Miss Cushman went and stood by his bed and said: "I want you to remember that these nurses of mine are here to help you to get well. They are to you even as daughters tending their father; and you must behave to them as a good father to good daughters."
So the Turk lay in bed and thought about that also. It took him a long time to take it in, for he had always been taught to hate the Armenians and to think low thoughts about their womenfolk. But in the end he learnt that lesson also.
At last the Turk got well, left his bed, and went away. He was so thankful that he was better that he was ready to do just anything in the world that Miss Cushman wanted him to do. The days passed on in the hospital, and always the white nurse from across the seas and the Armenian nurses tended the Turkish and other patients, and healed them through the heats of that summer.
War and Massacre
As summer came near to its end there broke on the world the dreadful day when all Europe went to war. Miss Cushman's colleagues, the American doctors at the hospital, left Konia for service in the war. Soon Turkey entered the war. The fury of the Turks against the Armenians burst out into a flame. You might see in Konia two or three Turks sitting in the shadow of a little saddler's shop by the street smoking their hubble-bubble water-pipes, and saying words like these:
"The Armenians are plotting to help the enemies of Turkey. We shall have to kill them all."
"Yes, wipe them out—the accursed infidels!"
The Turks hate the Armenians because their religion, Islam, teaches them to hate the "infidel" Christians; they are of a foreign race and foreign religion in countries ruled by Turks, though the Armenians were there first, and the Armenians are cleverer business men than the Turks, who hate to see their subjects richer than themselves, and hope by massacre to seize Armenian wealth.
Yet all the time, as the wounded Turks were sent from the Gallipoli front back to Konia, the Armenian nurses in the hospital there were healing them. But the Turkish Government gave its orders. Vile bands of Turkish soldiers rushed down on the different cities and villages of the Armenians.[64] One sunny morning a troop of Turkish soldiers came dashing into a quiet little Armenian town among the hills. An order was given. The Turks smashed in the doors of the houses. A father stood up before his family; a bayonet was driven through him and soldiers dashed over his dead body; they looted the house; they smashed up his home; others seized the mother and the daughters—the mother had a baby in her arms; the baby was flung on the ground and then picked up dead on the point of a bayonet; and, though the mother and daughters were not bayoneted then, it would have been better to die at once than to suffer the unspeakable horrors that came to them.
And that happened in hundreds of villages and cities to hundred of thousands of Armenians, while hundreds of thousands more scattered down the mountain passes in flight towards Konia.