The treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire / Documents presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon

by Unknown

111. Q.: LETTER FROM DR. E., DATED 27th OCTOBER, 1915; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

Since my writing to you last the situation has changed considerably, although the general need and suffering remain. The whole encampment near the railway has been cleared out and sent on, with the exception of some tents belonging to families with contagious cases, such as diphtheria, scarlet fever, etc., which are being attended to by the Beledié physician. There remain, however, a very large number of people in the city, some say as many as 20,000, who are still permitted to stay here—probably through bribes to the police, friends in the Government, etc. Although the above number may be an exaggeration, one sees crowds of Armenians everywhere in town, and we have the same crowd of about 500 every day to feed, and more patients coming to the clinic than we have time to see.

Soon after the great deportation that preceded the arrival of the new Vali, Miss H. and I drove out to PP. Han, the first station on the railway towards P., just to follow up the crowd, as a large number had been driven off on foot with the expectation of taking the railway later on. PP. Han is about three hours from here by carriage, and, even so near to Q. as this, we found 100 people sitting and lying about the station in utter destitution. They had been there three days; most of them had eaten up all the provisions they had and looked haggard and emaciated—veritable famine victims such as one sees in pictures of what occurs in India. On leaving Q. they had been promised food along the way, and the gendarmes there left, saying “geledjek,” but the fact was that they had had no provision whatsoever made for them. The train from Q. came along while we were there, and most of the people dragged themselves to the carriages and endeavoured to get on, but were pushed back by the gendarmes, partly because they had no tickets and partly because there was no room; so the poor people turned back bitterly and hopelessly to where they had been sitting or lying about the station. There is a village an hour or two away from the station, and a Turkish baker had driven to the station to sell bread, but as there was no money to buy, the grown-up people looked at it from the distance, while the little gaunt children drew near to stare at it wistfully. I bought enough to give each person there a loaf, and many declared that it was the first food they had had for three days. Some of the people there were intelligent and educated—their sufferings were even greater than those of the villagers, who were more accustomed to hardship. There were two women there desperately sick, with puny babies tugging away at the breast and getting nothing, their pathetic cries mingled with the groans of the mothers in physical and mental anguish. Among the hundred people there were not half-a-dozen tents, and these improvised and of the flimsiest description. All the rest of the people were lying out in the open, day and night, many without even a blanket or quilt. Half-a-mile from the station I found two old women who were crawling about on hands and knees, too weak to walk; they had been carried off on a wagon, ostensibly to go to a village, but, once out of sight of the gendarmes, the driver had dropped them in the field and hurried away. All without exception looked forward to certain death by starvation, nor could we see any other future for them. A few miles further on, we found a little heap of clods that had been apparently piled together and then scattered, and near it a bundle of rags full of a child’s bones. The skull, with the scalp still clinging to it, was lying a yard or two away. Evidently there had been a hasty burial, and the dogs had come and torn the grave to pieces and devoured the body. That same day we found another dead body by the roadside—an old woman wrapped in a torn quilt; also a woman about 40 years old sitting alone by the road, miles away from any city or village, with feet bare and swollen, almost pulseless, and evidently crazed from terror and exposure, muttering something about Turks who were coming to cut her throat, about her people who had left her behind, and so forth. A little further on, lying beside an empty wayside stable, we found an old woman, half-naked, pulseless, muttering in low delirium and with only a few hours to live. We lifted her into the old stable, covered her with an old quilt that we found near her, and drove back to the city, weighed down with the thought of the awful suffering that is going on all over the country, especially to the south-east of us, of which we see such terrible examples at our very doors.

Our new executive is affable and pleasant enough, but is hand and glove with the clique here and impresses me as insincere. After pushing the deportation vigorously for a few days, things have quieted down again, and the Armenians in town are having their hopes revived, although we see nothing to ground them upon. The hunger and want in the city are increasing; to-day we fed over 600. It is blessed work, even if it seems to have no future for the recipients. A lot of the exiles are well qualified to earn a living, but the police will not allow them to work.

Next time you write, I should be interested to know if the case of Vartouhi, whose sisters from Gumuldjina were abducted, was taken up by the Bulgarian Ministry.

A side-light on the rate of extermination of the Armenians is thrown by a glance at mortality statistics in our hospital, which I have been studying lately. In ordinary years the average mortality from all causes is about 4 per cent. This year, among 500 to 600 soldiers we have taken in, it has been about 6 per cent., the increase being doubtless due to the lowered vitality of the soldiers in general. The mortality among Armenians—exiles—who have been admitted to our wards has been over 30 per cent., and this in spite of the fact that we have taken in only the ordinary run of maladies and that there has been no epidemic! The nation is being systematically done to death by a cruel and crafty method, and their extermination is only a question of time.