“I have the hospital—sixty-five beds so far and about 150 outpatients requiring surgical dressings. Fifteen thousand starving people are to be fed and we are running into debt nicely.
“The Turkish authorities do nothing except arrest unoffending Armenians, from whom by torture they extort the most fanciful confessions. Even the wounded are not safe from their injustice. A man was being carried in to me yesterday when he was seized and taken off to gaol. I dare not think what his fate may be.
“Nobody is safe. They murder babies in front of their mothers; they half murder men and violate their wives while the husbands are lying there dying in pools of blood. Then they say it is the fault of the Armenians, because there existed a revolutionary society of about sixty members, who talked and wrote a good deal of rot.
“We arrived in Adana from Mersine the first day of the massacre, April 14. The murderers boarded the train. There was a rush of Armenian passengers into our compartment. While I tried to buck them up a bit Dick went and tackled an assassin who was just going to shoot somebody else. At Tarsus they murdered two men who were coming from the station just behind us. One man made a rush and gained the guardhouse, but the soldiers shoved him out and watched him done to death in the road.
“Dick got into uniform the moment he arrived, and we saw no more of him till 11 at night. He had been rescuing all the foreign subjects he could find. The following day I saw more brutal murders. An Armenian quarter near us was attacked by Arab soldiers from our guard and was practically wiped out. Their officers and one or two decent soldiers stuck to the guardhouse and took no part in the murders. The officers, at my earnest appeal, even saved some women and children—but how dreadfully shot they were.
“After an hour’s argument I got a Greek doctor to come out with me to the guardhouse and dress the wounded women and children. The room was a puddle of blood, and while we were working there a wounded Armenian, who was staggering in to be dressed, was stabbed to death by some of the soldiers. I saw many murders, and nobody seemed to care.
“The authorities did nothing, and the soldiers were worse than the crowd, for they were better armed.
“One house in our quarter was burned with 115 people inside. We counted the bodies. The soldiers set fire to the door, and as the windows had iron bars nobody could get out. Everybody in the house was roasted alive. They were all women and children and old people. It was in that part of the town that Dick was wounded. They told him that some wounded Turkish soldiers were lying among the burning houses, and he went to rescue them, which they certainly did not deserve. The house from which he was shot had a garden filled with dead women and children, and I have no doubt that some Armenian, who had lost entire family and most of his friends, shot him in a sort of mad fit, probably taking him for a Turk.
Slaughter in the Fields.
“Outside Adana every Christian village—Greek, Syrian, or Armenian—has been burned and every soul in them killed. Unfortunately, it was just before harvest, and thousands of peasants from the mountains and other districts were there to start work. From 100 to 200 men and women were murdered on every farm. Turkish farms were not burned or looted, but the Armenian servants were killed. I know of only one farmer—a friend of ours—who had the nerve to save his Armenians.