They did not know what was going to happen to them. They did not believe the soldiers who said they would be permitted to live at Shabin Kara-Hissar in peace. Their guards already were grumbling, she said, at having to take such a long march with them just because they had “turned.”

That night a dozen or more of our youngest girls, from eight to ten years old, were stolen by the soldiers and taken to the khan. We didn’t know what became of them, but we feared they were taken to be sold to Mohammedan families, or to rich Turks. Mother slept that night, she was so worn out, but Lusanne and I took turns keeping guard over our sisters and brothers, keeping them covered with dirt and bits of clothing, so the soldiers as they prowled among us, would not see them.

Before daylight the Armenians in the khan were taken away. We had not been upon the road next day but a few hours when we came upon a long row of bodies along the roadside, we recognized them as the men of the party of “turned” Armenians. A little farther on we came to a well, but we found it choked with the naked corpses of the rest of the party—the women. The zaptiehs had killed all the party, and to prevent Armenians deported along that road later, from using the water, had thrown the bodies of the women into it.

CHAPTER V
THE WAYS OF THE ZAPTIEHS

While we stood, in groups, looking with horror into the well, I suddenly heard these words, spoken by a woman standing near me:

“God has gone mad; we are deserted!”

I turned and saw it was the wife of Badvelli Markar, a pastor who had been our neighbor in Tchemesh-Gedzak. When the men of our city were massacred the Badvelli’s wife was left to care for an aged mother, who was then ill in bed with typhoid fever, and three children—a baby, a little girl of three, and a boy who was five. She had begged the Turks to let her remain in her home to care for her mother, but they refused. They made the aged woman leave her bed and take to the road with the rest of us. She died the first day.

During the first days we were on the road the Badvelli’s wife was very courageous. Then her little boy died. The guards had compelled her to leave her baby at the river crossing and now her little girl, the last of her children, was ill in her arms. When we passed the bodies of the Armenians from the khan, laid along the road, the Badvelli’s wife suddenly lost her mind.