of this deportation up to date is that it has been carried out on such a basis as to render it practically impossible in thousands of cases that these families can ever again be reunited. Not only wives and husbands, brothers and sisters, but even mothers and their little children have been dispersed in such a manner as to preclude practically all hope that they will ever see each other again.

In defence of these terrible measures which have been taken, the Turks at Constantinople declare that no one but the Armenians themselves is to blame. They state that when the present attack began on the Dardanelles, the Armenians were notified that if they took advantage of the moment when the Turks were concentrating every energy for the maintenance of the Empire, to rise in rebellion, they would be dealt with without quarter. This warning, however, the Armenians failed to heed. They not only rose in rebellion, occupying a number of important towns, including Van, but extended important help to the Russians in the latter's campaign in the Caucasus.**

While this is the Turkish side of the situation, there is also another side which I shall give on the authority of men who have passed practically their entire lives in Turkey and whose names, if I dared mention them, would be recognised in both Europe and America as competent authority. According to these men, the decision has gone out from the Young Turk party that the Armenian population of Turkey must be set back fifty years. This has been decided upon as necessary in order to ensure the supremacy of the Turkish race in the Ottoman Empire, which is one of the basic principles of the Young Turk party. The situation, I am told, is absolutely analogous to that which preceded the Armenian massacres under Abd-ul-Hamid. So far, however, the Young Turks have confined themselves to the new system of deportation, dispersion and separation of families.
----------------
* For full text see page 572. See " Historical Summary," Chapter V. Compare Doc. 101

** For the real facts see Section II.

2. DESPATCH, DATED 11th JUNE, 1915, FROM AN ESPECIALLY WELL INFORMED NEUTRAL SOURCE AT CONSTANTINOPLE COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

A week before anything was done to Baibourt, the villages all round had been emptied of their Armenian inhabitants. The forced exodus from Baibourt took place on the 1st June*. All the villages, as well as three-fourths of the town, had already been evacuated. The third convoy included from 4,000 to 5,000 people.

Within six or seven days from the start, all males down to below fifteen years of age had been murdered.

Persecutions, accompanied by horrible torture, have taken place in the Armenian village of Baghtchedjik or Bardizag (2,000 families), in Ovadjik (600 families), in Arslanbegfamilies), in Dongol (65 families), in Sabandja (1,000 families in Ismid, etc. The inhabitants of Kurt-Belen‚ (6,000 to 7,000families) have been expelled.

In Arabkir the Armenian population has been converted to Islam, after.2,000 males hat been killed.

-------------
* See Doc. 59.

3. EXTRACT FROM A LETTER*, DATED ARABKIR, 25th JUNE/ 8th JULY, 1915, COMMIJNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

The Armenian population has been converted to Islam; it was a means of escaping from the forced migration. Orthodox Turks are given the wives of absent husbands or their daughters. We have been told that, according to an order from the Padishah, everybody must embrace Islam.**

* Name of author withheld.

** See Doc. 82, page 324.

4. LETTER FROM AN AUTHORITATIVE SOURCE, DATED CONSTANTINOPLE, 15th/28th JUNE, 1915; PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORK JOURNAL " GOTCHNAG," 28th AUGUST, 1915.

In America you have probably not yet heard of the terrible crisis through which the Armenians of Turkey are passing at this moment. The severe censorship to which all communication between Constantinople and the provinces are subjected, and the absolute embargo on travelling under which the Armenians has been placed, have resulted in depriving us, even in Constantinople of all but the scantiest information regarding the whole provincial area. And yet what we know already is sufficient to give you some idea.

In every part of Turkey the Armenian population is in a more or less serious plight, in suspense between life and death. Apart from the distress produced by the illegal requisitions, the paralysis of industry, the ravages of the typhus, and the mobilization ( the men first of those from 20 to 45, and then of those from 18 to 50 years of age thousands of Armenians have been suffering during the last two months in prison or in exile.

At the beginning of the month of April, immediately after the events at Van, the Government issued an order requisitionin Armenian houses, schools, and episcopal residences, even in the most obscure corners of the provinces, and making the possession of arms, which were allowed until now, or of books and images which were freely sold in public, a pretext for imprisonments and convictions. The effect of this order has been such that in the prisons of Kaisaria alone there are, at the present moment, more than 500 Armenians in custody, without reckoning those who, by a mere administrative act and without any charge being brought against them, have been deported into districts inhabited entirely by Mohammedans.

However, even this state of things is mild enough in comparison with the condition of affairs in Cilicia and the provinces bordering on the Caucasus. The Turkish Government is now putting into execution its plan of dispersing the Armenian population of the Armenian provinces, taking advantage of the preoccupation of all the European Powers, and of the indifference of Germany and Austria. They began to execute this plan about four months ago, starting with Cilicia** where the entire Armenian population of Zeitoun, Dört Yöl and the neighbourhood, and a considerable part of the population of Marash and Hassan-Beyli, have been removed from their homes by brute force and without warning.

Some of the exiles, about l,000 families, have been sent to the Sultania district of the Vilayet of Konia.*** The majority, however, have been dispersed among the villages of the province of Zor, beyond Aleppo, and through the districts in the immediate neighbourhood of Aleppo itself -- Moumbidj, Bab, Ma'ara, Idlib, etc. This compulsory emigration is still in progress. The same fate is in prospect for Adana, Mersina, Hadjin, Sis, etc. As can be seen from the despatches and letters which arrive from these districts, all these people are being deported without the possibility of taking anything with them, and this into districts with a climate to which they are absolutely unaccustomed. There, without shelter, naked and famished, they are abandoned to their fate, and have to subsist on the morsel of bread which the Government sees good to throw to them, a Government which is incapable of providing even its own troops with bread.

The least details of this compulsory emigration that reach us at Constantinople, reduce one to tears at their recital. Among those 1,000 families deported to Sultania there are less than fifty men. The majority made the journey on foot; the old people and the young children died by the wayside, and young women with child miscarried and were abandoned on the mountains. Even now that they have reached their place of exile, these deported Armenians pay a toll of about ten victims a day in deaths from sickness and famine. At Aleppo they need at present £35 (Turkish) a day to provide the exiles with bread. You can imagine what their situation must be in the deserts, where the native Arabs themselves are near starvation.

A sum of money has been sent from Constantinople to the Katholikos of Cilicia, who is at the present moment at Aleppo, witnessing the misery and agony of his flock. At Aleppo, at any rate, the authorities permit the distribution of relief to these unfortunate people; at Sultania, on the other hand, it has so far been impossible to bring any relief within their reach, because the Government refuses permission, in spite of the efforts of the American Embassy.

The same state of affairs now prevails at Erzeroum, Bitlis, Sairt, etc. According to absolutely trustworthy information which we have received, they have begun, during the last two or three weeks, to deport the Armenians of Erzeroum and the neighbourhood towards Derdjan; the rest have been given several days' grace. From Bitlis and Sairt we have just had despatches forwarded to us, imploring relief. From Moush we have no news, but the same state of affairs must certainly prevail there also****. At Khnyss there has been a massacre, but we do not yet know how serious it was. In the neighbourhood of Spas Several villages, Govdoun among others, have been burnt.
------------------------
* See Section XV.

** See Docs. 123 and 125.

*** See Section III.

**** See Doc. 53.

5. LETTER FROM THE SAME SOURCE, DATED CONSTANOPLE 12/25th JULY, 1915;­ PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORK JOURNAL "GOTCHNAG," 28th AUGUST, 1915.

Since my last letter, our nation's position has unhappily become more serious, inasmuch as it is now not merely Armenians of Cilicia who have been deported, but the Armenians of all the native Armenian provinces. From Samsoun and Kaisaria on the one hand to Edessa on the other, about a million and a half people are at this moment on their way to the deserts of Mesopotamia, to be planted in the midst of Arab and Kurdish populations. These people cannot take with them anything the barest necessities, because of the impossibility of transport and the insecurity of the roads; so that very few of them indeed will succeed in reaching the spot marked out for their exile, while, if immediate relief is not sent them, they will die of hunger

6. LETTER FROM THE SAME SOURCE, DATED CONSTANTINOPLE, 13/26th JULY, 1915, AND ADDRESSED TO A DISlINGUISHED ARMENIAN RESIDENT BEYOND THE OTTOMAN FRONTIER.

Since the 25th May last, events have followed hard upon one another and the misery of our nation is now at its zenith.

Apart from a few rumours about the situation of the Armenians at Erzeroum, we had heard of nothing, till recently, except the deportation of the inhabitants of several towns and villages in Cilicia. Now we know from an unimpeachable source that the Armenians of all the towns and all the villages of Cilicia have been deported en masse to the desert regions south of Aleppo.

From the 1st May onwards, the population of the city of Erzeroum, and shortly afterwards the population of the whole province, was collected at Samsoun and embarked on shipboard. The populations of Kaisaria, Diyarbekir, Ourfa, Trebizond, Sivas, Harpout and the district of Van have been deported to the deserts of Mesopotamia, from the southern outskirts of Aleppo as far as Mosul and Baghdad. "Armenia without the Armenians" that is the Ottoman Government's project. The Moslems are already being allowed to take possession of the lands and houses abandoned by the Armenians.

The exiles are forbidden to take anything with them. For that matter, in the districts under military occupation there is nothing left to take, as the military authorities have exerted themselves to carry off, for their own use, everything that they could lay hands on.

The exiles will have to traverse on foot a distance that involves one or two months' marching and sometimes even more, before they reach the particular corner of the desert assigned to them for their habitation, and destined to become their tomb. We hear, in fact, that the course of their route and the stream of the Euphrates are littered with the corpses of exiles, while those who survive are doomed to certain death, since they will find in the desert neither house, nor work, nor food.

It is simply a scheme for exterminating the Armenian nation wholesale, without any fuss. It is just another form of massacre, and a more horrible form.

Remember that all the men between the ages of 20 and 45 are at the front. Those between 45 and 60 are working for the military transport service. As for those who had paid the statutory tax for exemption from military service, they have either been exiled or imprisoned on one pretext or another. The result is that there is no one left to deport but the old men, the women and the children. These poor creatures have to travel through regions which, even in times of peace, were reputed dangerous, and where there was a serious risk of being robbed.

Now that the Turkish brigands, as well as the gendarmes and civil officials, enjoy the most absolute license, the exiles will inevitably be robbed on the road, and their women and girls dishonoured and abducted.

We are hearing also from various places of conversions to Islam. It seems that the people have no other alternative for saving their lives.

The courts martial are working everywhere at full pressure.

You must have heard through the newspapers of the hanging of 20 Huntchakists at Constantinople.

The verdict given against them is not based on any of the established laws of the Empire. The same day twelve Armenians were hanged at Kaisaria, on the charge of having obeyed instructions received from the secret conference held at Bukarest by the Huntchakist and Droshakists. Besides these hangings, 32 persons have been sentenced at Kaisaria to terms of hard labour, ranging from ten to fifteen years. Most of them are honest merchants who ar in no sort of relation with the political parties. Twelve Armenians have also been hanged in Cilicia. Condemnations have become daily occurrences. The discovery of arms, books and pictures is enough to condemn an Armenian to several years' imprisonment.

Besides this many people have succumbed under the rod. Thirteen Armenians have been killed in this way at Diyarbekir and six at Kaisaria. Thirteen others have been killed on the way to Shabin Kara-Hissar and Sivas. The priests of the village of Kourk with their companions have suffered the same fate on the road between Sou-Shehr and Sivas, although they had thei hands pinioned and were defenseless.

I will spare you the recital of other outrages which have occurred sporadically all over the country, under the cloak of searches for arms and for revolutionary agents. Not a single house has been left unsearched, not even the episcopal residences the churches or the schools. Hundreds of women, girls, and even quite young children are groaning in prison. Churches and convents have been pillaged, desecrated and destroyed. Even the Bishops are not spared. Mgr. Barkev Danielian (Bishop of Broussa), Mgr. Kevork Tourian (Bishop of Trebizond), Mgr Khosrov Behrikian (Bishop of Kaisaria), Mgr. Vaghinadj Torikian (Bishop of Shabin Kara-Hissar), and Mgr. Kevork Nalbandian (Bishop of Tchar-Sandjak) have been arrested and handed over to the courts martial. Father Muggerditch, locum tenens of the Bishop of Diyarbekir, has died of blows received in prison. We have no news of the other bishops, but I imagine that the greater part of them are in prison.

We are so cut off from the world that we might be in a fortress We have no means of correspondence, neither post nor telegraph.

The villages in the neighbourhood of Van and Bitlis have been plundered, and their inhabitants put to the sword. At the beginning of this month, there was a pitiless massacre of all the inhabitants of Kara-Hissar with the exception of a few children who are said to have escaped by a miracle. Unhappily we learn the details of all these occurrences too late, and even then only with the utmost difficulty..

So you see that the Armenians in Turkey have only a few more days to live, and if the Armenians abroad do not succeed in enlisting the sympathy of the neutrals on our behalf, there will be extraordinarily few Armenians left a few months hence, out of the million and a half that there were in Turkey before the war. The annihilation of the Armenian nation will then be inevitable.

7. LETTER FROM THE SAME SOURCE, DATED CONSTANTINOPLE 2/15th AUGUST, 1915, AND ADDRESSED TO THE SAME ARMENIAN RESIDENT BEYOND THE OTTOMAN FRONTIER.

Since I wrote my last letter (of which you have acknowledged the receipt), we have been able to obtain more precise information from the provinces of the interior. The information with which we present you herewith is derived from the following witnesses: an Armenian lady forcibly converted to Islam, and brought by an unforeseen chance to Constantinople; a girl from Zila between nine and ten years old, who was abducted by a Turkish officer and has reached Constantinople; a Turkish traveller from Harpout; foreign travellers from Erzindjan, and so on. In fine, this information is derived either from eye-witness or from actual victims of the crimes.

It is now established that there is not an Armenian left in the provinces of Erzeroum, Trebizond, Sivas, Harpout, Bit and Diyarbekir. About a million of the Armenian inhabitants of these provinces have been deported from their homes and sent southwards into exile. These deportations have been carried out very systematically by the local authorities since the beginning of April last. First of all, in every village and every town, the population was disarmed by the gendarmerie, and by criminals released for this purpose from prison. On the pretext of disarming the Armenians, these criminals committed assassination and inflicted hideous tortures. Next, they imprisoned the Armenians en masse, on the pretext that they had found in the possession arms, books, a political organization, and so on at a pinch, wealth or any kind of social standing was pretext enough. After that, they began the deportation. And first, on the pretext of sending them into exile, they evicted such men as had not been imprisoned, or such as had been set at liberty through lack of any charge against them; then they massacred them not one of these escaped slaughter. Before they started they were examined officially by the authorities, and any money or valuables in their possession were confiscated. They were usually shackled either separately, or in gangs of five to ten. The remainder old men, women, and children were treated as waifs in the province of Harpout, and placed at the disposal of the Moslem population. The highest official, as well as the most simple peasant, chose out the woman or girl who caught his fancy, and took her to wife, converting her by force to Islam. As for the children, the Moslems took as many of them as they wanted, and then the remnant of the Armenians were marched away, famished and destitute of provisions, to fall victims to hunger, unless that were anticipated by the savagery of the brigand bands. In the province of Diyarbekir there was an outright massacre, especially at Mardin, and the population was subject to all the aforementioned atrocities.

In the provinces of Erzeroum, Bitlis, Sivas and Diyarbekir, the local authorities gave certain facilities to the Armenians condemned to deportation: five to ten days' grace, authorization to effect a partial sale of their goods, and permission to hire a cart, in the case of some families. But after the first few days of their journey, the carters abandoned them on the road and returned home. These convoys were waylaid the day after the start, or sometimes several days after, by bands of brigands or by Moslem peasants who spoiled them of all they had. The brigands fraternized with the gendarmes and slaughtered the few thrown men or youths who were included in the convoys. They carried off the women, girls and children, leaving only the old women, who were driven along by the gendarmes under blows of the lash and died of hunger by the roadside. An eye-witness reports to us that the women deported from the province of Erzeroum were abandoned, some days ago, on the plain of Harpout, where they have all died of hunger (50 or 60 a day).

The only step taken by the authorities was to send people to bury them, in order to safeguard the health of the Moslem population.

The little girl from Zila tells us that when the Armenians of Marsovan, Amasia and Tokat reached Sari -Kishila (between Kaisaria and Sivas), the children of both sexes were torn from their mothers before the very windows of the Government Building, and were locked up in certain other buildings, while the convoy was forced to continue its march. After that, they gave notice in the neighbouring villages that anyone might come and take his choice. She and her companion (Newart of Amasia) were carried off and brought to Constantinople by a Turkish officer. The convoys of women and children were placed on view in front of the Government Building at each town or village where they passed, to give the Moslems an opportunity of taking their choice.

The convoy which started from Baibourt was thinned out in this way, and the women and children who survived were thrown into the Euphrates on the outskirts of Erzindjan, at a place called Kamakh-Boghazi.*

Mademoiselle Flora A.Wedel Yarlesberg, a Norwegian lady of good family who was a nurse in a German Red Cross hospital, and another nurse who was her colleague, were so revolted by these barbarities and by other experiences of equal horror, that they tendered their resignations, returned to Constantinople, and called personally at several Embassies to denounce these hideous crimes.

The same barbarities have been committed everywhere, and by this time travellers find nothing but thousands of Armenian corpses along all the roads in these provinces. A Moslem traveller on his way from Malatia to Sivas, a nine hours' journey, passed nothing but corpses of men and women. All the male Armenians of Alalatia had been taken there and massacred; the women and children have all been converted to Islam. No Armenian can travel in these parts, for every Moslem, and especially the brigand and gendarmes, considers it his duty now to kill them at sight. Recently Messieurs Zohrab and Vartkes, two Armenian members of the Ottoman Parliament, who had been sent off to Diyarbe to be tried by the Council of War, were killed, before they got there, at a short distance from Aleppo. In these provinces one can only travel incognito, under a Moslem name. As for the women's fate, we have already spoken of it above, and it is unnecessary to go into further particulars about their honour, when one sees the utter disregard there is for their life.

The Armenian soldiers, too, have suffered the same fate. They were also all disarmed and put to constructing roads.** We have certain knowledge that the Armenian soldiers of the province of Erzeroum, who were at work on the road from Erzeroum to Erzindjan, have all been massacred. The Armenian soldiers in the province of Diyarbekir have all been massacred on the Diyarbekir-Ourfa road, and the Diyarbekir-Harpout road. From Harpout alone, 1,800 young Armenians were enrolled and sent off to work at Diyarbekir; all were massacred in the neighbourhood of Arghana. We have no news from the other districts but they have assuredly suffered the same fate there also.

In certain towns, the Armenians who had been consigned to oblivion in the prisons have been hanged in batches. During the past month alone, several dozen Armenians have been hanged in Kaisaria. In many places the Armenian inhabitants, to save their lives, have tried to become Mohammedans, but this time such overtures have not been readily accepted, as they were at the time of the other great massacres. At Sivas, the would-be converts to Islam were offered the following terms: they must hand over all children under twelve years of age to the Government, which would undertake to place them in orphanages; and they must consent, for their own part, to leave their homes and settle wherever the Government directed.

At Harpout, they would not accept the conversion of the men; in the case of the women, they made their conversion conditional in each instance upon the presence of a Moslem willing to take the convert in marriage. Many Armenian women preferred to throw themselves into the Euphrates with their infants or committed suicide in their homes. The Euphrates and Tigris have become the sepulchre of thousands of Armenians.

All Armenians converted in the Black Sea towns Trebizond, Samsoun, Kerasond, etc. have been sent to the interior, and settled in towns inhabited exclusively by Moslems. The town of Shabin-Karahissar resisted the disarming and deportations and was thereupon bombarded. The whole population of the town and the surrounding country, from the Bishop downward was pitilessly massacred.

In short, from Samsoun on the one hand to Seghert*** and Divarbekir on the other, there is now not a single Armenian left. The majority have been massacred, part have been carried off, and a very small part have been converted to Islam.

History has never recorded, never hinted at, such a hecatomb . We are driven to believe that under the reign of Sultan Abd-ulHamid we were exceedingly fortunate

We have just learned the fate of some of the provincial bishops. Mgr. Anania Hazarabedian, Bishop of Baibourt, has been hanged without any confirmation of the sentence by the Central Government****. Mgr. Bosak Der-Khoremian. Bishop of Harpout, started on his road to exile in May, and had barely left the outskirts of the town when he was cruelly murdered. But we have still no news of the Bishops of Seghert, Bitlis, Moush, Keghi, Palou, Erzindjan, Kamakh, Tokat, Gurin, Samsoun and Trebizond, or for a month past of the Bishops of Sivas and Erzeroum. It is superfluous to speak of the martyred priests. When the people were deported, the churches were pillaged and turned into mosques, stables, or what not. Besides that, they have begun to sell at Constantinople the sacred objects and other properties of the Armenian churches, just as the Turks have begun to bring to Constantinople the children of the unhappy Armenian mothers.

It appears that the massacres have been less cruel in Cilicia, or at least we have no news yet of the worst. The population, which has been deported to the provinces of Aleppo and Der-el-Zor and to Damascus, will certainly perish of hunger. We have just heard that the Government has refused to leave in peace even the insignificant Armenian colonies at Aleppo and Ourfa, who might have assisted their unhappy brethren on their southward road; and the Katholikos of Cilicia, who still remains at Aleppo, is busy distributing the relief we are forwarding to him.

We thought at first that the Government's plan was to settle the Armenian question once and for all by clearing out the Armenians of the six Armenian provinces and removing the Armenian population of Cilicia, to forestall another danger in the future. Unhappily their plan was wider in scope and more thorough in intention. It consisted in the extermination of the whole Armenian population throughout the whole of Turkey. The result. is that, in those provinces where the Government was pledged to introduce reforms, there is not one per cent. of the Armenian population left alive. So far, we do not know whether a single Armenian has reached Mosul or its neighbourhood. And this plan has now been put into execution even in the suburbs of Constantinople. The majority of the Armenians in the district of Ismidx and in the province of Broussa have been forcibly deported to Mesopotamia, leaving behind them their homes and their property. In detail, the population of Adapazar, Ismid, Gegvé, Armasha and the neighbourhood has been removed

in fact, the population of all the villages in the Ismid district (except Baghtchedjik, which has been granted several days' grace) The Principal of the Seminary at Armasha has also been removed with his colleagues in orders and his seminarists*****. They have had to leave everything behind, and been able to take nothing with them on their journey. Six weeping mothers confided their little ones to the Armenians of Konia, in order to save their lives, but the local authorities tore them away from their Armenian guardians, and handed them over to Moslems.

So now it is Constantinople's turn. In any case, the population has fallen into a panic, and is waiting from one moment to another for the execution of its doom. The arrests are innumerable, and those arrested are immediately removed from the capital. The majority will assuredly perish. It is the retail merchants of provincial birth, but resident in Constantinople who are so far being deported among them Marouké, Ipranossian Garabed, Kherbekian of Erzeroum, Atamian Karekins Krikoria Sempad of Bitlis, etc. We are making great efforts to save at any rate the Armenians of Constantinople from this horrible extermination of the race, in order that, hereafter, we may have at least one rallying point for the Armenian cause in Turkey.

Is there anything further to add to this report? The whole Armenian population of Turkey has been condemned to death, and this decree is being put into execution energetically in every corner of the Empire, under the eyes of the European Powers; while, so far, neither Germany nor Austria has succeeded in checking the action of their ally and removing the stain of these barbarities, which also attaches to them. All our efforts have been without result. Our hope is set upon the Armenians abroad.

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*See Docs. 59, 60, 61, 62. The Witnesses at Erzindjan were not Norwegians but Danes EDITOR.

** See Docs. 23 and 62.

*** Sairt (?)

**** See DOC. 59.

***** See DOC. 99.

8. EXTRACTS FROM A LETTER, DATED ATHENS, 8th/21st JULY, 1915, FROM AN ARMENIAN FORMERLY RESIDENT IN TURKEY TO A PROMINENT ARMENIAN IN WESTERN EUROPE.

Events have been taking place in Turkey of which I imagine that you have no first-hand or reliable information, on account of the strict censorship and scarcity of travellers..And as I have been able to obtain reliable information, I have thoughtit my duty as an Armenian to submit it to your Excellency.

Mr. A., who was a missionary teacher at the town of B. in Cilicia for four years, and with whom I am acquainted personally (and I have good reason to believe in every word he says), arrived in this city only yesterday, coming from AE. in company with Miss B., the daughter of the Director of Mr. A.'s college, with whom I am also acquainted personally.

They just began to inform me by saying that the condition of the Armenians in Cilicia was awful. The town of Dört Yöl, after having been cleared of its Armenian populationm has been peacefully occupied by Turkish families, and not by the military authorities. The whole of the Armenian inhabitants have been sent away turned out of their homes and are naturally suffering from hunger. The exposure is something that cannot be described. Before evacuation, some nine leading merchants were hanged, on the accusation that they were in communication with the British fleet and were spying for the Allied Forces*.

Zeitoun has met the same fate. There is not a single Armenian left in Zeitoun, and all the houses are occupied by Turkish people. My friends could not understand what exactly had happened to the Zeitounlis, but the fact is that special care has been taken by the Turkish authorities that too many of them should not be left together. Attempts have been made to make them Mohammedans, and it is known that the authorities attempted to distribute one, two, or three families to each Turkish village in the district of Marash.

They have attempted to do the same thing to Hadjin, but, somehow or other, only half the inhabitants have left, whose homes have naturally been occupied by the Turks.

The Turks of Tarsus and Adana are showing the same disposition as they did before the massacres of 1909.

Missionaries from Beirout state that the same persecution is being carried out against Christian Syrians.

Dr. C., for many years a missionary in Smyrna, and latterly in AD., was exiled to Angora. He states that there were thirty Armenians exiled with him from AD. on the simple charge that they had either themselves been Huntchakists or had friends belonging to the said Party. Extortion of money, robbery and insults are usual, and conditions in general are worse than at any period in the time of Hamid. Dr. C. has been in Turkey for 35 years and knows Turkish.

At Kaisaria they hanged eight Armenians. About the same time they hanged twenty-six at Constantinople, and this immediately after the note of the Powers threatening to hold Turkish officials responsible for massacres of Armenians. Imprisonment and exile are common things, and the Reverend Missionary finished by saying that " I ought to be glad I was out of it."

Dr. C., coming from Constantinople, gave me the further information that massacres had been going on round Bitlis for some time. And then, from correspondents at Bitlis, his informants had had news that whole villages were embracing Mohammedanism in order to escape tortures, because the object of the massacres was not simply to kill, but to torture.

A resident at Mardin had telegraphed by code to Constantinople informing his correspondent there that the same conditions existed at Mardin as during 1895.

The American Ambassador at Constantinople, after asking the Turkish Government to stop the massacres, went to the German Ambassador. But Herr Wangenheim said he could not interfere in any way with Turkey's internal affairs ! ! !

All these informants do not hide their belief, based on what they have actually seen, that German policy is at the back of the movement for a clean Mohammedan " Turkey for the Turks."

I will give your Excellency another coincident piece of evidence. In May, 1914, I travelled with Dr. Niazim Bey, who is the spirit of the Union and Progress Party, when he was on the mission of establishing a boycott nominally against the Greeks only, though it proved to be against the Armenians as well. The Doctor said that the work of the Turkish Government was very complicated, and he laid all the fault of it on the ancestors of the modern Turks, who, in spite of their being victorious and defying all Europe, nay all the world, had not been far-sighted enough to cleanse all the country they ruled of the Christian element, but had yielded to their chivalrous feelings and allowed the Christians to live. Had they done this bit of cleaning up at a time when nobody could protest, there would have been an easy task now for the heads of the Government in governing, and so on.

The Russian retreat has intoxicated the Turks. They think they have their chance now, and evidence shows that their almighty ally Germany encourages them in their effort at house cleaning. The note of the Allied Powers is no deterrent, even if the Turkish officials were not sure of final victory because they feel that, if they lose, Turkey is not the place to offer them a happy shelter, and, with the money they are making now, the officials responsible can hide themselves in a country where they cannot be found or cannot be extradited. And some of the bolder spirits, like Talaat and Enver, have openly said that they do not expect to live if defeated, even without the threat of the Allies to bring them to account.

The Armenians in Turkey have not been able to concealtheir feelings, and when I myself was in Constantinople, prudent man though I am, I was unable to conceal my feelings myself, or at least so effectively as not to be perceived by the Turks.

As early as September last, the Turkish comic paper Karayoz had written one day that " If the Armenians were cheerful, there was certainly news of victory for the Allies; if not, it had been the reverse." But if, in spite of the Armenians concealing their feelings, the Turks had definitely adopted the policy as no doubt they had of exterminating the Christians in Turkey, then we have at least the satisfaction that we have hurt them with the display of what we felt.

I believe that the Germans did not want to exterminate Armenians unless the latter proved of military danger in the present game; but I imagine the Armenians have incurred the Germans' displeasure in this regard.

That Germany, or the Germans in Turkey, are for the above reason encouraging the Turks in their attempt at extermination, is proved by the fact that wholesale massacres and deportations have been specific to regions of which the inhabitants might be of especial help to an invading army. For instance, Dört Yöl and Zeitoun would be of excellent help had the Allies made a landing at Payas. Bitlis is next door to Van; the Russian army is getting towards Bitlis, and naturally the Armenians of Bitlis would be of great value to them, as indeed the Armenians of Van have been already.

Take the case of Erzeroum, again a frontier town, which, besides individual hangings, has been the scene of wholesale massacres; while towns far away from the theatre of war, such as Angora, Broussa, Konia, Constantinople, etc., although not exempted from persecution, have still not been subjected to wholesale massacres and deportations.

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* See DOC 123.

9. LETTER, DATED 3rd/16th AUGUST, 1915, CONVEYED BEYOND THE OTTOMAN FRONTIER BY AN ARMENIAN REFUGEE FROM CILICIA IN THE SOLE OF HER SHOE*.

In haste and in secret I seize this opportunity of bringing to your ears the cry of agony which goes out from the survivors of the terrible crisis through which we are passing at this moment. They are exterminating our nation, mowing it down. Perhaps this will be the last cry from Armenia that you will hear; we have no longer any fear of death, we see it close at hand, this death of the whole people. We are waifs who cry for the lives of our brothers. These lines cannot describe our misery; it would need volumes of reports to do justice to that.

(1.) At the present moment there are at ______________ more than 10,000 deported widows and children (among the latter one sees no boys above eleven years of age). They had been on the road for from three to five months; they have been plundered several times over, and have marched along naked and starving; the Government gave them on one single occasion a morsel of bread a few have had it twice. It is said that the number of these deported widows will reach 60,000; they are so exhausted that they cannot stand upright; the majority have great sores on their feet, through having had to march barefoot.

(2). An enquiry has proved that, out of 1,000 people who started, scarcely 400 reached __________. Out of the 600 to be accounted for, 380 men and boys above eleven years of age, and 85 women, had been massacred or drowned, out of sight of the towns, by the gendarmes who conducted them; 120 young women and girls and 40 boys had been carried off, with the result that one does not see a single pretty face among the survivors.

(3.) Out of these survivors, 60 per cent. are sick; they are to be sent in the immediate future to ________________, where certain death awaits them; one cannot describe the ferocious treatment to which they are exposed; they had been on the road for from three to five months; they had been plundered two, three, five, seven times; their underclothes even had been ransacked, so far from being given anything to eat, they had even been prevented from drinking while they were passing a stream. Three-quarters of the young women and girls were abducted; the remainder were forced to lie with the gendarmes who conducted them. Thousands died under these outrages, and the survivors have stories to tell of refinements of outrage so disgusting that they pollute one's ears.

(4.) The massacres have been most violent in the eastern provinces, and the population has been deported wholesale towards the Hauran Desert, Gereg and Mosul, where the victims are doomed to a death from natural causes more infallible than massacre. When one remembers that these people were leading a comfortable European life, one is forced to conclude that they will never be able to survi ve in an alien and inhospitable climate, even if the knife and the bullet do not previously do their work.

My friends, I have not time to tell you more; one may say with truth that not a single Armenian is left in Armenia; soon there will be none left in Cilicia either. The Armenian, robbed of his life, his goods, his honour, conveys to you his last cry for help help to save the lives of the survivors ! Money to buy them bread! There is a rumour here that the Government will allow the women and the children under seventeen years of age to leave the country. How are they to do it? Where are they to go ? What ship is to take them? Who will provide the funds? From moment to moment we are waiting for relief, to stave off the death of the Nation. Be quick, never mind how; send us money, we have no means of communication!

Send, through the agency of the American Government, money, money, money; the bearer of this letter deserves every reward; she will tell you all the details. Zohrab, Vartkes Daghavarian and their five companions have been murdered by the gendarmes at Sheitan-Deré, between Urfa and Diyarbekirl where thousands of headless corpses make the passers shudder; the Euphrates bears down its stream thousands of corpses of men and women, photographs of this have been taken by Europeans. Fifteen thousand Zeitounlis have been deported to Derel-Zor, where they are suffering the worst atrocities. Thousands of babies at the breast have been thrown into rivers or abandoned by the wayside by their mothers. The urgent need money! Make that clear to the Armenian colony in America. Money ! Money !

One thousand six hundred Armenians have had their throats cut in the Prisons at Diyarbekir. The Arashnort was mutilated, drenched with alcohol, and burnt alive in the prison yard, in the middle of a carousing crowd of gendarmes, who even accompanied the scene with music. The massacres at Beniani, Adiaman and Selefka have been carried out diabolically; there is not a single man left above the age of thirteen years; the girls have been outraged mercilessly; we have seen their mutilated corpses tied together in batches of four, eight or ten, and cast into the Euphrates. The majority had been mutilated in an indescribable manner.

The above facts have been gathered from official sources and eye-witnesses.

The American Consul is able to arrange for the despatch of funds. We are unable to realise any of our property, either national or private, because it has all been confiscated by the Government. The Government has even confiscated the convents, the churches and the schools. Black famine reigns in this town; we have 16,000 deported Armenians here, who are being sent on in batches to Arabia. The whole of Armenia is being cleared out.

I sign this letter with my blood!

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*The author of the letter has been identified by an Armenian resident abroad who recognised his hand-writing. EDITOR.

10. LETTER FROM MR. N., A FOREIGN RESIDENT AT CONSTANTINOPLE, DATED 27th AUGUST, 1915; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

The.Armenians of Bardizag have generally speaking been deported. A promise secured by Mr. Morgenthau that Protestants should be exempted from deportation has kept the people at Nicomedia (Isnik) for nearly a week. They are camped in the open near the Railway Station, exposed to the weather and to the insults of the populace, apparently to be deported a few days later on. Whether we shall succeed in saving the Protestants remains to be seen. Deportation has taken place generally throughout all the region contiguous to Nicomedia, Adapazar, Konia, Marsovan, Sivas, Harpout, Diyarbekir and to some parts of the American Central Mission. Many people have already lost their lives, and others, as for instance those in this city, have lost hope as to their final security. I shall enclose a few letters which will give an idea of the situation throughout the land.

Prof. QQ.* has just arrived from X. He has been four weeks on the journey, having been delayed considerably at S. He states that the Armenians have left, having been deported from X. and the vicinity. Mr. Morgenthau endeavoured to save the Mission entourage at X. from deportation; the promises securing this, however, were not fulfilled. Even the hundred girls and young women held in the College Compound could not be saved from this dreadful fate. To the bold stand made by the Mission people, on behalf of their pupils and teachers, the Kaimakam himself opposed his personal authority, threatening to hang anyone who attempted to prevent the carrying out of his orders for the deportation of the people. These orders, here as elsewhere, seemed to respect neither age nor condition.

The movement against the Armenians has now well-nigh covered the entire country. Many prominent Armenians have lost their lives; hardly a family has escaped experiencing to some extent the severity of this blow. It looks as if the patronage from this community for the American schools has been quite cut off. Teachers and pupils alike have been sent into exile, or have suffered death or have been carried off to Turkish communities or harems. There is an ugly rumour that the turn of the Greeks will come next. Should Greece move, this will probably be realised.

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* Author of Docs. 56 and 57.

11.MEMORANDlJM DATED 15 /28th OCTOBER, 1915, FROM A WELL-INFORMED SOURCE AT BUCHAREST, RELATING TO THE TERMINATION OF THE ARMENIANS IN TURKEY.

I. At Vezir Kanji (district of Marsovan) all Armenian women and girls from 7 to 40 years of am have been sold at auction.

Women were also presented to the buyers without payment.

2 At Kaisaria more than 500 Armenian families were forced to embrace Islam. A father asked his son in Constantinople to follow his example," in order to prevent worse consequences for his parents."

3. All Armenian judicial officials in the provinces have been discharged. All Turkish officials who have shown special zeal in the extermination of the Armenians have been promoted. Thus Zeki Bey, Kaimakam of Develou (Kaisaria), the man who directed in person the terrible tortures of the Armenian prisoners and was responsible for the death of most of them, has been made mektoubdi of the Vilayet of Constantinople.

4. The Young Turk Government has published as an excuse or perhaps as a means of exciting greater hatred against the Armenians, a book entitled The Armenian Separatist Movement, which is as ridiculous as it is criminal. The reader finds in it not only copies of entirely fictitious publications, but actually pictures of enormous depots of arms and munitions purporting to be Armenian.

5. In Konia, and everywhere else, the wives of the Armenian soldiers who have not been deported have been taken as servants or concubines into Turkish families.

6. In Marash more than three hundred Armenians have been executed by Court Martial, besides the numerous victims murdered in the course of the deportations. At Panderma many important Armenians have been condemned to death by the Court Martial. The vicar Barkev Vartabed has been condemned to five years' penal servitude. The Archbishop of Erzeroum, His Grace Sempad, who, with the Vali's authorisation, was returning to Constantinople, was murdered at Erzindjan by the brigands in the service of the Union and Progress Committee. The bishops of Trebizond, Kaisaria, Moush, Bitlis, Sairt, and Erzindjan have all been murdered by order of the Young Turk Government. According to reports from travellers, all the Armenian population of Trebizond has been massacred without exception. Almost the whole male population in Sivas, Erzeroum, Harpout, Bitlis, Baibourt, Khnyss, Diyarbeikir, etc., has been exterminated. At Tchingiler, a small village in the district of Ismid, 300 men have been murdered because they did not obey the order to leave their houses. The people deported from Rodosto, Malgara and Tchorlu, who have been deprived of all their possessions in accordance with the new "temporary law" of the 13/26th September, have been separated from their families and sent on foot from Ismid to Konia on the arbitraryorder of the notorious Ibrahim, dictator of the Ismid district. Thousands of poor Armenians expelled from Constantinople made to march on foot from Ismid to Konia and still further after they have delivered up everything they possess to gendarmes, including their shoes. Those who can afford travel by rail are also fleeced by the gendarmes, who not only demand the price of the ticket from Constantinople to their destinations, but extract the whole of their money by selling them food at exorbitant prices. They demand payment even for unlocking the door of the water-closet.

7. German travellers from Aleppo describe the misery of deported Armenians as terrible. All along the route they saw corpses of Armenians who had died of hunger.

The Arab deputies from Bagdad and Syria report that misery in the deserts of Hauran is indescribable: --

" The railway discharges into the mountains vast numbers of Armenians, who are abandoned there without bread or water. In the towns and villages, the Arabs try to bring them some relief; but generally the Armenians are abandoned at five or six hours' distance from their homes. We saw on the way numbers of women and old men and children dying of hunger who did not know where to look for help."

Some Armenians are leading a life of misery among Arabs, forty or forty-five hours' journey from Bagdad. Every day numbers of them die of hunger. The Government give them no food. Moreover, fresh troops have been sent to Bagdad and these will be a new scourge to the unfortunate exiles.

8. Three Special Commissions have been sent through through the provinces to liquidate the abandoned goods and estates ofArmenians, in conformity with the new "temporary law" the 13/26th of September, 1915.

12. INFORMATION REGARDING EVENTS IN ARMENIA, PUBLISHED IN THE "SONNENAUFGANG " (ORGAN OF THE "GERMAN LEAGUE FOR THE PROMOTION OF CHRISTIAN CHARITABLE WORK IN THE EAST "), OCTOBER, 1915; AND IN THE "ALLGEMEINE MISSIONS-ZEITSCHRIFT," NOVEMBER, 1915.

[NB: This section is italicised in the original report. AJP]

This testimony is especially significant because it comes from a German Source, and because the German Censor made a strenuous effort to suppress it.

The same issue of the "Sonnenaufgang" contains the following editorial note:

"In our preceding issue we published an account by one of our sisters (Schwester Mohring) of her experiences on a journey, but we have to abstain from giving to the public the new details that are reaching us in abundance. It costs us much to do so, as our friends will understand; but the political situation of our entry demands it."

In the case of the "Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift," the (censor was not content with putting pressure on the editor. On the 10th November, he forbade the reproduction of the present article in the German press, and did his best to confiscate the whole current issue of the rnagazine. Copies of both publications, however, found their way across the frontier.

Both the incriminating articles are drawn from common sources, but the extracts they make from them do not entirely coincide, so that, by putting them together, a fuller version of these sources can be compiled.

In the text printed below, the unbracketed paragraphs are those which appear both in the "Sonnenaufgang" and in the "Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift "; while paragraphs included in angular brackets (< >) appear only in the "Sonnenaufgang," and those in square brackets ([ ]) only in the "Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift."

Between the 10th and the 30th May, 1,200 of the most prominent Armenians and other Christians, without distinction of confession, were arrested in the Vilayets of Diyarbekir and Mamouret-ul-Aziz .

[On the 30th May, 674 of them were embarked on thirteen Tigris barges, under the pretext that they were to be taken to Mosul. The Vali's aide-de-camp, assisted by fifty gendarmes, was in charge of the convoy. Half the gendarmes started off on the barges, while the other half rode along the bank. A short time after the start the prisoners were stripped of all their money (about £6,000 Turkish) and then of their clothes; after that they were thrown into the river. The gendarmes on the bank were ordered to let none of them escape. The clothes of these victims were sold in the market of Diyarbekir.]

< It is said that in Diyarbekir five or six priests were stripped naked one day, smeared with tar, and dragged through the streets.>

In the Vilayet of Aleppo they have evicted the inhabitants of Hadjin, Shar, Albustan, Goksoun, Tasholouk, Zeitoun, all th villages of Alabash, Geben, Shivilgi, Furnus and the surroundir villages, Fundadjak, Hassan-Beyli, Harni, Lappashli, Dort Yol and others.

[They have marched them off in convoys into the desert on the pretext of settling them there. In the village of Tel-Armen (along: the line of the Bagdad Railway, near Mosul) and in the neighbouring villages about 5,000 people were massacred, leaving only a few women and children. The people were thrown alive down wells or into the fire. They pretend that the Armenians are to be employed in colonising land situated at a distance from twenty-four to thirty kilometres from the Bagdad Railway. But as it is only the women and children who are sent into exile since all the men, with the exception of the very old, are at the war, this means nothing less than the wholesale murder of the families, since they have neither the labour nor the capital for clearing the country.]

A German met a Christian soldier of his acquaintance, who was on furlough from Jerusalem. The man was wandering up and down along the banks of the Euphrates searching for his wife and children, who were supposed to have been transferred to that neighbourhood Such unfortunates are often to be met with in Aleppo, because they believe that there they will learn something more definite about the whereabouts of their relations. It has often happened that when a member of a family has been absent, he discovers on his return that all his family are gone-- evicted from their homes.

[For a whole month corpses were observed floating down the River Euphrates nearly every day, often in batches of from to to six corpses bound together. The male corpses are in many cases hideously mutilated (sexual organs cut off, and so on), the female corpses are ripped open. The Turkish military authority in control of the Euphrates, the Kaimakam of Djerablous, refuse to allow the burial of these corpses, on the ground that he fin it impossible to establish whether they belong to Moslems or Christians. He adds that no one has given him any orders on the subject. The corpses stranded on the bank are devoured by dogs and vultures. To this fact there are many German eye-witnesses. An employee of the Bagdad Railway has brougt the information that the prisons at Biredjik are filled regularly every day and emptied every night into the Euphrates. Between Diyarbekir and Ourfa a German cavalry captain saw innumerable corpses lying unburied all along the road.]

< The following telegram was sent to Aleppo from Arabkir: "We have accepted the True Religion. Now we are all right." The inhabitants of a village near Anderoum went over to Islam and had to hold to it. At Hadjin six families wanted to become Mohammedans. They received the verdict:" Nothing under one hundred families will be accepted."

Aleppo and Ourfa are the assemblage-placese for the convoys of exiles. There were about 5,000 of them in Aleppo during June and July, while during the whole period from April to July many more than 50,000 must have passed through the city. The girls were abducted almost without exception by the soldiers and their Arab hangers-on. One father, on the verge of despair, besought me to take with me at least his fifteen-year-old daughter, as he could no longer protect her from the persecutions inflicted upon her. The children left behind by the Armenians on their journey are past counting.

Women whose pains came upon them on the way had to continue their journey without respite. A woman bore twins in the neighbourhood of Aintab; next morning she had to go on again. She very soon had to leave the children under a bush, and a little while after she collapsed herself. Another, whose pains came upon her during the march, was compelled to go on at once and fell down dead almost immediately. There were several more incidents of the same kind between Marash and Aleppo*

The villagers of Shar were permitted to carry all their household effects with them. On the road they were suddenly told: "An order has come for us to leave the high road and travel across the mountains." Everything -- waggons, oxen and belongings had to be left behind on the road, and then they went on over the mountains on foot. This year the heat has been exceptionally severe, and many women and children naturally succumbed to it even in these early stages of their journey

There are about 30,000 exiles of whom we have no news at all, as they have arrived neither at Aleppo nor at Ourfa.>

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* We have just picked up fifteen babies. Three are already dead. They were terribly thin and ailing when we found them. Ah! If we could only write all that we see." -- Extract from a letter dated Marash 4th June, 1915, published in "Sonnenaufgang," September,1915.