The city was glorious in the days of Tamerlane. Ancient writers were enthusiastic in their praises of its lofty towers, of the churches and monasteries in the suburbs; especially charming were its gardens and orchards and olive groves which the delightful but humid climate is so well suited to foster. Nature lovingly smiles upon it still, but the handful of scattered Christians, the ruins of stately churches and monasteries and walls all tell the same story of the conquest and heartless rule of the Turk, and emphasize with silent but pathetic eloquence the moaning cry for deliverance that rose up from prostrate and bleeding Armenia.
As we have traveled we have seen the helplessness of the unarmed Armenians when the Kurds went sweeping down the valleys upon the defenceless villages. How hopeless also any attempt at escape when the Kurds held possession of all the passes. Saddest of all there were no cities of refuge for them.
Van alone of all the cities of Armenia was able to resist and drive back the hordes of mountain warriors, yet her fertile plains were swept naked of their beautiful villages. Thousands of refugees were, however, kept alive by the generosity of the tender hearted in America as the chapter on Relief Work will graphically portray.
CHAPTER XI.
THE REIGN OF TERROR.
The time has come for every citizen to deliberately accept or repudiate his share of the joint indirect responsibility for a series of the hugest and foulest crimes that have ever stained the pages of human history. The Armenian people are being exterminated root and branch by Turks and Kurds—systematically and painfully exterminated by such abominable methods, and with such fiendish accompaniments as may well cause the most sluggish blood to boil and seethe with shame and indignation.
For the Armenians are not lawless barbarians or brigands: nor are the Turks and Kurds the accredited torch bearers of civilization. But even if the “rôles” of the actors in this hideous drama were thus distributed, an excuse might at most be found for severity, but no pretext could be discovered for the slow torture and gradual vivisection employed by fanatic Mohammedans to end the lives of their Christian neighbors. If for instance it be expedient that Armenians should be exterminated, why chop them up piecemeal, and in the intervals of this protracted process, banter the agonized victims who are wildly calling upon God and man to put them out of pain?
Why must an honest, hard workingman be torn from his bed or his fireside; forced to witness the violation of his own daughter by a band of all pitiless demons unable to rescue or help her, and then, his own turn come, have his hand cut off and stuffed into his mouth while a short sermon is being preached to him on the text: “If your God be God, why does He not succor?” at the peroration of which the other hand is hacked off, and then amid boisterous shouts of jubilation, his ears are torn from his head and his feet severed with a hatchet, while the piercing screams, the piteous prayers, the hideous contortions of the agonizing victim seem to intoxicate with fiendish delight the fanatic Moslems who inflict such awful cruelties. And why when the last and merciful blow of death is being dealt, must obscene jokes and unutterable blasphemies sear the victim’s soul and prolong his hell to the uttermost limits of time, to the very threshold of eternity? Surely, roasting alive, flaying, disembowelling, impaling and all that elaborate and ingenious aggravation of savage pain on which the souls of these human fiends seem to feast and flourish, have nothing that can excuse them in the eyes of Christians, however deeply absorbed in politics or money getting whether in Downing Street or in Wall Street.
But the Turk or Kurd is at his best only a Tartar utterly averse to all humanizing influence, and at his worst seems a fiend incarnate perpetrating and glorying in the horrors just enumerated, and in others so gross and vile that they can not be mentioned. But remember that while we may shut our ears to the horrid tale, innocent women and young children are enduring even unto the agonies of death outrages we can not imagine.