Bleeding Armenia: Its history and horrors under the curse of Islam

by Augustus Warner Williams; M. Smbat Gabrielean

Now the answer has been given. What an answer! These ill-fated men might know that European sympathy has taken a different form—that of a marine guard before the Sultan’s palace to shield him and his from harm from without, while they proceed with their orgies of blood and lust within. They might know; only most of them have been butchered since then, like the relatives and friends whose lot they lamented and yet envied.

In accordance with the plan of extermination, which has been carried out with such signal success during these long years of Turkish vigor and English sluggishness, all those Armenians who possessed money or money’s worth were for a time allowed to purchase immunity from prison, and from all that prison life in Asia Minor implies. But, as soon as terror and summary confiscation took the place of slow and elaborate extortion, the gloomy dungeons of Erzeroum, Erzinghan, Marsovan, Hassankaleh, and Van were filled, till there was no place to sit down, and scarcely sufficient standing room. And this means more than English people can realize, or any person believe who has not actually witnessed it. It would have been a torture for Turkish troopers and Kurdish brigands, but it was worse than death to the educated schoolmasters, missionaries, priests, and physicians who were immured in these noisome hotbeds of infection, and forced to sleep night after night standing on their feet, leaning against the foul, reeking corner of the wall which all the prisoners were compelled to use as.... The very worst class of Tartar and Kurdish criminals were turned in here to make these hell-chambers more unbearable to the Christians. And the experiment was everywhere successful. Human hatred and diabolical spite, combined with the most disgusting sights and sounds and stenches, with their gnawing hunger and their putrid food, their parching thirst and the slimy water, fit only for sewers, rendered their agony maddening. Yet these were not criminals, nor alleged criminals, but upright Christian men, who were never even accused of an infraction of the law. No man who has not seen these prisons with his own eyes, and heard these prisoners with his own ears, can be expected to conceive, much less realize, the sufferings inflicted and endured. The loathsome diseases, whose terrible ravages were freely displayed; the still more loathsome vices, which were continually and openly practised; the horrible blasphemies, revolting obscenities and ribald jests which alternated with cries of pain, songs of vice, and prayers to the unseen God, made these prisons, in some respects, nearly as bad as the Black Hole of Calcutta, and in others infinitely worse.

Into these prisons venerable old ministers of religion were dragged from their churches, teachers from their schools, missionaries from their meeting-houses, merchants, physicians, and peasants from their firesides. Those among them who refused to denounce their friends, or consent to some atrocious crime, were subjected to horrible agonies. Many a one, for instance, was put into a sentry-box bristling with sharp spikes, and forced to stand there motionless, without food or drink, for twenty-four and even thirty-six hours, was revived with stripes whenever he fell fainting to the prickly floor, and was carried out unconscious at the end. It was thus that hundreds of Armenian Christians, whose names and histories are on record, suffered for refusing to sign addresses to the Sultan accusing their neighbors and relatives of high treason. It was thus that Azo was treated by his judges, the Turkish officials, Talib Effendi, Captain Reshid, and Captain Hadji Fehim Agha, for declining to swear away the lives of the best men of his village. A whole night was spent in torturing him. He was first bastinadoed in a room close to which his female relatives and friends were shut up so that they could hear his cries. Then he was stripped naked, and two poles, extending from his armpits to his feet, were placed on each side of his body and tied tightly. His arms were next stretched out horizontally and poles arranged to support his hands. This living cross was then bound to a pillar, and the flogging began. The whips left livid traces behind. The wretched man was unable to make the slightest movement to ease his pain. His features alone, hideously distorted, revealed the anguish he endured. The louder he cried, the more heavily fell the whip. Over and over again he entreated his tormentors to put him out of pain, saying: “If you want my death, kill me with a bullet, but for God’s sake don’t torture me like this!” His head alone being free he, at last, maddened by excruciating pain, endeavored to dash out his brains against the pillar, hoping in this way to end his agony. But this consummation was hindered by the police. They questioned him again; but in spite of his condition, Azo replied as before: “I cannot defile my soul with the blood of innocent people. I am a Christian.” Enraged at this obstinacy, Talib Effendi, the Turkish official, ordered the application of other and more effective tortures. Pincers were fetched to pull out his teeth; but, Azo remaining firm, this method was not long persisted in. Then Talib commanded his servants to pluck out the prisoner’s moustachios by the roots, one hair at a time. This order the gendarmes executed, with roars of infernal laughter. But this treatment proving equally ineffectual, Talib instructed his men to cauterize the unfortunate victim’s body. A spit was heated in the fire. Azo’s arms were freed from their supports, and two brawny policemen approached, one on each side, and seized him. Meanwhile another gendarme held to the middle of the wretched man’s hands the glowing spit. While his flesh was thus burning, the victim shouted out in agony, “For the love of God kill me at once!”

Then the executioners, removing the red hot spit from his hands, applied it to his breast, then to his back, his face, his feet, and other parts. After this, they forced open his mouth, and burned his tongue with red hot pincers. During these inhuman operations, Azo fainted several times, but on recovering consciousness maintained the same inflexibility of purpose. Meanwhile, in the adjoining apartment, a heartrending scene was being enacted. The women and the children, terrified by the groans and cries of the tortured man, fainted. When they revived, they endeavored to rush out to call for help, but the gendarmes, stationed at the door, barred their passage, and brutally pushed them back.[1]

Nights were passed in such hellish orgies and days in inventing new tortures or refining upon the old, with an ingenuity which reveals unimagined strata of malignity in the human heart. The results throw the most sickening horrors of the Middle Ages into the shade. Some of them cannot be described, nor even hinted at. The shock to people’s sensibilities would be too terrible. And yet they were not merely described to, but endured by, men of education and refinement, whose sensibilities were as delicate as ours.

And when the prisons in which these and analogous doings were carried on had no more room for new-comers, some of the least obnoxious of its actual inmates were released for a bribe, or, in case of poverty, were expeditiously poisoned off.

In the homes of these wretched people the fiendish fanatics were equally active and equally successful. Family life was poisoned at its very source. Dishonor menaced almost every girl and woman in the country. They could not stir out of their houses in the broad daylight to visit the bazaars, or to work in the fields, nor even lie down at night in their own homes without fearing the fall of that Damocles’ sword ever suspended over their heads. Tender youth, childhood itself, was no guarantee. Children were often married at the age of eleven, even ten, in the vain hope of lessening this danger. But the protection of a husband proved unavailing; it merely meant one murder more, and one “Christian dog” less. A bride would be married in church yesterday and her body would be devoured by the beasts and birds of prey to-morrow. Others would be abducted, and, having for weeks been subjected to the embrace of lawless Kurds, would end by abjuring their God and embracing Islam; not from any vulgar motive of gain, but to escape the burning shame of returning home as pariahs and lepers to be shunned by those near and dear to them for ever. Little girls of five and six were frequently forced to be present during these horrible scenes, and they, too, were often sacrificed before the eyes of their mothers, who would have gladly, madly accepted death, ay, and damnation, to save their tender offspring from the corroding poison.

One of the abducted young women who, having been outraged by the son of the Deputy-Governor of Khnouss, Hussni Bey, returned, a pariah, and is now alone in the world, lately appealed to her English sisters for such aid as a heathen would give to a brute, and she besought it in the name of our common God. Lucine Mussegh—this is the name of that young woman whose Protestant education gave her, as she thought, a special claim to act as the spokeswoman of Armenian mothers and daughters—Lucine Mussegh besought, last March, the women of England to obtain for the women of Armenia the privilege of living a pure and chaste life! This was the boon which she craved—but did not, could not, obtain. The interests of “higher politics,” the civilizing missions of the Christian Powers are, it seems, incompatible with it! “For the love of the God whom we worship in common,” wrote this outraged, but still hopeful, Armenian lady, “help us, Christian sisters! Help us before it is too late, and take the thanks of the mothers, the wives, the sisters, and the daughters of my people, and with them the gratitude of one for whom, in spite of her youth, death would come as a happy release.”

Neither the Christian sisters nor the Christian brethren in England have seen their way to comply with this strange request. But it may perhaps interest Lucine Mussegh to learn that the six Great Powers of Europe are quite unanimous, and are manfully resolved, come what will, to shield His Majesty the Sultan from harm, to support his rule, and to guarantee his kingdom from disintegration. These are objects worthy of the attention of the Great Powers; as for the privilege of leading pure and chaste lives—they cannot be importuned about such private matters.

What astonishes one throughout this long, sickening story of shame and crime is the religious faith of the sufferers. It envelops them like a Nessus’ shirt, aggravating their agonies by the fear it inspires that they must have offended in some inexplicable way the omnipotent God who created them. What is not at all wonderful, but only symptomatic, is the mood of one of the women, who, having prayed to God in heaven, discovered no signs of His guiding hand upon earth, and whose husband was killed in presence of her daughter, after which each of the two terrified females was outraged by the band of ruffians in turn. When gazing, a few days later, on the lifeless corpse of that beloved child whom she had vainly endeavored to save, that wretched, heartbroken mother, wrung to frenzy by her soul-searing anguish, accounted to her neighbors for the horrors that were spread over her people and her country by the startling theory that God Himself had gone mad, and that maniacs and demons incarnate were stalking about the world!