By Far Euphrates: A Tale

by Deborah Alcock

He took the nearest turning which led to the Armenian Quarter, and soon found himself in the midst of horrors which the effects of no siege, no battle known to history, could have equalled. The dead—and the dying too, who lay undistinguished amongst them—were being dragged to the great trenches outside the town, which the Moslems had dug to receive them. There were many houses, like that of the Vartonians, in which no human creature, not even the babe in arms, was left alive.

On and on he wandered, from one horror to another. What he saw, in its details, is best left untold. He was not mad; the consciousness of the past was coming back upon him, every moment more clearly and fully. As the human heart will ever do, in the most overpowering, most universal agony, he still reverted to his own. "Shushan! Shushan!" was his cry, amidst the reeking ruins of the devastated city. Always, everywhere, it is not the "all" we care for, but the "one." We are made so.

He bore his burden alone, in the blank unbelief of utter despair. "Cold, strong, passionless, like a dead man's clasp," there closed about his heart the horror of "the everlasting No," choking it to death. No hope, no love, no God, no Christ.

How long he wandered in that ghastly scene of death he could not tell. Some desultory plundering was still going on; parties of Turks, chiefly of the lowest class, sometimes met him, but no one thought of killing him. The killing was over, and even if it had been otherwise, his supposed madness would have secured his safety. Sometimes he saw an Armenian in the distance, gliding ghost-like in the shadow of a wall; but if he hailed the phantom, it would vanish instantly into some hiding-place near at hand. He barely noticed the change of day into night or of night into day again. As the claims of his physical nature asserted themselves he took food, almost without thinking; plenty of it lay about, uncared for, in the desolated homes. The one thing he did not dare to do was to sleep. He feared the dreams that would be sure to come—he feared still more the awakening.

After what seemed to himself a long time, he thought he heard a faint cry from the interior of a house in the courtyard of which he was standing. He went in, and was guided by the sound to a store closet, where food had been laid up. There, on the ground, her head upon a sack of bulghour, lay a woman quite dead, beside her a little baby, probably dying also.

Better let it die so, reason would have said, and perhaps kindness too. Nature is stronger than either. Jack stooped down, took up in his arms the little wailing babe, and tried to soothe its cries. Evidently it was starving. What should he do? He could not give it rice or bulghour, and hard, dry bread, even dipped in fruit syrup, would not be more suitable. How could he feed a baby? Then all at once he thought of the Mission House. Miss Celandine would know what to do. He had often thought of her before; but either he supposed her out of reach, as for some time past she had almost been, or else unconsciously he shrank from going where he used to find Shushan. Moreover, for aught he knew, she might by this time have left the place. He thought Osman told him she had got her passport at last.

However, he soon found himself treading the familiar way by which he had gone so often to visit Shushan. How clearly he saw her now, in all her winning loveliness, her sweet eyes full of joy, coming to meet him with her little hand stretched out, English fashion, and on her lips the one word, "Shack!" He had not seen her so clearly since Osman's tale turned his heart to stone.

As he went he held the little babe close to his breast to keep it warm, and half feared it would die by the way. He found the great gate of the Mission House, and saw forms, like shadows, creeping in and out—wretched objects, most of them with bandaged limbs or heads. The spacious courtyard seemed turned into a hospital; men, women and little children sat or stood about, waiting to be treated. He asked some one where he might find Miss Celandine, and was directed to the Church.

What a transformation that beautiful church had undergone since he saw it last! If the yard was the hospital for out-patients, the church was the ward where those lay who could not be removed. It was crammed from end to end with men and boys—the wounded and the dying. Their mats were placed on the floor, so close together that it was hard to move among them.